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.
i think the most annoying thing about this whole discourse is that people refuse to judge threads by the standard of any other fedi instance
like if a mastodon instance got set up and federated right now and it allowed the shit threads allowed it'd be widely defederated IMMEDIATELY
there are accounts literally CALLING FOR THE DEATHS OF QUEER PEOPLE on there right fucking now
the only reason people are even willing to give them a chance is because it's a big corpo, but that should only be reason to give them less of one lmao. especially considering meta's history in particular
don't let them lower the bar for moderation standards here
and yet, by and large, the fediverse is the only major social media platform that actually manages to do this (the decent sections of it, at least)
why? well, here's the big secret: BECAUSE WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT PROFIT
big companies allow nazis to fester on their services because it makes them money, and here we're not beholden to such a corrupting influence. that's kinda the entire point
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.
Announcing Free Fediverse, a website resource for all of us fighting to save our communities from absorption into surveillance capitalism!
There are lots of stories, thinkpieces, links and statements flying around and disappearing quickly, and it would be handy to have a place to store and reference them all. Free Fediverse is that place.
Free Fediverse is a wiki-based site linking to resources of the following categories:
Links to and information on the FediPact
Essays on the Meta threat to the Fediverse
Articles on P92 in mainstream media outlets
Announcements from instance admins on joining the pact
Links and information for development projects beyond corporate enclosure
Articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity
Free Fediverse will continue to be updated. Just hit me up to suggest a link for any category. More links to FediPact instance statements are very welcome!
The website has no ads, trackers or analytics. Ferdi the Free Fediverse Froggy sez "hop on over!"
The Free Fediverse resource website is being continually updated with links to information, statements and thoughts on the upcoming incursion of the Zuckerberg surveillance entity into the fediverse. Feel free to hop over and check it out, or recommend a link to me here!
Detailed announcement in the toot at the top of this thread!
For anyone mobilizing to defend their own account, the fedi community they administer, or the entire fediverse against the Zuckerberg incursion now underway, the Free Fediverse website has a plethora of links to helpful resources.
🐸 FediPact: Info on the pact and how to find an instance you can trust
🐸 Developments: Information on blocking Meta, account migration, and authorized fetch
🐸 Articles: An ongoing history of the Meta scheme to take over the fedi
🐸 Essays: Thinkpieces on the threat and how to save the fediverse from corporate enclosure
🐸 Nightmares: Tons of articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity
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.
"extreme anti-trans hate content remains widespread across instagram, facebook, and threads. characterized by fear-mongering, lies, conspiracy theories, dehumanizing tropes, and violent rhetoric, these posts — many by high-follower accounts — aim to boost engagement, generate revenue, and seed hateful narratives about trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. these accounts profit from such hate, and so does meta and its shareholders"
i think the whole framing of fedipact and the meta surrounding blocking threads as being "mere drama" is really fucking annoying
like... this might just be a small inconvenience to you, but this is a matter of SAFETY for us. it's about keeping our communities free from harm, both in the short and long term
brushing it aside as simple internet drama just shows you don't really give a fuck about what happens to us
@onepict
Yes, but those "small communities" make big block lists, that affect small, medium and large instances, based on gut-driven decisions the major part of the time, not giving reasons or making them automated, with the "guilt by association" directive
Fediverse friends @alexis and @jo have documented the presence of vile fascist kill-list compiler accounts Moms for Liberty, Libs of Tiktok, Gays Against Groomers and PragerU on Threads. In the attached screenshot, Jo is dogpiled for harassment.
There will be many, many more like them. These accounts won't be banned from Threads, because they produce engagement. And engagement - of any kind, the more negative the better - is all the psychopaths who run Meta care about.
Now we see exactly what we're being pulled into. Facebook hasn't launched a big Mastodon. Instead, the fediverse instances that federate with it will become little Facebooks
@ophiocephalic@alexis@jo This is why I voted not to #federate with #Threads. It is pretty clear for servers if they comply by their rules. Meta will not follow those rules. We can start with federating, but it is a useless activity as Meta will violate the terms of most servers and not give a damn. They will have to be de-federated if our servers enforced the rules they put up.
@ophiocephalic@alexis@jo and now I'll wait for that guy who was insisting that Meta would ban and not advertise next to troll accounts to explain why this is different.
If you want to do your part
and take a stand against Meta’s new social media Threads coming up to connect with Mastodon possibly from July 6th :facebook::nes_fire::mastodon: :
Admins 🏠✨
If you are a Fediverse instance admin, you can:
Block all instances controlled by Meta before it joins us ⛔️
Be aware that blocking Threads might not alone protect your data from reaching Meta’s servers.
However, it is a great way to take a stand against surveillance capitalism, and the more people do it, the least impact Meta will have on the Fediverse :flan_sign::geodesic:
If everyone did this together,
they would have no power over us ✊🐘✨
@Em0nM4stodon@InayaShujaat@admin to be honest I haven’t thought extensively about it. Personally, I’d like to be disconnected with Meta as is possible. Ultimately it’s more what the community on this server feels; if there is a strong desire to federate then I think it would be a more challenging question to figure out how to do so.
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!
that's seven hundred and sixty-seven instance admins and mods who've decided to defederate the shit outta threads and take a stand against meta!!!!!!!!!!
threads is paying people to post with their "bonus program" and yes ofc it's scummy lmao
The Threads bonus is an invite-only bonus program that lets you earn money on your Threads content... Based on the performance [and] number of posts you create.
is this really the vibe we want them bringing to the fediverse???
Why Meta is looking to the fediverse as the future for social media
“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,” Cottle noted, speaking casually. Whether or not Meta would find a way to get a cut of those micropayments, of course, remains to be seen.
December 2023 – A user will be able to opt in via the Threads app to have their posts visible to Mastodon clients. People would be able to reply and like those posts using their Mastodon clients, but those replies and likes would not be visible within the Threads application. Threads users would not be able to follow or see posts published across Mastodon servers, or reply to them or like then.
Early 2024 (Part One) – the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users
Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application
Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them
TBD – Full blended interoperability between Threads and Mastodon
The only reason the algorithmic biases of the Zuckerberg entity are not dominating fedi discourse at this very moment is because they began to federate with "sharing" opt-in. If/when they switch that toggle over, 160 million accounts governed by these censorship algorithms will flood in and algorithmic creep could quickly destroy the journalistic prospect of the fediverse. Why would journalists show up here if less than 1% of the network can see their posts?
