Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I don’t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Meta’s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if they’re dumb enough to do it. The rest of us will rebuild.
I started on the Fediverse with Mastodon about seven years ago when I had ~42K followers on Twitter and zero here.
Personally, I don’t care how many followers I lose. My tiny, ineffectual, instance of one will defederate with any instance, no matter how large, if this rumour is true.
If this comes to pass, I’d urge those of you on the instances that become Meta’s lackeys to move to instances that are not if you’d like us to stay in touch.
Remember, it’s about quality not quantity. Always.
@aral Yeah, it is about quality. The ongoing civil war in Russia is about the first time there are breaking news that I can follow on Fedi, and even then the depth of information is greater on Birdsite with its larger ecosystem of Ukraine and Russia watchers.
@aral This is where power and wealth imbalance come in. For someone who is struggling or at least thinks they are struggling, a steady paycheck of thousands or tens of thousands of euros/dollars per month can be very hard to refuse. It is one thing to go against a system that is opposing you, and another to keep going against all the wealth it offers you.
@aral I know :) A big hug ! In my own little way, me too. So I thought of all people, you will definitely understand how hard it can become. I always try to understand why people, knowing how they are undermining a community, can still take decisions they know are detrimental to the majority.
Mostly the answer lies in the well being of your family and loved ones being affected. It's like a titrated bribing of morals.
@aral I don’t care about the minor followers but I do care about the personal connections lost. I recently lost 50 followers over night and now can’t follow people on mastodon.social any more, that sucks. Some of them were mutuals from Twitter I valued talking to. Loosing a part of my social graph does hurt, emotionally. I’d be happy if we could find ways to avoid these kinds of things!
@aral I don’t care about the number of followers but I do care about the personal connections lost. I recently lost about 50 followers over night and now can’t follow people on mastodon.social any more, that sucks. Some of them were mutuals from Twitter I valued talking to. Loosing a part of my social graph does hurt, emotionally. I’d be happy if we could find ways to avoid these kinds of things!
@kite@prdan Findability and availability. Every node has a physical, always-on, addressable place on the network. We don’t need immutable trees of data and gossip protocols and signaling servers beyond what’s in the existing infrastructure of the web. And so I hope this will lead to far greater simplicity and usability as well as allowing for emergent, extensible use cases and protocols. I see it as a bridge between the web and p2p for everyday people who use technology as an everyday thing.
@aral does anyone know where mastodon.world stands in all of this? I left .social just after joining last October and I’m not looking forward to moving again.
@aral What’s the risk of federating with Meta here? Meta becomes the largest instance then defederates all of the small instances and becomes like gmail?
@aral I've already moved, since the admin of my previous instance didn't appear to have an opinion as to what they'd do regarding Facebook. Whereas the instance I'm on now came out very clearly in favour of not federating with them as per the #FediPact
I’ve been shouting with my whole chest about the danger of large instances for as long as I can remember.
Even if this rumour is not true today or even if the large instance admins decide to act intelligently and with backbone and refuse such an offer if it is true, the danger remains.
You don’t have to wait for the ship to sink before taking action. If you’re on a huge instance, move to a smaller one. Spread yourselves thin. Make each instance a smaller target. Make the fediverse stronger.
@aral It seems there is some tension between “keep fedi small and distributed” (join a small instance, spread out, etc.) and “adopt fedi over monoplatforms” (join a big instance with lots to read and follow and where it is more straightforward to gain exposure, etc.)
@aral I'm running cleanup scripts on Friendica and Mastodon for years now to not grow too big. I was once the largest Friendica node out there and then reduced the (inactive) user count to below 1000 users.
Mastodon was an exemption with its large influx of new users where I grew to >25000 users.
In the past weeks 6.000 users were removed on nerdculture.de because they were not be used in the last 7 months.
@aral I’ve been considering whether it would make sense to cobble together something people can easily (and safely) self-host, even if just for their community/clubhouse or whatever. One of the things I’m currently stuck on is whether there is a way to hide the IP address, so people’s consumer grade uplink isn’t attacked/ddosed whatever.
@aral I think the trap I fell into, which caused me to join a large general purpose instance, was the thought process "I want to leave Twitter; I should find another Twitter like experience" without considering if I actually wanted another Twitter like experience.
I've got no actual complaints about this instance, it seems well run, but I think the general concept of the/a #Fediverse has more to offer than emulating the Twitter/Facebook/Reddit UX.
(And maybe some of you will now see why I’m designing the Small Web as a peer-to-peer web. Why ensuring that every node – every instance – is equal is essential to any system that wants to resist centralisation and corporate capture. Why if these places are extensions of ourselves, we must own and control them ourselves. It’s the difference between being a person and not a person in the digital age. It’s high time we understood this.)
@aral@ubiquity75 collaborate on a paper and make presentations (a tour). I bet privacy-minded associations and organisations would love to have you in events organised together with Universities. @d3 would you like to have Aral Balkan in Portugal explaining it?
@aral @ubiquity75
I would be interested in setting something up. I've talked about your work a few times and I think it might be interesting to pitch similarly for academic infra together. I am bb in academia but I know some web infra ppl around here :)
We had something like the Small Web 30-40 years ago.
(Although I find the word a bit weird. For me, a web is a network, that only exists because there are nodes that communicate.)
Sure, you likely didn't have your own server in the 80s. But our "organization" had (university, research institute, military thing).
The whole idea of "having your own website" was something that could have naturally evolved into "having your own server".
And yes, it is high time we fix that "it actually belongs to someone else" thing.
@wakame But it only looked like the Small Web. In essence it was the Big Web we have today. Only it hadn’t been injected with capital yet and the centres hadn’t grown.
Any system that can scale vertically, will scale vertically.
@aral how do you propose handling moderation in a theoretical peer to peer social space? Shared blocklists? Even then, if it's fast to create new single tenant instances won't spam be an issue?
This is not criticism, it's a genuine question. Feel free to redirect me elsewhere to read if you wrote about this before.
@qwazix The same way you moderate in real life as a person. By deciding who gets to follow you and disassociating yourself from the people you don’t want in your life.
The system merely models the human being as we know it in physical space.
@aral@qwazix this doesn't scale against brigades, at some point you have to outsource trust to gatekeepers (but of course revocable and even granular trust delegation could be done in such networks)
@aral in physical space you do have multi tenant instances. You go to a party, you know the host. The other guests have a social obligation to the host to behave. You can also have reasonable trust to the host to have not invited nazis.
The same goes for the dance school, the university and whatnot.
Also online the friction is minimal so a lot of nazis can pile on you from everywhere. If you have to screen every one of your followers you might as well join an instance with moderation.
We must find a way imo for the small web tenants to collaborate on creating safe spaces.
(Y quizá algunos de ustedes entiendan ahora por qué estoy diseñando la Small Web como una web entre iguales. Por qué garantizar que cada nodo -cada instancia- sea igual es esencial para cualquier sistema que quiera resistir la centralización y la captura corporativa. Por qué si estos lugares son extensiones de nosotros mismos, debemos poseerlos y controlarlos nosotros mismos. Es la diferencia entre ser una persona y no serlo en la era digital. Ya es hora de que lo entendamos).
@aral seems like a two-tiered strategy. Not just embrace-extend-extinguish, but also divide-and-conquer, creating an ad-free access to FB and Insta content that, backed my their money, can host millions, eventually holding critical mass of non-Meta fediverse. Then they will put up federation requirements that will force the rest to join or get defederated.
And recent decisions which led to big masto instances growing even further played right into their hands.
This is exactly the risk faced by instances that are big enough to draw the attention of surveillance capitalists.
They are a weakness in the system, because they are such a ripe target for acquisition and abuse. That's always what happens when a player accumulates power. And that's not a technical issue - it's a policy problem.
For example, if there was an agreed policy that no instance should be bigger than 1000 members (or it gets defederated) that's wouldn't be an issue.
@aral From what I've read so far Meta is trying to prep for a time in the near future when Twitter folds under its incompetent management, but to start their alt-Twitter silo they need some initial users. Having ActivityPub compatibility may provide that. It's the same sort of strategy as Slack, which afaik initially had IRC and XMPP compatibility, but then pulled up the drawbridge once they had critical mass.
So large instances federating with Zuck-Twitter will just be bait. It seems highly unlikely to me that he is in any way committed to ActivityPub or the open web.
If this is true, perhaps Meta/Facebook is trying to use the McDonalds franchise model where outlets are technically and legally independent but in practice dependent on a central corporation.
They want to turn the Fediverse into a McFacebook.
That part about the long term financial burdens on big instances being difficult... that's the point of the Fediverse! It is a good thing if no instance can get too big, being spread out keeps us safe from Meta/Facebook!
@aral this rhymes with forcing everyone to video even when nobody wanted it. Costs for competitors went up, and the big whale could absorb it.
If instances get paid to support the extra needs of a meta instance, then soon it will be required to take meta funding to afford to exist. That would then become very easy to choke.
@aral
Personally I feel that any instance that is owned, or sponsored by, or “sells out” to any corporate entity should have to have it in their address to make it easier to block them for being mouthpieces for the oligarchs. #Oligarchiverse #CorporateInterference #SellOuts
@aral I hope that these large instances will be included or at least identified in the fediblock lists.
I have zero willingness to be part of that assimilation. Like u said, if they're not wise enough to see this as an assault, 🤷 they never understood what this was about I guess.
@aral fedi war and mastodon is the first to pull the trigger. If the post is real then mastodon won't have the higher hand anymore, nice move from meta I admit. I can't wait to see twitter or reddit joining in, a full blown fedi war would be spectacular
@ianbetteridge@aral there are so many ways that Meta could undermine this. For example, everyone being on their own virtual instance (and those on Facebook would just have their local feeds stuffed with whatever Meta wanted).
@MariaLiv@supernovae Oh, I think we know rather clearly where he stands. From his posts it’s possible he’s the one who reached out to Meta first and started this whole thing to begin with.
@aral OMG, I just saw posts about it. Hadn't realized, I am apparently and unfortunately not on here enough to keep up with everything that's happening. Can I join your instance Aral?
@aral OMG, I just saw posts about it. Hadn't realized, I am apparently and unfortunately not on here enough to keep up with everything that's happening. Can I join your instance Aral? Can you DM me? 💗💗💗
@supernovae@aral@MariaLiv
All the love.
My questions to you are:
Considering Meta's lack of moderation, why is it a good idea to federate with a rogue instance?
If the response is "for the numbers" why are we expecting our mods and admins to moderate for Meta and become another group of free labor for meta as Reddit was?
@supernovae@MariaLiv Your painting of the entirely rational trepidation of those who understand Meta/Facebook/Instagram/surveillance capitalism – based not only on their toxic business model but the many documented ramifications of it on human rights and democracy – as “hate and pitchforks” and “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” is the problem here and is what’s incompatible with “love for this place.”
What I don’t know is, is it out of ignorance or malice?
@aral It’s quite extraordinary that we have a mountain of evidence that these corps destroy everything they touch in order to maximise often short-term profits, and some people still say this time might be different.
Fuck around and find out I guess.
@supernovae@aral@MariaLiv I have no doubts at all. Meta exists to use the Internet to make as much money as possible, while trying to limit PR damage to within "acceptable levels"; the Fediverse exists to make the Internet better.
I can't see a logical reason to believe that the two "platforms" are anything but mutually exclusive on a philosophical level.
@supernovae@aral Excuse moi Byron, but I sure as hell did not start any war against admins.
I've loved being on this instance and I have liked you as a person Byron. But I've just fled from Meta and Twtr. It took me a long ass time to get away from them. And I am not going to be sucked back, like we so often are in destructive relationships.
I've been in a destructive relationship irl that almost ended in me loosing my life twice. It took me ten years to get free. Did you know that abusers use the same words and methods, no matter what language they speak? Yes, research has shown that to be true.
Meta and Twtr use the same methods to control us, as abusers irl do. I hoped the fediverse was going to be a different experience. I didn't expect the abusers of social media to come here and I certainly did not expect them to be invited.
@aral As a user, we also have a role to play: to promise to make our financial contribution to our instance as long as it agrees not to federate with Meta.
@aral If this is true, it’s my worst nightmare when it comes to social media. Let’s hope the truth comes out soon, so people can prepare themselves to migrate if or when necessary.
@alternative_be Exactly. If it comes to pass, we should do all we can to help people on those instances migrate to safer ones before defederating those instances.
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