Meta joining the Fediverse is like AOL joining the internet: something that will bring a mass amount of people in, create some friction, but ultimately make the net better as more people federating on #Mastodon, #kbin, #lemmy, #pixelfed and other parts of the Fediverse make open protocols that much stronger.
Interesting new details have emerged concerning planned machinations for Meta's takeover of the fediverse. The information was revealed at a "data dialogue" in San Francisco on the subject of "Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse".
It seems that the plan is to gradually roll federation out in stages over the next year. The most telling reveal is in the screenshotted toot by Meta advocate Evan:
"Also, as far as I could tell, the most important use case for them is that a creator could move from Threads to their own server, even if they get de-platformed. I think the major motivator here is Mark Zuckerberg having to go testify in front of Congress twice a year or whatever, and getting grilled by conservative Congresspeople about de-platforming. Being able to say, you can get kicked off Threads but keep your followers, is a big win in this situation."
If correct, the impression here is that Meta is interested in ActivityPub's account portability, so they can offload problematic fascists to the fediverse without too much disgruntlement. They see the fedi as a dumping ground into which they can externalize toxic users without having to either moderate them on their own server, or provoke them by wiping out their social graph.
In Zuckerberg's scheme, our community is to become a landfill for fascism.
The notes and accounts from the FediForum in late September suggest that some of "the people who move the fediverse forward", as the conference promotes itself as platforming, are also acutely interested in moving forward the agenda of Meta.
The forum's notes tell the tale. Though a number of topics, including many of genuine benefit, were touched upon, digging through the sessions turns up a path of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Palo Alto.
So after wading into the debate yesterday based on an article written by @ploum (and posted by @dangillmor), and the larger #fedipact controversy, I decided to share a slightly more coherent version of my thoughts. I still think unnecessary #gatekeeping and preemptive #bans suck and will cause a helluva lot more damage to the protocol than Meta likely will, but as always, hope others who differ in their thoughts will engage in some healthy debate, and not just resort to calling me a troll for having a different opinion than them.
With the Zuckerberg takeover impending, there's a lot of confusion circulating about the use of user-level and instance-level blocks, and how our online expressions can be secured against Meta. Everyone who objects to their accounts being mined by the Zuckerberg entity for data collection, AI ingestion, monetization, and possible ghost-profile building needs to understand this problem. Here's information to clarify.
Neither a user-level block, or an instance-level block, will protect our posts from Meta data-mining by default on a Mastodon instance. Posts won't be delivered directly, but can be ingested by other means; if, for example, users on Meta-federated instances boost them.
However, both user and instance blocks will totally prevent post delivery in all cases IF your host instance has enabled the functionality called Authorized Fetch.
By default, Authorized Fetch is off on Mastodon instances and most haven't turned it on. If this concern is important to you, you might want to respectfully reach out to your admins and let them know. Remember that they are working hard to provide and sustain online community at no charge. It's likely they won't be very familiar with it and will need time to look into it.
One of the "defederate with Threads" arguments being advanced is that "Threads is about harvesting user's data"
Which, ok, sure - Threads is about harvesting Threads users data, that part I get.
What part of this setup, though, allows Threads to harvest other people's data (ie, the fediverse in general), in a way that can be genuinely blocked by defederating with them?
We, the moderation and administration of tech.lgbt, are signing the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact in fellowship with our peer communities. (https://vantaa.black/pact)
There is over a decade of precedent that Facebook will not have users' best interests as their guiding principle but rather profit margins, if it joins the Fediverse.
We at tech.lgbt have long held the belief that corporation owned instances are a threat to the core of the Fediverse: freedom for users to be themselves and to be a part of their communities. The 2010s saw the loss of online freedom when the majority of the Web was consolidated into a few destinations, and Facebook entering here could lead us back to centralization. Furthermore, NDAs for server admins will constrain our sovereignty online by binding us legally from disrupting their business.
We are not products. We are people, and we do not welcome Facebook in this space.
A poll: if you're planning on blocking Threads , do you want your posts to federate there so that hate groups can interact with them and Meta can track you?
The way blocking works on Mastodon, if your instance hasn't enabled "authorized fetch", blocking Threads won't actually prevent your posts from federating there if somebody on another instance who hasn't blocked Threads boosts your post. This means that anybody on Threads can still potentially see your posts, including hate groups like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers. And Meta's privacy policy says they'll use the information to target advertising and improve their products by training AIs. And most large Mastodon instances today haven't turned on authorized fetch.
If you're planning on -- or considering -- blocking Threads, do you still want your posts to federate there?
Observing fedi-folk from various marginalized communities snipe at each other over the past week has been devastating and tragic. No conspiracy theory here, but if there were some nefarious plot to weaken the fediverse, provoking a conflict like this one would be an effective way to go about it.
The purpose of this post isn't to further stir the shit. But it's worth taking a look at origins, alternatives and possible consequences in light of the ongoing threat of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation looming over the fedi.
No, Mark Zuckerberg won't meet you in the lobby Chris Trottier.
Recently one of the fediverse's most ardent proponents of collaboration with Meta produced a long thread in which he details his argument for embracing the P92 gambit with open arms. This post is a response.
If you're wondering why he is not tagged or addressed directly in his thread, that's because Chris is want to block anyone who offers up even the most polite of substantive counterpoints. We'll just toodle along over here thanks. The intent is not actually to debate him, but to provide food for thought to those who might have been persuaded by his relentless advocacy to federate.
Trottier seems to believe that ActivityPub possesses extraordinary powers: "ActivityPub means that whatever of Meta’s userbase that’s exposed to federation will diversify into other platforms […] This diversification reduces the dependence of users on a single platform, giving them more choices and potentially drawing them away from Meta."
But he never acknowledges that Meta platforms comprise an algorithmically-governed censorship regime which repress information of many kinds - for example, the #joinpixelfed hashtag, which was banned on Instagram along with the Pixelfed account itself. Why would this entity allow pied pipers of the fediverse to frolic freely on P92 and evangelize escape from its enclosure?
For that matter, why does he think that would work at all? The userbase of Instagram will be prompted to join Threads. That means something of the existing network effect of that longstanding service will be transplanted in; and rest assured, there will be no account migration functionality provided.
In fact, the number of teen-dream travel-snap influencers who will, upon exposure to a single post by Chris Trottier on the magic of W3C protocol development, leap to wrench themselves away from the highly addictive and even financially-incentivized dependency on their established social graph and plunge themselves into the X11-Wayland religious war waged among the beloved catgirls of the fediverse is statistically very close to zero.
There is also an unsettling absence of agency in Chris's characterization of the lost souls of Meta, as if they're just sheep waiting for the good shepherds of decentralization to lead them to greener pastures. Instagram account holders are free to sign up for a fediverse account right now, and many have already done so - and by the way, the reverse flow is also quite possible for anyone here who wishes to connect to friends and family on Meta networks.
To open this "revelatory" "Pandora's Box" (his words) of the ActivityPub Rapture, Trottier proposes, with great bloviation, something called "lobby servers". As he describes: "Lobby servers can bridge communities. They act as intermediaries that connect different social media platforms, including Meta-owned ones, with non-Meta platforms. […] By federating with Meta, lobby servers can pull content from Meta’s network and redistribute it to other federated platforms. This syndication allows users on non-Meta platforms to access and engage with Meta users’ content, thereby exposing them to different perspectives and encouraging cross-platform interactions…"
The flowery language continues on, but he is not actually proposing some novel new technical development. There is nothing described which is not already part and parcel of ActivityPub federation. The "lobby server" is simply a rebrand of "an instance federating with Meta".
This Hotel California doublespeak is indicative of the most problematic aspects of the communications of pro-Meta luminaries. In a ploy more typical of the contemporary reactionary right, the values and intentions of the opposing fediverse opinions on Meta are inverted. Trottier's post begins: "Federation with Meta actually hurts Meta."
He continues, referencing the FediPact community: "… it’s not everyone’s objective to fight Meta, and there should be spaces where fighting Meta isn’t top of mind. Not everyone wants to be part and parcel of a fight, and that’s okay." So, in this new upside-down reality, the anticapitalists trying to save at least part of the fediverse from colonization by one of the most destructive corporations in the world "don't want to fight Meta"; the true revolutionaries are those eager to collaborate with that corporation.
The Orwellian trolling degenerates from there. He claims that turning away from P92 - a single vertical silo which may comprise tens or even hundreds of millions of users - will paradoxically harm decentralization, because all those little servers federated with each other somehow result in "fragmentation" instead. And the anarchists and marginalized communities in the FediPact? They're actually pro-police authoritarians! "To enforce total defederation will require whitelisting, and policing of that whitelist." The term "whitelist" is repeated over and over in this paragraph, which is a subtle dig in the direction of a general and very nasty propensity among pro-Zuck advocates to associate the FediPact with the "HOA" and the absence of diversity.
On the whole, the most visible proponents for Meta collaboration have been big-instance admins who have done neither themselves or their cause any good over the last couple of weeks. Chris Trottier is something of an exception. We have repeatedly noted people explaining that they were on the fence over the Meta issue, until convinced by Trottier's arguments. He may fancy himself as fighting Meta, but by relentlessly arguing in favor of federating with them, he is actually serving as their most useful and effective asset in the fediverse.
Just remember, Every time advocacy groups warn about tech/capitalism, believe them. We don't make shit up, we use history of actions and facts to state our reasons to be against it.
If your instance isn't part of @FediPact please urge your admins to join or move to another instance who is.
And if you want proof, ask the general public what Jabber/XMPP was, and then ask what Google how they killed it.
EDIT: Please send support to the creator of the FediPact, @vantablack as she is homeless. This is possible because of them.
EDIT #2: Some peppe are saying it doesn't happen anymore, but since it only happened to competitors to Facebook and only after people noticed, I don't think it was a "bug" that only impacted FOSS replacements, but a feature for Facebook removed. Don't give these Zuckers gaslight and think they remain innocent.
FediPact advocates are again seeing the argument "they're scraping" dredged up and thrown into their faces.
No, they're not. Meta doesn't run a general web-wide crawler (like, say, a search engine would). Meta surveils the general web with the Facebook Pixel and other trackers installed directly on websites. No need to run a global crawler when the most of the world's existing websites willingly host your surveillance tech for you.
There's also no need to guess about the unknowable mysteries of cryptoid scrapers. That activity would appear in logs, and if persistent, incur performance penalties, especially on small-to-moderate sized instances.
Why would Meta bother manually scraping 14000 separate fedi instances while they're building an ActivityPub service that will "scrape" all of them at once through federation? Answer, they wouldn't.
Offered as raw material for your own tangles with Meta collaborators. However, keep in mind what will happen on this network if you start raising points of a technical nature. Ultimately, the scraping argument is a defeatist one, like saying "privacy is dead, so why bother protecting yourself?" Whether "they're scraping" or not, we won't throw up our hands and allow this space of refuge and community to be absorbed into surveillance capitalism without a fight. Scrape this Zuckerbros
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.
So I want to leave .social for a better server that doesn't federate with Threads, but the ones on the fedipact website either actually do federate with Threads anyway (looking at you mas.to) or they're invite-only. :(