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.
I'm confused by this - there are various things Meta might want from the Fediverse (free content, more data, more people to serve ads to), but new users can't be one of them. No one from Mastodon is likeky to migrate to Meta's platform; the people who want to use Meta are already there.
Anyone operating an instance should defederate from this shit immediately. This is exactly the kind of corporate overreach that isn’t welcome here. This will end very poorly for the fediverse I think.
By that logic though all of Fediverse is illegal and should be shut down. There is significant work to be done there, not just by Facebook but by the Fediverse community on the whole.
"Illegal" is a harsh term, I'd rather say "legally naive". There's no TOS anywhere saying things like "you give us the right to publish the comments you enter" which would clarify things but if you were to take an ordinary instance to court, you'd probably be thrown out with reference to you implicitly agreeing to have your comments published by, well, writing and submitting them. Licenses are ruled by contracts and contracts don't necessarily need written form.
Meta is a whole another thing, though, because now we're not only talking publishing, but straight commercial exploitation of your content. There's no equability to be seen anywhere, meta doesn't contribute to the maintenance of your home instance, it straight-up leeches your content to put it next to ads. An implicit license doesn't suffice for that, a written one might not even (because no equability), that's why all the corps have TOS.
If you post a comment on a publicly accessable page, there is an expectation that what you've posted will also be public. That's implied consent and doesn't require signing a contract.
In fact, the EU generally takes the position that a Terms of Service agreement is pretty much worthless. Nobody actually reads those documents, so the terms in them cannot be enforced. A TOS clarifies what a company/organisation will do with user entered content, but in terms of what can legally be done with the data the TOS doesn't apply.
It is absolutely not illegal. But it is subject to GDPR, so I could send a deletion request to the admin of an instance, and they would have to delete my content on their instance.
In general, any data that can be used to tack you, such as IP number that is sent with the request, is identifiable information so an anonymous username is not enough in itself
The Fediverse doesn't require that anyone provide any personal information, though. Literally none. It's the user's responsibility to choose not to post any.
Certainly, but when you make a comment or post it gets transferred to all federated servers without your express consent and you currently can't permanently delete anything.
Importantly, posts hosted and visible on Meta's server will be subject to Facebook's content moderation rules, which means those policies will likely have a sweeping impact across the Fediverse.
Is it just me or does that sound like anything on instances hosted outside of meta's own that can be merely seen from theirs? I'm all for moderation, the stricter moderation against hate-speech is part of why I joined Beehaw. But if I'm reading that right (I hope I'm not), then it seems like they plan to call the shots on other instances as if they have any say in what everyone else does right out of the gate.
Maybe what's meant here is simply defederation of entire instances and banning of problematic users like any other instance does, ok. But it could also mean pressuring admins to enforce Meta's TOS on a case-by-case basis which feels like the start of EEE tactics.
It just means they'll block users who don't abide by local site rules, which is standard practice.
Remote content is viewed locally, via mirroring, so in order for local users to see that remote content it had to be hosted on the local site. If that content does not meet local community standards, it gets removed, and the poster gets blocked.
This absolutely puts pressure on other admins to adhere to Meta's standards, because if they don't then they'll risk being defederate, but that's the whole history and controversy of Fediblock in a nutshell.
Meta won't have control over what users on other instances post. Instead, they'll just have very strong influence over the rules on instances that desperately want to federate with senpai Meta.
And really it’s nonsense. If we wanted to be on Facebook then we already would be. Meta coming in and telling everyone how to run their instances because a Facebook user might see their content, won’t bode well.
In a worst case scenario this could gut everything. I've had several 30 day facebook bans for morbid funny memes, like the classic with Dahmer asking, "Are you hungry? I've got Ben and Jerry in the freezer".
Nearly everything I find on imgur that I'd want to share with my few old friends on Facebook is either too dark/morbid or would be copyright claimed. Practically everything I find funny, the mods there think is "glorifying violence". It's ridiculous.
Meta is going to be treating content on any instance in any way it suits them. They're entering this as the 900 pound gorilla and expect they'll be able to throw their weight around, naturally. They'll treat all Fediverse content as "their" content and take, take, take.
There's no way to win this. The only winning move is not too play. Defederate all their instances sight unseen.
That way when they claim to be part of the Fediverse we can say "so, who are you federating with, yourself?" and we will be able to point out it's just same old Facebook with a new coat.
They will very soon have the largest userbase of any instance. If your instance gets blocked by Meta, your users suddenly have a fraction of the reach because no Meta people can see your posts anymore. That would put a lot of pressure on admins I imagine.
Sort of, you don’t have to subscribe to their communities or follow users from Meta. We don’t want to talk with Facebook users, that’s not why we’re here. There isn’t a single person on Facebook who would feel disrupted if they suddenly didn’t see my content anymore, either.
I was thinking the absolute worst case scenario is a bad faith use of the regulatory laws aimed at Meta but put on a firehose and aimed at federated servers who don't prostrate before them.
Things like partnering with copyright holders for automated DMCA floods for literally all images on the instance that have copyrighted content visible.
The Verge article is paywalled for me, but the screencaps Alex shared in his toot don't really support his summary. The article mentions that Threads can import content from Mastodon as an example of the sorts of things ActivityPub supports, and that's about as close as it gets.
And then there's this:
The company is planning to create a roundtable for administrators of other servers and developers to share best practices and work through problems that will inevitably arise, like Meta's server traffic putting strain on other, smaller servers.
Emphasis mine. How would Meta's server put strain on other, smaller servers if it's not federating with them?
I'm fully willing to believe Meta wants to EEE ActivityPub, but this particular claim doesn't seem to check out.
From a product side, I think most meta users who are looking for microblogging are happy enough with Twitter. So I think it will be tough to get a lot of initial buy-in.
In regards to the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns: I can't, off the top of my head, think of any feature adds that would outweigh fediverse peoples distaste for ads or corporate social media. I mean, are flashy ai filters enough to split the user base of a reddit-alike or twitter clones? Is anyone clamoring for vr group-chats to improve their link-sharing threaded convos.
I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, but I think the feature-poor nature of these types of services (that really aren't significantly different than old bbses) insulates at least those corners of the fediverse to some extent.
Plus, feature-creep is something people usually hate, or are uninterested in with big social media before this all started to pop off? Remember Foursquare check-ins, deals, credits, crypto, live audio...
Should we be surprised at this, after the whole Anti-Meta Pact thing got so much traction? Like on one hand we don’t want to federate with them, but on the other we’re unhappy when they won’t?
So... let me see if I've got this right: Meta is going to start a Twitter-like instance on the fediverse that will be marketed to Instagram members and will be subject to Facebook's content moderation rules, and Mastodon users who want to will be able to transfer their accounts to Meta's instance, in which case they will be subject to Facebook's content rules.
I keep trying to see what all of the fuss is about, but no matter how often I look at it or from how many different angles, all I see is Meta and Zuckerberg doing yet another faceplant.
It's as if Walmart announced that they were going to open a chain of art house cinemas and market them to Walmart customers.
Yeah... you know, I've seen this EEE thing so many times in the last couple of days that it's starting to feel like astroturf.
Here's a funny thing - I was actually on Voat when it came apart and I watched it happen, and what happened there is, I think, very much relevant.
It wasn't always a toxic right-wing cesspool - it was actually quite a bit like this in the early days - just people posting.
But then there was this sudden push to get people all wound up about an external threat - in that case, Reddit "powermods," and especially the SRS brigaders. The hue and cry was that they were going to destroy the free and open forum unless we did something about it.
Sort of like how Meta is going to destroy this free and open forum unless we do something about it.
But the thing is that the constant fanning of the flames just led to increasing paranoia and hysteria and infighting and harassment and brigading and general ugliness, and when the dust all settled, the toxic right-wing authoritarians had shouted down, alienated, stifled and ultimately driven away everyone else. All in the name of "protecting" the site.
Not saying that that will necessarily happen here (especially in that particular way, since if nothing else the tankies aren't going to give in to the righties). Just saying that I've already seen a forum destroyed by an obsessive fear of some bogeyman, and I'd rather not see it again.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
And it's not an accident:
What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market."
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book "Rebel Code" and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never caused by bad luck.
It's not exactly the same, since yes - many of those most involved in the ugliness were the same toxic posters who had been ejected from Reddit. More notably, it was different in that it was a single, monolithic site rather than a federation of individual instances.
However, the broad dynamic of it all - the way in which the destruction played out - was, to ne, disturbingly similar to what's happening here now.
It all started with posters banging the drums of fear, and specifically fear of some external actor that was going to move in to the site and destroy it. Exactly as is happening here. Then that drumbeat of fear started to alternate with the repeated refrain that "we" need to do something to protect the site from the threat. Exactly as is happening here.
The next step was to "do something." Specifically, a group of people pushed for a broad community commitment to opposing the invader, then appointed themselves guardians of that commitment. They began harassing and brigading people and subs that they claimed to be agents of the threat, or simply were accused of being insufficiently committed to "protecting" the site. And it was all downhill from there - the site tore itself apart from the inside.
Obviously none of that has happened here. Yet.
And yes, I'm aware of that article. Really, at this point, it's pretty much guaranteed that anyone who's spent even a few minutes on the fediverse is aware of it. since every single discussion of this topic brings another 37 links to that same article.
It does make some salient points, but it too is starting to feel a bit like astroturf.
And I find it a bit disconcerting that the focus seems to be on the threat the article outlines rather than the solution it prescribes:
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.
It does make some salient points, but it too is starting to feel a bit like astroturf.
Astroturf is created by billionaires to make it seem like a bunch of ordinary people agree with them. A legit article about several actual instances of corporations killing FOSS does not become astroturf just because a lot of ordinary people found it useful enough to post and cite.
The solution offered is not entirely clear but I read it as "do not federate with huge corporations because they will bury you".
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