Meta has shown repeatedly that they aren't trustworthy. This is like watching a wolf eat every one of your chickens in the coop and then swearing up and down that if you let it in the hen house, it won't touch the chickens in there. Absolutely zero chance that they aren't going to try to take over and steal data and control it. Why else are they trying to come in? These corporations don't make moves like this unless they see a potential profit. I vote block.
I can't imagine that meta aren't already collecting fediverse data. It's an existential threat to their business model and the data is comparatively easy to harvest. I'll bet their internal user model already has records for which federated services a facebook user also uses. There's not a lot of privacy here!
Bingo. If Meta get their foot in the door, then the writing will be on the wall and the Fediverse as we know it today will slowly disappear. These huge corporations have extremely covert and efficient methods of influencing change and instilling their evil values which aren't fully-apparent until it's already too late.
If Meta get involved, personally, I'll be leaving, and will just accept that the internet will never again be allowed to exist in a free state; the system won.
EDIT: I also left all social media over two years ago, and this was largely because Facebook was making me remarkably unhappy and angry. I don't want them in my life full stop and have gone out of my way to rid my digital identity of any ties to corporate proprietary bullshit. I like it here precisely because it has no corporate overlord, and it makes me sick to think that Meta can just waltz back into my life in a space users largely want to be left alone in.
Big companies are driven by profit and power. I don't expect us to keep them out but it would be nice to prevent them from becoming the default, or else we'll just repeat the same thing over again
Multiple smaller communities connected together is the best strategy for a free internet IMO
Imo the main thing would be to stop explaining federation. Just link them to one of the bigger instances, for example your local feddit or lemmy.world or beehive or whatever.
Federation is hard to grasp in the beginning and to be honest if you use it like you did reddit, the only difference is the way links to certain communities look like.
The problems start appearing when people start trying to share links to stuff with people outside of the site or click on links outside the site themselves. If the link takes a person to a different instance and they don't know federation even exists they're going to be very confused. IMO this is one of the big problems that needs to be solved since sharing links to things with friends is a huge way sites get advertised.
Yep, clients/UIs need to detect links to other instances and automatically reformat them to instance-local links. Configurable and indicated cleary that this happened, with a clickable icon next to it and resulting popup or some such.
I'd say it depends on why the individual is leaving those instances. Take Twitter for example. Many left due to the power held by one person. They may not be adverse to joining something like that again. Federation would be a selling point in that regard. Sure it won't matter to many, but it is still important.
This. I'm a pretty sech-savvy person but I have procrastinated making accounts on any decentralized platform for years for this exact reason. I understand the federation but it seemed like a hassle to have to choose an instance (even if I know it does not matter). I was paralized by the fact I had to commit to one, and having to decide which one that would be.
Just link people to kbin.social and don't bother them with other instances unless they want to. They will find that out on their own eventually and either care or not.
At first I thought just like you that I can pick any and it won't matter. But then I found that some instances defederate others and some ppl won't even see what you type. Just like shadow banning, but for a whole instance. I don't understand why thry do that, it will hurt the communities a lot.
Most of the time it won't matter. Only a few instances defederated and it won't impact most users. They mostly did it temporarily because they couldn't handle the massive number of users who came from reddit.
Also, the threat of your instance shutting down and having to migrate to another instance. These are just things most people never had to consider in the past so it seems quite abnormal and "risky".
Exactly. It’s an unnecessary complication. Most folks using kbin or lemmy instead of Reddit or Mastodon instead of Twitter will never, ever really need to know any federation, because all they want is to use the site. People will figure out federation if and when they need it - and until they do, all it is is a lot of technobabble that will make them tune out and give up before they even start, because it all sounds too complicated.
Federation is arguably the whole point of the fediverse however. Decentralisation is the solution to the problems created by centralised, proprietary platforms like Reddit and Twitter, but it can only survive if users are invested in it. If everyone joined one main instance, its admins could easily remove federation, add proprietary extensions etc and become yet another walled garden.
Trying to build the fediverse without onboarding users about federation would be like trying to build a democracy without educating citizens on the function and value of voting.
We should not shy away from sharing the concepts of federation, we just need to be better at sharing them.
It‘s an essential reason of why I‘m here, if I thought this was just going to turn into Reddit 2.0 corporate enshittification boogalo, I wouldn‘t have bothered with it.
I concede though that it’s probably not a necessary information to get most people to sign up.
Just tell them this: "It's like reddit, but multiple devs own different parts of the content. But don't worry, you still use the same software to access it & get it all from one location"
I agree with this. Without ANY mention of federation I would just think, "how long will I be able to use this cheap knockoff of Reddit until Joe Lemmy gets greedy in preparation of his own IPO, or until Kevin Bin takes a late-life turn towards authoritarian censorship"
Yeah honestly I've seen so many posts with multiple paragraphs explaining federation, while I've just been telling my friends two sentences like "it's just like reddit but instead of one website there's multiple independent ones (called instances) that all see each other's content. All content on all those instances can and should only be accessed through the website you signed up on, and when you do that it works basically completely like reddit"
This leaves out a bunch of information of course, but if they want more, they can always be confused and ask or look it up themselves.
if they want more, they can always be confused and ask
Thing is, people do, which is why...
I've seen so many posts with multiple paragraphs explaining federation
The easiest thing to do is, obviously, send new people to large sites that already have all of the remote communities people want access to subscribed to. Those work super well for people who need federation to be mostly hidden from them. But there's are practical caps on how big any one instance can get, which necessitates horizontal expansion of the network. Newer or smaller instances aren't going to have as complete federation, and that makes them less than ideal as a place for new users to go.
We need admins who are spinning up new instances to be conscious of this. People making niche instances need to have alts on mainstream instances to initiate federation. People making general purpose sites need to make sure they're seeding their server with all of the communities people want to join. Expansion needs to be done consciously and contentiously to make the distributed nature of things not matter.
Yeah I mean even like.......at this point you can show them a screenshot of the front page of kbin/lemmy and say "hey, it looks like this. Sign up for this instance & you'll be fine. Here's a link to 10 magazines you should subscribe to, and here's a link to your preferences."
What concerns me is that Meta will likely be on their best behavior at first, making people who are rightfully skeptical look like alarmists. Some instances will then decide that it’s okay to federate with Meta, because they’ve played nice.
If Meta is smart, they’ll only show their true colors gradually and with subtlety. We must expect them to play the long game. It’s vital to remember that no matter how friendly they seem, Meta will always do whatever looks most profitable. There is no profit for Meta in allowing the fediverse to continue untouched.
Which means there is nothing to worry about because admins will continue to shoot their own foot off. Not sure why it's such a big deal for people who will never use it anyway.
I think it all comes down to why does Meta do anything?Money. And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.
I looked into Mastodon after the whole Twitter thing in November, but I didn't really use Twitter, so an alternative at the time didn't make sense for me. However, I was an avid Reddit user for the last nine years, so when these API changes came to light and my app (Sync) was going to cease to exist, well I took the Fediverse alternatives more seriously and realized that ActivityPub is awesome technology that is now invaluable to the internet.
And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people
Project 92 has been on the news since at least May 20, a couple of weeks before the Reddit drama, and it seems that they have been testing it with influencers for months.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment about Facebook, but I think some of these takes fail to get the whole picture. Facebook isn't interested in us, Fediverse users and our communities. As you said, they only care about money. And the money today is in creating a competitor to Twitter. Mastodon happens to have an open-source Twitter clone, and Facebook can use it without spending much in coding. Also, the federation aspect allows advertisers to defederate from problematic communities, which is why they're leaving Twitter.
Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.
According to the article that I linked, every Instagram account will carry to a Project 92 account. There are like 2 million Lemmy accounts, and a few millions more of Mastodon accounts. Instagram has billions, with b, of accounts. We are anecdotal in comparison with the engagement that the migrated Instagram users will create.
We are not Meta's target. We are the ones that will suffer their consequences.
Great read. I would add the Sub Rehab list of subreddits that have moved to the Fediverse. It has the links, so that the read can go.right to the new magazines/communities.
This whole controversy irritates the fuck out of me, because it's driven by people who either don't grasp the nature of the fediverse or are willfully misrepresenting it.
By design, there are no mechanisms by which Meta can be prevented from owning an instance, and there are no mechanisms by which the fediverse as a whole can respond in any particular way. That's not a bug - it's a feature.
The exact idea behind the fediverse is that centralized authority is ultimately harmful, and that a social media network can manage without it, through the carrot and stick of federation/defederation.
So anyone who wants to start an instance can (which necessarily includes Meta). That's not an ideal or a policy - it's a fact. There's literally no way for anyone to stop anyone else from starting an instance.
And every instance owner can decide whether or not to federate with any other instance.
And every individual can decide which instance(s) they want to join or follow.
And that's it. That's the whole deal, right there.
The whole idea behind the ActivityPub protocol is that those things are sufficient to establish and maintain a healthy ecosystem. And ALL anyone can do at this point is wait and see if that works out to be true or not. There's literally nothing else anyone can do.
So all of this sturm und drang is just pointless, emotive nonsense. It's fear and hostility that cannot possibly have any bearing on anything. The system is already in place and events are already unfolding and it's all going to play out however it does and all of your hand-wringing abd fear-mongering and anger and demands mean NOTHING. They're just divisive noise.
I also think fear-mongering won't help. There is little we can change about it. Let instances decide for themselves to defederate or not.
Yes, there is a risk Meta applies the "EEE" strategy. We shouldn't be naive about that. But why would you stay on an ad-ridden Meta ActivityPub server if you see there are friendly, ad-free Activity servers on Mastodon and the likes?
For a more positive view and an interesting read on the matter, I recommend:
The upper hand of Facebook getting BTFO. I don't like mentioning the quote about his Harvard data collection because people post it all the time and it feels overused, but I feel it's particularly relevant here:
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
I'd rather we not repeat the same mistake. This time we know full well not to trust him, and I say this as someone with a considerable amount invested in Meta right now.
Again, meta joining doesn't change anything for you if you don't follow and you block it yourself.
activitypub is already a public protocol.
It's about people. You have your agency to act as you see fit. There are good people on meta platforms that i hope to invite here and activitypub makes that possible.
That's all that matters.
If its about privacy and protecting your data from corporations, activitypub is the wrong protocol for that.
XMPP is a "public protocol" too, google came in, "supported it", then defederated from it and took all their users. Big companies have technical sway, hell, just look at how chrome can push and block w3c standards because its the big voice in the room and you either conform to them or slowly die.
At risk of sounding aloof, but the "normies" won't care, they just want what's easy, not what's best long term. It's a bigger problem with humanity TBH.
I‘m here because corporations are a collection of moldy, parasitic assholes who enshittify platforms, how anyone can be on here and still have this naive trust in them is what truly confounds me.
If they were willing to participate in good faith and share traffic, or anything at all, why not just go ahead and spin up their little instance? Why the sketchy NDA shit? Why come for the admins and devs?
All they want is a monopoly on our data and on how the fediverse works, this move by them is nothing but an attempt to snuff out this blossoming community (aka competition).
They dress it up in doublespeak to make it seem beneficial to us, but if they get enough admins and devs on their side, those people will come to regret it in a few years when their community has no activity stemming from itself anymore and is overshadowed by some proprietary Meta nonsense they foolishly (or greedily if money is involved) signed up for.
Admins that talk after the initial meeting no longer sign ndas.
ndas for unreleased projects are not sketchy.
What is sketchy is people justifying abuse, anger and hate towards fellow people because they don’t know what is going on and failed to ask a single question before they started to hate people.
i’m sorry, but abuse is never justified.
Have any specific questions i can answer or anything you want me to ask?
My “MO” has always been to work in the open and break through the bulllshit.
Having meta join doesn't change shit here other than have a huge corporation break the wall down on what federation means to the average joe - and that's a good thing.
Meta will meta no matter what they do - but if we can break the walled garden down and make it easy for users to move that would be great.
I sure hope the devs and admins of the major instances think differently, but if they don‘t and the entire protocol turns to some halfway proprietary shitshow forcing us to use Meta to access most of it, I‘ll come and find you to write "I told you so." Or I guess I won‘t, cause I‘ll be hiding on some abandoned part of the fediverse which can‘t communicate with you anymore cause Meta won‘t let me without signing up for their ads.
What i'm saying is people like you will never be convinced of anything so it doesn't matter what Meta does.
But for the rest of us, I'll enjoy following people i haven't followed because i refuse to have meta apps installed but will soon be able to connect without them.
Activitypub is going to be here no matter what.
I'll make it so awesome the people I like on Meta will move over
And i'll continue to ignore the people who are just espousing hate and vitriol because they don't matter anyway.
It's about the people - not the protocol. the protocol helps us break the walled gardens down - but we have to welcome the people or it won't matter.
You do realize that Meta will likely implement incentives to stay on their platform, and weed out other federations over time, right?
They're absolutely planning to grab Fediverse members, and will make efforts to prevent the other way around. Your friends will stay with the meta product because it's more convenient for them to do so.
You honestly seem to be more rooting for meta than the fediverse, since you seem certain that "anyone who disagrees could never be convinced otherwise"...but you seem to have only taken into account fediverse users doing this, not meta users. Like you're arguing very one-sidedly.
If you can't convince them to jump ship now, I just don't see what changes when Meta provides them (as meta users) more options, not less.
They wouldn't even try to interact with fediverse, if they couldn't make hooks to keep people from jumping ship. They're not stupid, and they know nobody in their network would jump ship just because they chose not to federate.
You argue that people who argue against you are "trump of the fediverse"? You sound like you're the kind of person who would give Trump a chance. What's the worst he could do?
Turns out he practically redefined what a President could do. And none of it good.
Don‘t act as if you‘d have listened to me if I had dressed it up in pretty words for you, plenty of journalists have done that already anyway. I‘ll spew my opinions as long as I still can cause believe it or not, I also care about this platform, as I see it as the last ditch effort at having a corporate free space and an online community which isn‘t entirely focused on selling us and selling things to us.
Meta is a corporation. Meta fundamentally has incentive to either subsume or make irrelevant any competitors, or anything that could possibly be an alternative.
The Fediverse is one such thing. I fully expect Meta to either do a Google and make ActivityPub irrelevant or to straight up embrace and extend ActivityPub in such a way that their implementation is the primary one used.
like if Meta's not protected against, it will be the only one winning here
Fediverse should be free and no one should rule over it.
What Meta should be defederated or not is owed by every instances.
By the way, Meta has a lot of scam accounts now, so it should be defederated from my instance.
There are a lot of spam accounts on fediverse. There is a huge sex worker/porn under belly, there is a HUGE amount of organized fraud. If anything, having meta join will dilute some of our own hot mess.
Yup, I've always said moderation scales with the size of the fediverse, so a momentous change like p92 will scale that up - but not necessarily in any specific ratio. Because fediverse is loosely coupled, it will scale as the relationships build more than scale merely out of existence.
Human history. The oldest history of humanity we have is the Sumerians. From that time on every large group of people formed a government. Babylon. Arkadian. Egyptian. Greek.
Other forms of government are tribes. Hunters. Gatherers. Those are tribes.
Show us people that didn’t have a form of government and we’ll be impressed.
I see, if you define government as “any collection of humans,” than yes, it’s always been extant.
What I meant, however, was a group of rulers that use force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not.
Written history is also a blip terms of the duration of the history of humanity, too. Something like 1%. We can access some of the rest via anthropology.
Yes. Those types of people have always been around. Have you never read history before? You can aCkuALY all you want to, I don’t care. I’d rather you left that shit attitude at reddit, though.
Ah, that’s just the point - the types of people have been around for awhile, but the institutions supporting them — backing militias, basically — have not.
I can’t continue with this conversation simply because of how ignorant you are. I’m not here to argue with you over the dumb things you feel are gotcha points. You are not as clever as you think you are.
Lmao you think there were governments when early humans were wandering around the plains of Africa in tiny little tribes?
E: Downvote all you want but by the definitions being proposed here then all species have governments because they snatch food from one another, which is an immensely asinine description of ‘government’ since it describes and means effectively NOTHING
So you want to reduce humanity by 99%? Because hunter gatherer lifestyle isn’t sustainable with more than 100 million people.
Oh and you also want to go back to a life expectancy of 40 years, barely any useful medicine, exorbitant child mortality, countless women dying at birth and the constant fear that your surroundings will kill you.
Huh??? I never advocated for going back to a pre-agriculture society society at all, i was pushing back against the idea that governments ‘have always existed’ because of course they haven’t, that’s patently absurd since they are social constructs
People lack both the knowledge to realize that different forms of society already existed (and do, currently), and imagination to realize that it’s possible to move towards a different and better form.
As long as there is a limited supply of resources there will be some form of economic distribution and a government to settle disputes about that distribution.
It’s almost as if the entire point of Threads was to use the Twitter hate to harvest more personal data with zero interest in creating an actual longstanding platform. 🤔
Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like “a friendly space” and “convenient” to sell it to users. So you’re actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.
One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don’t want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.
In the USA there’s a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don’t necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they’re doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.
I could have made that a lot longer, but I just wanted make a few points without creating a wall of text.
Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.
This is in comparison to an institution of some kind using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.
The only thing I said about Musk is that it’s a positive he tried to reduce censorship. I never implied that he removed censorship altogether. Twitter is still guilty of curating content same as the others. However Threads has flat out stated a full tilt censorship agenda.
No? You’re not going to respond with any evidence at all about anything you said here? Come on man. What a let down. Why do you even write this stuff then?
using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.
Please please please provide evidence of this one.
Can you provide some evidence for your claim of US agents on staff for censorship purposes, as well as elaborate on which speech you believe is being removed?
99% of the time I see people upset about ‘censorship’ of online spaces, they’re mad about far-right hate-speech or dangerous misinformation.
Well I’m not wikipedia here, just going on things I’ve read in past. You can either believe it or not believe it, suit yourself.
In the pre-internet days it was a well known fact that major media outlets in the USA had federal officials on staff to put the kibosh on issues of national security. That criteria has since broadened. For anyone that still watches news media on TV they can see for themselves the stories that never get past the editorial desk.
I’ve read claims of the same federal scrutiny happening for large social media outlets. These are USA companies operating in the USA so they fall under jurisdiction. They’re certainly not going to advertise that’s the case. I don’t doubt this is happening for a second and in their own best interest they keep it on the downlow.
I’m not sure I understand the comment. You meant 99% of those complaining are posting hostile shit? If so, it’s the 1% that post intelligent and legitimate counter arguments we need to allow a voice. It’s not uncommon for legislation to push through under the guise of some public benefit that further erodes our civil liberty. As US citizens we need to be vigilant about that kind of thing or we’re just throwing our freedom away.
Well known facts from the pre-internet days, no less. You know, back when everything was recorded in physical books. Sadly all of those records have been lost. Tin foil hat sad face.
Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.
Unless those moderators are getting paid, you are just benefitting from unpaid labor and externalizing the costs of running the community onto volunteers.
That’s why I’m not against algorithmic moderation. The work itself is never going to be paid labor unless social media is nationalized, so it must be automated.
I have generally taken to the principle that I wouldnt say anything here I wouldnt say in mixed company or in public.
Its less stressful that way.
BUT - privacy is still important. When I was on reddit I had people witchunt me for relatively mundane hot takes. Luckily (for me) they didn’t string together the details correctly to identify me specifically but they tried, and probably harassed some innocent bystander in the process. So even while my main principle applies, I also tend to try and keep things vague and non-specific. Of course though, that gets more difficult as topics change, your account becomes more “seasoned” etc. I dont really care if my co-workers know my handle. Just dont want some random crazy person trying to get me fired because i go fishing or something.
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