Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):
I’ve forwarded your question to our legal help and will provide an answer as soon as they give it to me. What you must understand is that our lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms, and we don’t have experience with law, so we meet somewhere in the middle. Meta presumably has an in-house legal team that can really embed themselves in the problem area; our lawyers are external and pro-bono and rely on us to correctly explain the requirements and community feedback. The draft has been around for something like a year and none of the community members pointed out this issue until now. I’ll add one thing:
“My assumption, {… shortened for brevity …} is that when you post content it gets mirrored elsewhere, and this continues until a deletion notice is federated. So I’d assume if an instance somewhere mirrors my content they can’t get in trouble for it, and I’d also assume that if there is a deletion or maybe a block and a reasonable interpretation of the protocol would say that the content should be removed, I could send them a takedown and at that point they’d have to honor it.”
The goal of the terms is to make assumptions like this explicit, because assumptions are risky both sides. Just because luckily there were no frivolous lawsuits around this so far doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of one.
Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF’s lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.
I’ll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.
Mastodon comms person here. We’re discussing how we go forward. The questions being asked are all absolutely reasonable, and we want to do what we can to improve the terms (that we do need to have in place) taking into account the feedback and offers of support.
The upcoming 4.4 release has a generator based on a template, which was this one. We will look into whether we need to put that feature on hold from the 4.4 release while we work through this, however, yes the idea is that there would be a template set of terms that any instance could customise and adopt.
With the local law, probably not. With the translating the concerns of open communities like the fediverse and FLOSS into legal terms, most definitely.
Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):
Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF’s lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.
I’ll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.
Thank you very much for the context, that makes a lot of sense and I’m glad this info can be part of the discussion here :)
Mastodon comms person here. We’re discussing how we go forward. The questions being asked are all absolutely reasonable, and we want to do what we can to improve the terms (that we do need to have in place) taking into account the feedback and offers of support.
This entire exchange is refreshingly wholesome.
Look! Adults talking!
Neat!
I’m still new to FOSS/Fediverse etcetc, but seeing someone just explain ToS like a human is so fucking refreshing.
Any plans of releasing the terms as open source, so smaller instances can adopt them?
The upcoming 4.4 release has a generator based on a template, which was this one. We will look into whether we need to put that feature on hold from the 4.4 release while we work through this, however, yes the idea is that there would be a template set of terms that any instance could customise and adopt.
Thanks!
They’re included in the source code.
That’s neat, thanks!
Thanks for this extra context.
EFF’s lawyers don’t have the legal expertise to help a company based in Germany.
What, EFF doesn’t know any German lawyers? I’d imagine they know a few. They have been around for three and a half decades.
With the local law, probably not. With the translating the concerns of open communities like the fediverse and FLOSS into legal terms, most definitely.
The same legal terms might mean vastly different things in Germany and the US. This is often the case in arbitration and warranty clauses.
That doesn’t negate the value of having them participate in the conversation though.
Perhaps not, perhaps so, but we do have other folks offering support and we will do what we can to get to a better situation here.