I think it makes way more sense to see how Meta's participation plays out in practice, rather than immediately jump to most extreme possible response.
I believe that wandering.shop is here for our users, and if our users want to connect with their friends and fam on Meta, then I believe we should give that system a chance.
@offby1 With all due respect, I'm not sure I follow the logic here? Facebook is a known-bad actor, with plenty of history of both extreme privacy violations and incitement to violence; what additional information would be relevant to predict how they'll approach the fediverse in general and this instance in particular?
@offby1 WRT "data is public," Mastodon intentionally doesn't have a full-search feature and attempts to add one have largely been met with community outcry, as the public availability of data does not confer consent to index and archive that data.
@xgranade The use of the word "consent" here is a bit of a red herring; if anybody is under the illusion that Facebook / Google et al aren't already indexing these instances, I don't really know what to tell you.
I'm going to hold off on a judgement about whether it's a good idea or not until there are more details, because again, the goal here is to allow people to connect, and I'm not okay with cutting off a couple of billion people without seeing how that plays out first.
@offby1 I don't think consent is a red herring? The fact that someone else acts in violation of consent doesn't confer a duty to help them in that, to be sure.
To be clear, though, my question wasn't with the decision to support the pact or not, but rather with respect to what more information would affect that decision — Facebook is already a very well known quantity, irrespective of whatever technical details underlie their new product.
@xgranade from my perspective, I’d see if a significant portion of the vocal users of this instance want to be defederated from it, along with all the people on it. And I'd wait to see what they think until after they'd had experience with it.
I view social networks as about the people on the network first, and about the infrastructure and operators much lower down. The shop shouldn’t be making a priori decisions about the people who can be connected in our social networks (moderation aside)
@offby1@xgranade I can really see both sides of this disagreement but I think that something in favor of the "preemptive block" here is the enshittification cycle. Let's say Facebook shows up to the fedi with kid gloves and massively overstaffs their moderation team, responding fast to any federated peers' moderators. We all say "I guess they've turned a new leaf, let 'em in". Ten months later they lay off all the moderators but now 80% of your users' follows are on Facebook hardware.
@glyph@xgranade That's definitely a risk. However, right now I’d bet that well over 80% of the users of this instance have friends who are on Facebook or Instagram, and don't have the option at all.
Mastodon has tools other than defederation to deal with many of the consequences of that issue, and being "on Facebook hardware" is never going to be the fundamental issue with a Meta instance. We have the same issues with .social today that we would with a potential FB fedizen.
@offby1@xgranade I do tend to agree that preemptive defederation is a hammer when what we usually need a scalpel, but I don't admin an instance, so my opinions here are loosely held. Although I do think comparing the post flow of .social to a potential FB or Insta fedizen is thinking you can handle sailing through Niagara Falls because you held a garden hose once ;-).
@glyph@offby1 I guess I hadn't thought about what happened to XMPP as a kind of nonmonetary enshittification, but now that you point it out....
More on point, though, WRT "the people on the network first," I think part of the issue that I would raise here is that not blocking FB is a choice that has impact on those people, and it's not a neutral choice. It may even be the right choice, but wait-and-see absolutely is an active stance — it's not a default to fall back on.
@xgranade@glyph I don't think that at any point I made any claim that I didn't consider "wait and see" to be an active decision? I'm well aware that waiting is also a choice, and so is "not blocking FB”. I never said otherwise.
@glyph@offby1 (This is mostly a shitpost, but I think Gruber's agreement with Fosstodon has pretty much convinced me that preemptive blocking is necessary. I've generally found the tech opinions I feel the best about in retrospect tend to be those where I disagree with Gruber.)
@xgranade@glyph@offby1 truly amazing to see who among us has the "let's invite the vampires in the front door, they seem nice and we don't want to be rude" stance, despite other house occupants' vocal screams to not fall under the spell.
So this is how the Fediverse falls, not with a bang but with a "how bad could Zuck really be? I miss seeing my grandma resharing Tucker Carlson memes in the same place where I socialize with my friends."
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