Best part about the federation is that you can leave
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Could someone explain why binding arbitration clauses are horrible? My understanding is that it keeps costs low on both sides as taking things to actual court can get expensive.
First, they make the proceedings private: there’s no public record of the proceedings or verdict, and even if you win there’s no precedent that others can use. The for-profit nature of the arbitrator (much or even most of whose business comes from corporate clients) represents a conflict of interest.
Second, they isolate the plaintiff: you can’t sue as part of a class action, so no lawyer can represent a group of similarly wronged people in exchange for a percentage of any verdict. This means you have to pay for your own lawyer, which many people can’t afford to do and even if you can it may not be worth it if the damage is small enough.
Together, these issues massively favor business and employers that include these clauses in contracts, as reflected in both win rates for corporations as well the number of cases brought against them versus in open court.
But they can stack the deck heavily in their favor, and you don't have the same legal protections anymore. Who arbitrates Where? When?
Update: it seems, they're taking the feedback seriously.
Mastodon@mastodon.social - We've heard your feedback on the Terms of Service updates for mastodon.social and mastodon.online, and we're pausing the implementation date (previously announced to users via email as 1st July 2025) so we can take further advice and make improvements.
It may take us a moment to consult with the right people, so please bear with us while we do so. As always, we appreciate your patience and support.
I'm guessing lawyers drew it up as a standard tos and they threw it over the fence tbh
Looks like it, and it's not a good look.
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.
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!
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.
Important to note that this is about the mastodon.social instance, not about all of Mastodon
And does this just mean youn’t sue them?
It doesn't actually mean anything. These clauses have been struck down before.
Is it even possible to prove deletion of content if it has been distributed to hundreds of decentralized servers?
No. In fact, ActivityPub has no general mechanism for even knowing where content has been distributed to. So when you ask your instance to delete something, it can't actually know what other instances to ask to delete the mirrored content.
Mastodon tries its best by sending deletion requests to all known instances, in the hope that that will reach all instances that have fetched the content. But in fact, instances that are unknown to your own instance could have the content as well, though this is probably a very rare occurrence.
Bottom line: Don't write anything on the internet that you don't want publicly displayed. Anyone can save it and then you can't force them to delete it. That applies to the entire internet. It also applies to the fediverse.
The issue is potential copyright, the right to be "forgotten", and of course illegal porn (csam, "revenge", etc).
I actually would really love to hear how "right to be forgotten" applies to an email you've sent. I mean you can't force anyone to delete an email you've sent to them, so how does right to be forgotten even apply for emails?
The fediverse would work in the same way, I think.
I’ve only ever seen the legal “right to be forgotten” concept applied to search engines and news publications. I think the closest to this was in Delhi high court where they ruled to have some social media “news” posts deleted. But that’s far different from having platforms erase things you’ve said and may regret. And then add yet another degree of separation for using a semi-private form of communication in email.
I am not speaking authoritatively so anyone who knows more than me jump right in.
There is no legal precedent, but most likely you would only have to prove deletion on your own server.
I think asking other instances to remove too is reasonable also
We are talking legal obligations.
If you remove content you posted somewhere in the fediverse, your server will send "delete" activities to other servers anyways. But your server does not know whether those other servers actually do delete it.
abbreviation wave !!r
Arbitration waiver*
The github discussion is interesting. I don't think the arbitration clause is going to hold
Maybe that will push people to other instances
And/or (i suspect this is more likely) it will threaten to do so, and mastodon.social/.online will update their TOS to fix the problem identified in the bug report. Either way it's a win for federation, in that migration is relatively painless for the user..
I'm also really appreciating the speed and depth of the response to this from the community (e.g. all the comments on the bug report). It's cool to see!
edit: Also, Eugene's response is reasonable and levelheaded - seems like there will be some TOS improvements eventually.
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I kinda see that they want to cover their asses a bit, but arbitration waivers as a whole should never be legal to begin with.
One should always be able to exercise their legal rights.
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