Damn, what a great guy. He doesn't just make it easy to request a refund that he needs to pay from his own pocket. He actually made it opt-out. I've always used RiF on Android, never used Apollo. But Christian earned a lot of my respect in the last few weeks. Fuck Reddit and fuck how they screwed the people that helped them build the platform into what it is today.
Ugh, I hate that. Twitter is worse, but those unclosable popups are a good way to make sure I never create an account on a site. I have no problem with the suggestion, but make it optional.
I’ve seen this story several times now, and it’s probably true. Unfortunately there’s nothing else but the anecdotal story and I wish we had more corroboration from other former employees.
There are multiple stories like that from several people.
Apparently there were people at Tesla who were effectively employed to get fired when he was in one of his moods.
And if you read enough of the stories it all comes down to basically a single PA who kept him away from important things. And that person stopped working for him shortly before the public realized what an asshole he is.
And after learning that, I can’t stop wondering who they work for now… And I want to see a show based on their biography.
That’s a great thought. Are there any insane people that recently haven’t been as loud as usual? Which “important” person had lowered thier IM A GENIUS decibel level and no one noticed? That PA could be the reason.
The memes about him have been a lot less derisive, and recently they are semi-positive towards him/meta, people were reasonable in the response to his green screen grilling video and there are jokes about them changing the Threads logo high up on lemmy, etc. And he registered an X logo as trademark to potentially counter Musk.
But honestly we might never know. I doubt they went to work for someone as self-destructive as Musk.
“Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.” I can’t decide between wanting to have a work environment like this for once for the laughs, or not wanting to act in front of him as if he’s a person to be respected. But I guess the collegial cohesion is great in this one, if you only have to tiptoe around a single person and everyone makes fun of it.
Migrate away from instances that embrace Meta to those that do not. Choose an instance that aligns with you.
Or in the extreme case, if you’re the first who can’t find such an instance and you’re technically inclined, there’s your room for a new instance. It’s how the fediverse works and partly why Meta is so intent on destroying it.
The tooltip for fedipact says: “Agreed to block all communications (their blocklist is private)”
To me that says, they’ve agreed but it’s not confirmed that they’ve gone through with it because the blocklist is private. Blocked on the other hand says “All communications are blocked”
No, that’s not how federation works. My instance sends my content directly to everything my instance federates with. No instance takes content from other instances and sends it further - that is not a thing. I sent my content to lemmy.world and it is free to be there. Lemmy.world will not forward that to Threads.
This is a strange response for me because de-federating is an active step on behalf of its admin, usually after a vote amongst its users, at creating a virtual boundary between the two entities. How is that burying your head in the sand? And yeah, lemmy.world is big, but aside from the obvious loss of content/users, what other effect will that have on the mass of de-federated instances?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta.
For example, this discussion we’re having right now is on !technology. So it doesn’t matter whether our own instances have defederated meta - our posts and comments here will bring them value. Directly, in the form of content. And indirectly, in the form of processable data for machine learning, shadow profiles, etc.
but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta
Your understanding is wrong. Instances don’t forward stuff from other instances to other instances. Instances only send their own content directly to the instances they federate with.
@Minotaur@henfredemars@technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That's federation. We're all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they're in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
Servers can block, or "defederate from" other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.
And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.
I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a (comparatively) niche competitor like Pixelfed
I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.
That’s exactly why Threads is incompatible with the Fediverse. Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.
Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.
Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?
Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked “accidentally”, how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.
You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn’t a revenue opportunity, it’s a potential front for which they’ll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying ‘engagement is containment’?
It doesn’t work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of content that isn’t posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it’s available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn’t exist.
FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.
Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn’t be as effective. They’d cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.
I didn’t fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):
We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that’s only as long as they’re made under Lemmy posts
Threads hasn’t had federation enabled until now, but you’ve always been able to interact with Mastodon… sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn’t really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don’t tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
You’ve had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:
You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they’re treated the same way as a “group” on Mastodon in general.
You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual “users” and Lemmy doesn’t have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.
The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won't federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That's because Mastodon doesn't push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.
To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don't recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can't do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.
I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You'll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.
I'm pretty sure Lemmy won't make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it's a reply, but I'm going to check just to be sure.
Literally just tried to open it 10 minutes ago. Goodbye, Apollo. Thanks for the great app, Christian, and for dispelling all the BS that /spez tried to spew.
I just tried to open it myself just to see it close. Kind of a sad feeling. Thank you christianselig@mastodon.social, you made reddit better and exposed /spez and reddit for what it really is.
Before everyone freaks out, this has zero impact on our communities. Chill.
They can already do this by bringing content from Mastodon to Meta platforms via links and screen grabs, this only speeds up the process.
Personally, I love that they're not federating day one. Because I don't want any instances I use to federate with them, I don't want to be connected to a Meta platform unless I deliberately go to a Meta platform to use it.
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don't let them access that data through ActivityPub. They can build their own platform on the Fediverse and we can have our network of smaller connected instances.
Them doing this does not affect our communities unless we let it. Defederate from them and we can go on our merry way and they can have their own ad laden instance that's not connected.
Everyone, relax. Continue building your communities here and ignore Meta in their unconnected instances.
I've seen that article and no, we still don't need to be worried. Just defederate and that's all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we're golden.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can't.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don't want to be affected by Meta then don't join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You're done. Problem solved. That's the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that's just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don't lose as long as we have the communities we've built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
It only doesn't matter if the majority of us are conscious of it and want to stop it. We need to place sanctions in a true democracy, that's not easy and it requires everybody be educated.
We're lucky that we're still in the tail end of the early adopters phase so most people in the fediverse will be open to gaining education. Also both sides of the heavily populated fediverse (Lemmy and mastodon)* feel recently betrayed by corporate greed.
All to say, it won't be a big deal as long as most people know what's going on. (I didn't before reading this.)
It's not even that, just change your perspective so whatever Meta is doing or not doing is irrelevant. They can't "win" if we are on a different field playing the same sport with different players and our own equipment. Even if they have better equipment and 40,000 fans to our 1,500 that doesn't mean our thing isn't happening and meeting our needs.
The issue is that the fediverse is not going to present a unified front at this rate, it is already split over whether to defederate meta or not. We don't know whether the administrators of largest instances that joined the NDA talks with meta are going to defederate too.
I agree there's no reason to panic, but that doesn't mean that nothing should be done. The anti-meta-federation act or however it is called is a good step to get the community on board, as well as sharing articles like these and informing people about what is coming.
Some of the largest server admins are actively excited about Meta showing up, so yeah, we shouldn't expect them to defederate. I wouldn't expect them to federated even after it becomes clear that it was a bad idea. I think you'll see those particular instances close, or be handed off to new admins, of even be sold before you'll see them defederate, because people don't like to eat crow.
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to "destroy" the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that "everyone" will be here, and it'll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don't think they're actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don't even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: "It feels like what X used to feel like". And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren't pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
This might all be true, but personally I don't care about Twitter or any alternative version of "microblogging". That's not the kind of content or engagement that I am looking for.
If Mastodon and other instances like it throughout the Fediverse are taking the majority of Meta's attention, even better. Let them be the army at the Black Gate distracting the Eye from two little hobbits approaching Mt Doom. Totally fine with me!
That is very shortsighted. Just because "its twitter and microblogging" doesn't mean it doesn't affect someone on lemmy that doesn't have it - people from mastodon can still read and reply to your comments there. Furthermore you yourself are on kbin that has an even larger integration with mastodon and other microblogging platforms, magazines themselves can be configured with specific tags so you get automatic engagement from other parts of the fediverse that aren't on either lemmy or kbin.
And this is just ignoring the simple basic truth that it still affects other people that you are interacting with. Just because you don't care doesn't mean others don't care, and if they leave, or want federation, or switch platforms, it affects your feed too.
One important key lesson that everyone misses is funding ... we have to normalize paying a bit of money through donations or subscriptions to those people that maintain instances and those people who maintain, update and build the software ... if we all just keep tell ourselves that we all just keep our heads down, lock the door and don't bother to pay anyone to keep the door locked ... the same problems of the past will always emerge .... Owners, developers, programmers, instance maintainers just running out of money and enthusiasm because they have the shoulder the financial costs while everyone ignores them and takes everything for granted.
If we all just keep expecting volunteers to keep everything running for us for free ... eventually we will run out of willing volunteers as the community grows and the costs add up over time as instances grow more popular
SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE ... whatever platform it is and whatever amount of money you can give ... even if it means we just give a dollar a day, across hundreds or thousands of user, it will protect your instance owner, and ensure that the people running your instance never run into a situation where they have to decide on either ending their work ... or selling everything they have to make a bit of money back.
Couldn't agree more! I think that message might deserve it's own post but you did a great little write up here on the importance of supporting your instance!
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them?
IIRC they had to be sued by the US federal government and Sun (over IE and Java, respectively) to back off. Which is not going to happen for the Fediverse. And it’s not going to happen again in today’s day and age period.
To wit, remember when Google took over the web and now defines the browser standard on both mobile and PC and nobody can do anything about it?
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don't let them access that data through ActivityPub.
When Twitter had an exodus to Mastodon and a lot of new instances popped up, several were quickly defederated because they were scraping data from other instances, which made a lot of people uncomfortable.
There were also a few far right instances that spun up that were also defederated and blocked within 24 hours so the communities ability to respond to situations like this is very much there and I'm sure that the vast majority will not want to have a single thing to do with meta
@Dee_Imaginarium@giallo I wish most Mastodon instances were planning to defederate from Meta by default but sadly that's not the case. Meta reached out to the admins of some of the big instances and a whole bunch of them don't plan to. One of the admins shared this — https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836
Some admins are going for a "trust but verify" approach. These are the only instances which have agreed to defederate from the start —https://fedipact.online/
Ok I can get behind the "fedipact" as an idea but who the hell designed that website, nobody is gonna take it seriously if you're greeted with bright pink background and floating hearts. Who's leading the fedipact project anyway?
It looks like a student/chatgpt created website. Not sortable in any way, no links to the source of the declaration, just a list of names and no proof anyone signed anything.
The extremely small "why" contains an explanation of what the pact is, but it's kinda cringe being written in lowercase and every second sentence having "lol" or "lmao" at the end of it. And then her personal donation links at the end? I thought this was supposed to be a community effort against meta, not a place for her to promote herself and herself only, at the very least put links to donation sites of the admins that sign the pact or the opencollective thing
Like the idea is fine but ugh, seeing this just made me extremely pessimistic about how is this gonna end.
I don't know exactly what kind of proof you expect.
How about a link to a public toot of the administrator where they actually agree to this?
It is quite common for people who show up on the fediverse and put in some work to ask for donations.
On their personal site of course, I am not arguing that, but if this is supposed to a community effort and an "official document/rallying point" then it has no place here, it comes off as desperate and unprofessional. You don't make an appeal to ethics and for everyone to come together and then use that space and community to ask for money just for yourself.
I mean I hate it that I'm being so negative, I know it doesn't matter in the large scale of things but I'm just shocked that this is how the fedipact is being organized. It comes off as extremely amateurish and unprofessional.
Jesus, it really is bad isn’t it. Pink is a bold choice for the background but it’s excusable. Floating animated hearts? No way. All lowercase typing in the “oath”? No way. This honestly is super embarassing.
If you scroll to the bottom, it says to Created by Vanta which somehow manages to be even worse. It’s not even “cool in a playful way” which is what I have to assume they’re going for. It’s horrifically ugly, painful on the eyes, and practically illegible.
This is a sweet spot for maximizing unreadability, ugliness, nausea-induction and unprofessional-ness.
I don't know what you're talking about. The text isn't even cyan! And where is Comic Sans? I got all excited to see some Geocoties throwback, and I didn't even get yellow or lime green ok a hot pink background.
Oh I absolutely love the BSG reference with choosing the name Starbuck, but if branding with the coffee is an issue, I think Artemis or even KBucks would work tbh
Coffee company can't be an issue. They are starbucks, not starbuck. The copyright issue could arise from the BSG franchise itself as not only is the character their IP, it's a direct reference to BSG because it makes sense only in that context.
Artemis with like a logo of like a bow and arrow could be cool. Or a quiver since it would hold multiple arrows each arrow being an instance or something.
@christianselig Thank you for an amazing answer to the Reddit app from a former AlienBlue user. It was difficult to lose AlienBlue and the sting is familiar with Apollo. I used your app near exclusively on an iPad and adored it, so I can’t imagine what you must have had cooked up behind the scenes. I’m excited to follow your next chapter from my new home on kbin. :)
I clicked the link and thought, I'll read this and be done. RIF is also kaput. I've decided to keep it installed because all my Reddit links default to RIF and this way I won't accidentally give Reddit any traffic.
It’s not just true, there’s a history of this mentioned in the replies to the original masto comment. Pixelfed is a direct competitor/alternative to instagram and meta’s has a pretty clear policy of not giving it any airtime on their platforms.
Why, well they dominate the instagram style platform space (and I’d guess it’s their biggest platform ATM and most prospective going forward). Twitter-style platforms are new for them and introduce monopoly issues … so they toy with the fediverse to allay potential issues.
I think all of the schmoozing the likes of Evan, Gargron etc are doing with meta (they have active accounts on Threads AFAIU, for instance) will reveal their true colours (techbro growth mindset just the hipster way) and leave them with egg on their face.
One of the cool things about the fediverse is that you are free to run your own instance with whatever rules you do or don’t want, and tell the rest of us to fuck right off.
Some instances will defederate from you depending on what those rules are, like those specific relatives we all avoid if we can at holidays, and ignore the rest of the year. They are also free to do so.
IOW, folks might tell your instance (or Meta’s) to fuck right off.
That’s what freedom looks like. It’s not supposed to be just your freedom, it’s supposed to be everyone’s freedom.
Edit: And by the way, I’m very surprised if a company scrubbing mentions of competitors from its platform isn’t a solid anti-trust violation.
each instance can do its own thing. so its very strange to see people shitting on meta for doing exactly that.
You mean scrubbing mentions of a competitor from their platform? That’s not OK, and it’s an indicator of their future behavior that is very consistent with their
this hate-boner everyone gets from the idea of meta on the 'verse is childish.
You are entitled to your opinion. (And so are the folks you think are being childish.)
Nobody is saying to shut down any instance, only that we, and others on the platform who think likewise, would like to not have to see those instances. Nobody is saying to shut down Truth Social or Pawoo or Baraag, for instance, despite having severe disagreements with those instances - we just decided, on our instances, not to federated with them. You aren’t obligated to agree with us - you can make your own instance with your own rules, as others have said, or switch to an instance accommodating to your beliefs. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to listen. Think of defederation like blocking - I’m sure you have some sort of block list for trolls, spammers and bots. Same thing, but for an instance.
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