"Voting with your feet" is a backstop not a first resort. The first resort should be democratic decision making. We should not accept instances where the users don't collectively have ultimate authority over policy and defederation decisions.
@dalereardon That's not the only way to look at it though. When mastodon.social federates with Threads, that will potentially create risks for instances that federate with mastodon.social even if they block Threads -- there's a simple example here. So it's very reasonable for other instances to say "if you're doing something that may put people on our instance (or their data) at risk we're going to prioritize their safety and defederate from you."
"the purpose of The Pact is to embolden instances to commit to blocking project92/barcelona/threads. a lotta peeps were already talking bout preemptively blocking it since the march leaks, me included. and the idea popped into my head that maybe if we had like, y'know, a thingy peeps could sign to show their support for it... it might weaken that argument that it's like pointless or whatever, and might make that choice easier to make"
And it very much succeeded at that! Of course she was also clear that this wasn't why others signed the Pact, and many people pushing for defederating Threads (whether or not they signed the pact) articulated a whole range of reasons. For example in Consent and the fediverse@onepict says
"By supporting the fedipact we are signalling that we don't consent to interacting with a known abusive actor who revels in their power."
@misc it would be interesting to see some of the descriptions that framed it as coervice. Maybe they were reacting to statements that were phrased in a coercive way, which would also be interesting to see. But it wouldn't surprise me if they were projecting something into it that wasn't really there. This happens a lot -- @welshpixie's Toxic Manosphere of Fedi links out to an example where an instance admin asserting a boundary as a "bully", and @oliphant's Defederating Universeodon has an example where a different instance admin describes defederation as "abuse". So it's quite possible that people initially describing the FediPact as "coercion" were similarly mischaracterizing it, and then others just repeated that description without checking it.
I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We've left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.....
Let's stick to the facts here and not opinions, gossip or rumour. The timeline of events is right here. (and I hope a friendly mod comes along and pins this)
Between June 12th and June 15th: Meta employees have been meeting with admins of large Mastodon servers, including at least Eugen Rochko (Mastodon CEO, admin of mastodon.social and mastodon.online) and Byron Miller (admin of universeodon.com). This meeting was under NDA, and seems to have mainly centered around discussing the app P92.
June 15th: information about the meeting, and the signing of an NDA, starts to spread around the feeds.
June 18th: @vantablack starts the fedipact, a place where admins can sign that indicate that their server will not federate with Meta’s servers.
June 23rd: @kev, admin of fosstodon.org shows an email where admins of Mastodon servers get invited to a roundtable meeting with Meta, as well as his response declining the meeting.
June 23rd: Alex Heath reports for The Verge on the issue. He reports that “Meta plans to introduce this phase [ActivityPub support] about three months after the initial release.”
June 27th: An off-the-record roundtable meeting between Meta and Mastodon server admins is planned.
Note that there is zero mention of "a deal", "an exchange", "a transaction" (pick your preferred terminology) or "gifts" as alluded to in the Medium link (which IMO is trash - anyone can write an article on Medium and scream 'doom and gloom', should we really accept that as valid journalism?) and alluded to by the OP. That simply did not happen and that is fake news.
Also, from what I read Threads (assuming Facebook calls it that) will be decentralized, as in other companies will be able to install the software upon their own servers. The only requirement is an Instagram login account (I do not think the software will be open source).
This is one of the reasons why blocking will be futile in the long run. It’s why I believe engaging with people on Threads & convincing them to join the greater Fediverse is a better long term strategy.
I plan on using this opportunity to convince many of my friends & family to consider options like Misskey & Pixelfed (Mastodon too, but some have tried that & were not happy—I will reintroduce Mastodon to them again).
I believe the reason most large instances will not block is that their community will not be thrilled that they can not communicate with their relatives on Threads. Most people have great relations with their family & many in the Fediverse (myself included) are on big social platforms because our friends & family are on there.
But in the end we will have to wait & see when Instagram launches Threads.
Inform users and tell them that they can block Meta’s domain and effectively isolated themselves from that service.
Limiting Meta means no posts on the federated timeline (in case of badly moderated posts) and that users will have to approve all follows from meta users (they won’t send their posts to meta unless they give consent first)
Secure fetch means that Meta cannot easily (they still can by other means) scrap your instance and it also means that boosts won’t accidentally push posts to meta if the user is against it.
And domain blocking means that you’re giving the choice to the users. (it can even be opt-out, if you find a way to add meta as a default blocked domains for all users)
It also means that users can connect with their normie IRL friends who are all on meta’s services (either facebook or instagram) and will never willingly use mastodon.
Defederating from all servers who decide to federate with meta is beyond stupid. All you’re going to achieve is completely isolate yourself. If that’s the path you wan to take, you might as well disable federation entirely. Scrap all ActivityPub related code from your instance and continue as the old web of PHPBB forums.
Defederating from Meta and only Meta is a lot less serious (especially if all your users are likely minded), but you’re still forcing a choice on your users that shouldn’t be yours to make. Let users ban meta themselves if they want to.
Federating with meta should be a user choice, not an admin choice and even less a coordinated fediverse choice.
Instances with 25+ members that have signed the FediPact
The list below is being updated manually, so if an instance is incorrectly listed, or its signup status has changed, please let me know....
Why we need to move on from kbin.social
I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We've left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.....