I think maybe the easiest way to illustrate it is through the person of Cory Doctorow. I don't know for sure because I haven't been following him for awhile, but I suspect he is a fan of the fediverse concept. He and the kinds of people that he influenced (like me) strike me as the kind of people for whom open federated social networks are appealing and satisfying as a solution in contrast to closed centralized corporate social networks.
But then, a big part of my time following him and just generally being in that milieu, one of the primary boogeymen for us was the DRM being pushed by corporate interests.
So to me, DRM seems anathema to this entire aesthetic of federation.
You can have a very strict license without actually using any cryptographic 'protection' on the content.
See, for example, the way IBM used to in the 00s (still does?) release software. There was no copy protection, no license servers, no keys. But copyright was absolutely retained and you couldn't legally just give it to anyone.
If you were found to be running their stuff without the appropriate commercial license then their sales department will be along very shortly to work out a nice cost-effective plan for you, and failing that the lawyers will be involved.
Closed, licensed, but it's not DRM.
So far we haven't thought of social media content as licensed but it effectively is: the license is usually the EULA of the host giving them the ability to do whatever they want with it.
So really to be responsible with social media content we really should both get a license from our users and then provide a compatible license to federating peers. At that point they can decide not to accept the license, thereby refusing to federate that content. There are already filters like this for filtering certain kinds of content from peers, so it doesn't seem like it should be a huge reach.
Creative Commons might be sufficient here. If you license content as non-commercial, then would Facebook be barred from choosing to display it to the users of their commercial platform?
I do think there is a throughline between the ... techno-hippies? of my youth for whom DRM was a big concern, and those of today, for whom corporate concentration of social media is a big concern. But I know that's just a heuristic. Nevertheless, I think it's interesting to me that there is now some subset of the newer group who is arguing for something that seems very analogous to DRM for social media content.
I think you're probably right that it's totally different people, not the same people being inconsistent.
One is their issues with a centralized service is control. Their issue with copyrighted material is control.
Of course not everyone holds the same beliefs
