Interesting new details have emerged concerning planned machinations for Meta's takeover of the fediverse. The information was revealed at a "data dialogue" in San Francisco on the subject of "Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse".
It seems that the plan is to gradually roll federation out in stages over the next year. The most telling reveal is in the screenshotted toot by Meta advocate Evan:
"Also, as far as I could tell, the most important use case for them is that a creator could move from Threads to their own server, even if they get de-platformed. I think the major motivator here is Mark Zuckerberg having to go testify in front of Congress twice a year or whatever, and getting grilled by conservative Congresspeople about de-platforming. Being able to say, you can get kicked off Threads but keep your followers, is a big win in this situation."
If correct, the impression here is that Meta is interested in ActivityPub's account portability, so they can offload problematic fascists to the fediverse without too much disgruntlement. They see the fedi as a dumping ground into which they can externalize toxic users without having to either moderate them on their own server, or provoke them by wiping out their social graph.
In Zuckerberg's scheme, our community is to become a landfill for fascism.
@ophiocephalic starting by adding fedi read-only is also a naked cooptation, making us more fuel for the ad machine without building any community or giving much back.
The notes and accounts from the FediForum in late September suggest that some of "the people who move the fediverse forward", as the conference promotes itself as platforming, are also acutely interested in moving forward the agenda of Meta.
The forum's notes tell the tale. Though a number of topics, including many of genuine benefit, were touched upon, digging through the sessions turns up a path of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Palo Alto.
The FediForum dedicated no less than four sessions in support of a plan by the IFTAS thinktank for a realtime centralized "AI" surveillance system for the fediverse.
@skobkin have you ever run a social network? You're telling me I should individually ban each Nazi on the 141 million user social network instead of just defederating from the Nazi network all together? Sorry not sorry, but that's just not possible. Every Admin has a limited amount of time. If your instance isn't moderating discrimination it has no place interacting with our users.
Those were the rules for every other Fediverse instance, and we do not discriminate nor favor Threads in any way. They are to be treated like every other instance.
For me personally an instance's user's ability to not be harassed but protected is more important.
With the Zuckerberg takeover impending, there's a lot of confusion circulating about the use of user-level and instance-level blocks, and how our online expressions can be secured against Meta. Everyone who objects to their accounts being mined by the Zuckerberg entity for data collection, AI ingestion, monetization, and possible ghost-profile building needs to understand this problem. Here's information to clarify.
Neither a user-level block, or an instance-level block, will protect our posts from Meta data-mining by default on a Mastodon instance. Posts won't be delivered directly, but can be ingested by other means; if, for example, users on Meta-federated instances boost them.
However, both user and instance blocks will totally prevent post delivery in all cases IF your host instance has enabled the functionality called Authorized Fetch.
By default, Authorized Fetch is off on Mastodon instances and most haven't turned it on. If this concern is important to you, you might want to respectfully reach out to your admins and let them know. Remember that they are working hard to provide and sustain online community at no charge. It's likely they won't be very familiar with it and will need time to look into it.
One of the "defederate with Threads" arguments being advanced is that "Threads is about harvesting user's data"
Which, ok, sure - Threads is about harvesting Threads users data, that part I get.
What part of this setup, though, allows Threads to harvest other people's data (ie, the fediverse in general), in a way that can be genuinely blocked by defederating with them?
@wogan maybe people think the behaviour is unacceptable and therefore they want to withdraw all forms of support, even if it doesn't affect their server?
They began experimentally federating several of their staff accounts. I could read them directly on mastodon. I don’t THINK they could read any Mastodon data
Observing fedi-folk from various marginalized communities snipe at each other over the past week has been devastating and tragic. No conspiracy theory here, but if there were some nefarious plot to weaken the fediverse, provoking a conflict like this one would be an effective way to go about it.
The purpose of this post isn't to further stir the shit. But it's worth taking a look at origins, alternatives and possible consequences in light of the ongoing threat of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation looming over the fedi.
Fact: There's nothing magic about a blocklist. There are numerous of them in use on the fedi. You yourself can make one by popping open LibreOffice and typing a few server names into csv cells. If someone wants to make a blocklist which is transphobic - or for that matter racist - they're free to do it. They would be a piece of shit for doing it, but nothing's stopping them, and nothing stops anyone else from loading it into their personal account or their server config if they're an admin.
The critical issue with The Bad Space isn't the content of the blocklist, or even the nature of its "trusted sources". It's what those who are funding its compilation intend to do with it.
The issue here should be clear enough. FSEP is a plan to centralize control over blocklists.
From here, we could easily dive in to why it might be a Bad Idea to make The Bad Space, specifically, the locus of that centralized control - not least because, though some of its "trusted sources" are solid, a few are in fact broadly untrusted by a majority of the fediverse.
But the point here isn't to join in the dunk on The Bad Space. FSEP would be problematic regardless of where it centralizes its control. The problem is that FSEP centralizes control.
No, Mark Zuckerberg won't meet you in the lobby Chris Trottier.
Recently one of the fediverse's most ardent proponents of collaboration with Meta produced a long thread in which he details his argument for embracing the P92 gambit with open arms. This post is a response.
If you're wondering why he is not tagged or addressed directly in his thread, that's because Chris is want to block anyone who offers up even the most polite of substantive counterpoints. We'll just toodle along over here thanks. The intent is not actually to debate him, but to provide food for thought to those who might have been persuaded by his relentless advocacy to federate.
Trottier seems to believe that ActivityPub possesses extraordinary powers: "ActivityPub means that whatever of Meta’s userbase that’s exposed to federation will diversify into other platforms […] This diversification reduces the dependence of users on a single platform, giving them more choices and potentially drawing them away from Meta."
But he never acknowledges that Meta platforms comprise an algorithmically-governed censorship regime which repress information of many kinds - for example, the #joinpixelfed hashtag, which was banned on Instagram along with the Pixelfed account itself. Why would this entity allow pied pipers of the fediverse to frolic freely on P92 and evangelize escape from its enclosure?
For that matter, why does he think that would work at all? The userbase of Instagram will be prompted to join Threads. That means something of the existing network effect of that longstanding service will be transplanted in; and rest assured, there will be no account migration functionality provided.
In fact, the number of teen-dream travel-snap influencers who will, upon exposure to a single post by Chris Trottier on the magic of W3C protocol development, leap to wrench themselves away from the highly addictive and even financially-incentivized dependency on their established social graph and plunge themselves into the X11-Wayland religious war waged among the beloved catgirls of the fediverse is statistically very close to zero.
There is also an unsettling absence of agency in Chris's characterization of the lost souls of Meta, as if they're just sheep waiting for the good shepherds of decentralization to lead them to greener pastures. Instagram account holders are free to sign up for a fediverse account right now, and many have already done so - and by the way, the reverse flow is also quite possible for anyone here who wishes to connect to friends and family on Meta networks.
To open this "revelatory" "Pandora's Box" (his words) of the ActivityPub Rapture, Trottier proposes, with great bloviation, something called "lobby servers". As he describes: "Lobby servers can bridge communities. They act as intermediaries that connect different social media platforms, including Meta-owned ones, with non-Meta platforms. […] By federating with Meta, lobby servers can pull content from Meta’s network and redistribute it to other federated platforms. This syndication allows users on non-Meta platforms to access and engage with Meta users’ content, thereby exposing them to different perspectives and encouraging cross-platform interactions…"
The flowery language continues on, but he is not actually proposing some novel new technical development. There is nothing described which is not already part and parcel of ActivityPub federation. The "lobby server" is simply a rebrand of "an instance federating with Meta".
This Hotel California doublespeak is indicative of the most problematic aspects of the communications of pro-Meta luminaries. In a ploy more typical of the contemporary reactionary right, the values and intentions of the opposing fediverse opinions on Meta are inverted. Trottier's post begins: "Federation with Meta actually hurts Meta."
He continues, referencing the FediPact community: "… it’s not everyone’s objective to fight Meta, and there should be spaces where fighting Meta isn’t top of mind. Not everyone wants to be part and parcel of a fight, and that’s okay." So, in this new upside-down reality, the anticapitalists trying to save at least part of the fediverse from colonization by one of the most destructive corporations in the world "don't want to fight Meta"; the true revolutionaries are those eager to collaborate with that corporation.
The Orwellian trolling degenerates from there. He claims that turning away from P92 - a single vertical silo which may comprise tens or even hundreds of millions of users - will paradoxically harm decentralization, because all those little servers federated with each other somehow result in "fragmentation" instead. And the anarchists and marginalized communities in the FediPact? They're actually pro-police authoritarians! "To enforce total defederation will require whitelisting, and policing of that whitelist." The term "whitelist" is repeated over and over in this paragraph, which is a subtle dig in the direction of a general and very nasty propensity among pro-Zuck advocates to associate the FediPact with the "HOA" and the absence of diversity.
On the whole, the most visible proponents for Meta collaboration have been big-instance admins who have done neither themselves or their cause any good over the last couple of weeks. Chris Trottier is something of an exception. We have repeatedly noted people explaining that they were on the fence over the Meta issue, until convinced by Trottier's arguments. He may fancy himself as fighting Meta, but by relentlessly arguing in favor of federating with them, he is actually serving as their most useful and effective asset in the fediverse.
@reiver
Thanks for this link! It's intriguing; but a couple of things come to mind. These guys always talk in gushing New Age platitudes about the wondrous gifts they selflessly bestow upon humanity. Also, there's that issue of the regulatory threats looming overhead. They're going to work hard to sound like they're complying. I will continue to remain skeptical that vague language like this actually indicates account portability, but I agree that the rhetoric, at least, is a new wrinkle. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Just remember, Every time advocacy groups warn about tech/capitalism, believe them. We don't make shit up, we use history of actions and facts to state our reasons to be against it.
If your instance isn't part of @FediPact please urge your admins to join or move to another instance who is.
And if you want proof, ask the general public what Jabber/XMPP was, and then ask what Google how they killed it.
EDIT: Please send support to the creator of the FediPact, @vantablack as she is homeless. This is possible because of them.
EDIT #2: Some peppe are saying it doesn't happen anymore, but since it only happened to competitors to Facebook and only after people noticed, I don't think it was a "bug" that only impacted FOSS replacements, but a feature for Facebook removed. Don't give these Zuckers gaslight and think they remain innocent.
FediPact advocates are again seeing the argument "they're scraping" dredged up and thrown into their faces.
No, they're not. Meta doesn't run a general web-wide crawler (like, say, a search engine would). Meta surveils the general web with the Facebook Pixel and other trackers installed directly on websites. No need to run a global crawler when the most of the world's existing websites willingly host your surveillance tech for you.
There's also no need to guess about the unknowable mysteries of cryptoid scrapers. That activity would appear in logs, and if persistent, incur performance penalties, especially on small-to-moderate sized instances.
Why would Meta bother manually scraping 14000 separate fedi instances while they're building an ActivityPub service that will "scrape" all of them at once through federation? Answer, they wouldn't.
Offered as raw material for your own tangles with Meta collaborators. However, keep in mind what will happen on this network if you start raising points of a technical nature. Ultimately, the scraping argument is a defeatist one, like saying "privacy is dead, so why bother protecting yourself?" Whether "they're scraping" or not, we won't throw up our hands and allow this space of refuge and community to be absorbed into surveillance capitalism without a fight. Scrape this Zuckerbros
@pleaseclap
Thanks for the link! Agree it's pointing in the wrong direction. What you point out in your post is right and why we need to think beyond a regular fediblock and absolutely beyond individual users blocking the domain. Meta is not just another single-user Masto instance shitposting hitler memes
@nilsskirnir
As a user, no. But instance admins will know if they're diligent and pay attention to logs. And Kolektiva admins are certainly tuned into opsec issues, especially after events of the past several months
It's not 60% of servers, but 60% of users are on such servers.
It's also not 10% of users who support the #fedipact, but 10% of users are on servers which support the #fedipact. Not all users on such servers support the #fedipact. I vaguely remember that some #fedipact server admin posted about polling their users getting 52% support or so. Also vice versa, users like you support #fedipact but live on non-fedipact servers.
@nm Also focusing on threads alone might help creating the impression, that every "bad actor" (supposedly or not, it doesn't matter in this discussion I'm trying to make) has to be singled out and be blocked into oblivion, which creates nifty pathways for trolls to cause havok.
If a had a last request, in case you want to expand: Many do blocks and never think of them anymore, only some do the due diligence and re-assess their blocks. We need a way to show possible outdated information.
@nm I want this to become actually helpful in managing someones own instance, and not to become a tool to block each other until there is no federation anymore (the benefactors would only be sites like threads).
"We're committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren't able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it's coming.
If you're wondering why this matters, here's a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that."
promises are one thing. reality, when FB is involved is something different
@Rairii@skye I think it's if you activate tracking protection, in the console I have tons of errors such as
The resource at “https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/y2/l/0,cross/oju91DaLtajQYVvn4txhylEULOuFUOLfVDD1WIfjbhs-.css?_nc_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.<br></br>CuRtcYTNY3J<br></br>The resource at “https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/ys/r/HkeeMYph6Rq.js?_nc_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.<br></br>CuRtcYTNY3J<br></br>The resource at “https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3irlm4/yH/l/en_US/V0bxb9Hh_Aq22SE2iEbhXJLFPMhtmkZxrV34bdP1leFKujfH4XJt9vhtG9QBiLgWB7Gobz51cqKuTuhs8tjs3m7L1xkHB-WAiepfnuSPCku2B7oYlm25-h0gEJ7RbhykdozJDd-4e13oP9kCoCnCjGOFMIIawelkTsfmSnC7Cja_sFJcp55HfXW__mM4VZN-2Xfy_O96kaBkjI0yUID5jy5WJx3JxzRAKhFqvLhToyX1JB0VyuGzajKZzufaROCvWGFcvwk9ZTVxFFTInzTb_BOZ8Vl0YIVV2wf16w1g-Jtww8IPtYZ-Yah7b13jfP1P5Vd2iCB-Hc.js?_nc_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.<br></br>
@Rairii@crowdagger i just get a notice that the content is unavailable and i dont care enough to seek it out anyway. if they dont want me there, then the feeling is mutual
There are some hot and appropriate takes going around about the "leadership" at the top of major fediverse projects, and its imminent failures. One of those leaders literally describes himself as a "dictator". Well, now his technology has a new dictator, one who has no credible pretense to benevolence.
It seems there are two kinds of FOSS-folk among us. One contextualizes their technical work with a political understanding; be it anarchism, socialism, or some variant of an oppositional outlook, which posits FOSS in an anticapitalist, antiracist or liberatory context. They know there's something out there to stand against, and aspirationally, replace. I salute them and hope we can all build together.
The other, while more-or-less into FOSS, seems to be motivated by nothing deeper than a "tech is neato" ethos. One could argue that it's this second type that has brought us to the crisis.
If tech has any chance to facilitate liberatory - or even alternative - agency (and it's arguable if that chance exists), it has to be about something more than itself. As we watch ActivityPub, Mastodon and Pixelfed get recuperated into the Zuckerverse, here's hoping we can figure out a way to sustain and support those developers of next-gen decentralized and peer-to-peer social networking who understand this
@ophiocephalic@nm gonna give a shout out to GoToSocial devs, as people I think embody this. It’s not a fork, it’s in alpha, but it’s compatible with everything and it’s sweeeet
@meljoann@nm
Agree, that is definitely one of the most interesting prospects on the horizon! Bonfire, with its strengths in organizing groups, is also very intriguing
For those interested in the prefiguration of dual power, there is a perfect opportunity right under our noses - the fediverse. Moreover, such praxis may not be so much of a choice, as a necessity. The forces of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation are coming for this network.
So far, it remains largely out of the control radius of corporations, government security services and the fascists poisoning every other online environment. But there are well-resourced elements both without and within working to change that.
Consider the contrast with major capitalist services. This recent story explains how the "U.S." government has attempted to extort a price from TikTok in exchange for allowing it continued operation in the country - its conversion into a domestic mass surveillance tool under the control of state security and military agencies.
Meta will federate for the same reason that Google pays Mozilla tens of millions a year to keep Firefox alive. But that comparison only takes us so far, because in this case, it's more like Google dishing out the money only on the condition that Firefox disables ad-blocking and sends telemetry to Google.
So, we have multiple, recent and ongoing indicators. We have motives and strategies which fit a type. Every signal beams in the same direction, and there are none which contradict it. Meta is coming.
And the ActivityPub protocol and major fediverse development projects are firmly under the control of facilitators who are smoothing the way. This is a blog post by one of the primary Mastodon developers, with a proposal to add in backend hooks for the algorithmic surveillance and telemetry collection demanded by the Facebook Mafia.
How could the communalization of the fediverse manifest tangibly? One idea that pops up over and over from different corners is the organization of instances into alliances. Here is a thread proposing the formation of the fedifam construct.
In brief: Instances allied into fedifams could share resources and mutually support each other in many ways, such as:
🐸 A common charter of moderation principles
🐸 Hosting infrastructure and setup support
🐸 A crowdfunding mechanism
🐸 An open-source administration platform
🐸 A commonwealth of blocklists or allow-lists
🐸 A framework for new instance initiatives from within the fedifam to spin up
We have recently been advocating the activation of a function which is present but usually off in Mastodon and other fedi services called Authorized Fetch. As we plead with the major development projects to take safety more seriously and make it a default, we have learned that Meta itself didn't think twice about it and has activated it in their own ActivityPub implementation against us.
We know this because of news that a fascist has devised a way to evade it and force federation with Threads. They promise to then turn their technique upon us and coerce unblockable federation with fascist and cryptospam instances: https://soapbox.pub/blog/threads-server-blocking/
While Authorized Fetch remains important to activate, it is clear that even it - which remember, provides better defense than that currently implemented on most of our home servers - is inadequate to the threats facing us as the Zuckerberg incursion progresses. If we're serious about protecting our communities and expressions from absorption into surveillance capitalism and the accelerating miseries of fascism, we need to talk about a stronger grade of defensive weaponry.
To this end, @are0h has fired a first volley: https://h-i.social/@are0h/111653850819592308 Every fedi community which serves as a refuge for those targeted and under siege should be thinking like this. True safety only awaits us in a transitive approach to defederation, and further on, in an intentional federation based on the allow-list.
A note also on the gaslighting we face from Meta's colluders; the latest being the embarrassing spectacle of ActivityPub co-author Evan wagging around a "small fedi". @thenexusofprivacy has a good rebuttal to this cringe exhibitionism here: https://privacy.thenexus.today/the-annotated-case-for-a-big-fedi/
Evan has seen fit to misappropriate the "small fedi" idea, then build a blog post around warping it into a smear, with a long list of patronizing and fictional mischaracterizations. But what is truly small is the thinking that the fedi's future is surveillance, algorithmic ingestion, centralized servers too big to moderate, and huge psychotic corporations like Meta. In fact, that is social media's catastrophic past, the one we're all here to reject.
some accessibility concerns with https://fedipact.online have been brought to my attention and i'm working on addressing them. more specifically, the readability of the color contrast and the animations
i wanna put a button on there that flips the text and background colors, making it hot pink on black, and disables the animated floating hearts (they're already disabled if the user has "reduced motion" on)
i just... don't have the web design skills necessary to do so lol. BUT someone else is working on it!!! so it should be fixed and better soonsies
thanks to everyone who pointed this out :heart_cyber_pink:
"i know there’s a ton of skepticism about meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable. i do want to kind of make a plea that i think everyone on the team has really good intentions. we really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is."
i just really wanted fediforum peeps to know about FediPact since it seems like that's mentioned so much less when talking of meta's threads these days
there used to be whole articles about it, now "skepticism about threads joining the fediverse" is only ever mentioned in passing
it's almost like the uncomfortable contributions of marginalized women get swept aside and ignored consistently in life lol
