In reading a fascinating and important discussion of the lack of a termination clause in the new Mastodon.social Terms of Service:

New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content · Issue #35086 · mastodon/mastodon

Summary Since it first opened, mastodon.social has operated without any sort of explicit IP grant from the users to the service, which is unusual for a social networking service. Today Mastodon announced effective July 1 there will be a ...

GitHub (github.com)

I was GOBSMACKED to discover the new ToS has a "binding arbitration waiver," which takes away your right to sue, no matter how badly the service abuses you.

These are profoundly unethical, terrible clauses. They should never, ever appear in "adhesion contracts" (that is, contracts that you merely click through, rather than negotiating.)

No one, and I do mean NO ONE, should ever, ever, EVER agree to a binding arbitration waiver.

These are the most grotesquely unfair contractual terms in routine use today. The potential for abuse is literally unlimited.

Remember when a Disney World visitor died of an allergic reaction after being assured that her food order was allergen-free? Disney argued that her family couldn't sue because her husband had clicked through an arbitration waiver when signing up for a free trial of Disney Plus.

I am very shocked to see this in the ToS for the flagship Mastodon instance, promulgated by the Mastodon nonprofit.

To be clear, I think this is *much* worse than, say, requiring users of mastodon.social to agree to have their posts used to train LLMs. The harms of having your work fed to an AI are mostly hypothetical and relate to moral qualms.

By contrast, a binding arbitration waiver would literally allow the management of mastodon.social to cause your DEATH and face no consequences.

I am trying not to be dramatic here, but this is a deal-breaker for me - literally. I changed dentists because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration. I changed solar installers because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration.

I could never, in good conscience, recommend that someone use a service that required binding arbitration as a condition of use - which means that as of July 1, I would no longer be able to recommend that people get an account on mastodon.social.

And since mastodon.social is the flagship instance, which sets the moral example - and the workaday template - for most instances in the Fediverse, this catastrophically bad clause is likely to proliferate far and wide throughout the Fediverse, rendering most of this new, better internet unfit for use.

Please, @Gargron, reconsider this. It is a very bad look - and worse still, it's a very, very bad example.