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.
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?
They’re included in the source code.
That’s neat, thanks!
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!
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 :)
EFF’s lawyers don’t have the legal expertise to help a company based in Germany.
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.
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.
Thanks for this extra context.
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.
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.
Best part about the federation is that you can leave
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.
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?
Yeah. There already are arbitrators by law: public courts.
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.
But will it tho? People still use Instagram.
People use the web channels that convert to cash. That’s what it is. Meta and their ilk have spent billions in marketing and persona research. They know what color makes you press a button and how to stimulate your brain into releasing dopamine when a certain product is mentioned or used.
Here’s some free advice to foss enthusiasts and developers.
Products don’t get sold because they’re better, they get sold because someone wants it. Not needs, wants. A person will put aside need for want.
Make people WANT your product and they’ll switch to it. And no, free isn’t a good enough tactic
I’m not saying Foss needs to sell its soul, I’m saying that those creators need to find a way to compete in that area.
Isn’t not doing that part of the draw of foss? That sort of UI/“engagement” is necessary for monetization but is not for foss.
A product getting “sold” is in direct contradiction to it being foss. That’s the viewpoint of money and enshittifiers.
Most people here are specifically avoiding those companies in part because of their “engagement” algorithms.
No! I apologize for not being clearer.
The point isn’t that foss has to be cash grabbing
It has to be likeable, lovable. Something that becomes familiar and comfortable as soon as a user starts using it, WITHOUT the nefarious monetization that the corps hang on it.
Think of it as your favorite cookies a friend bakes and gives out for free. Everyone loves them, their I. Demand, and their free
I hope I did a better job explaining my position. I’m not batting A thousand today in that arena lol
abbreviation wave !!r
Arbitration waiver*
The github discussion is interesting. I don’t think the arbitration clause is going to hold
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.
how badly can you be abused by a twitter clone service you voluntarily agree to sign up to ?
Yeah, I don’t like when corporations put stuff like that into their ToS, but at the same time, I 100% understand why every open-source license under the sun has it. You’re giving it away for free, so you don’t want people to sue for more than you’re providing for free.
Mastodon.social is currently very much in the latter camp of giving things away for free. I also understand that a service is yet another beast than a piece of software, since they hold your personal data and may leak/sell it. But yeah, at this point in time, I wouldn’t want someone to be able to sue Mastodon.social out of existence. I guess, it depends a lot on how it’s formulated in the end…
This binding arbitration bullshit is unenforceable in Germany anyways for end users
I’m wondering if they used ChatGPT to crank this bullshit out
No, we did not (nor did we use any other AI tool).
Then why did you knowingly put a bullshit arbitration clause in the ToS that’s unenforceable in Germany?
“Knowingly” is a big word given that Mastodon GmbH has been transparent about not having extensive legal knowledge in-house and being dependent on their probono lawyers. Which is completely understandable given their company & team size.
Legal stuff is complicated and we’re not all, always, experts at everything. FWIW https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821
the lawyers they hired put it in there, and they seemingly don’t know enough about the law to know it’s bad. they’re working on it.
Also null and void in Spain. Judicial recourse is an non-waiveable right.
As it should be. Forced Arbitration is never to the advantage to the consumer
I know that avatar cause that user works on Analogue Pocket FPGA cores.
