"extreme anti-trans hate content remains widespread across instagram, facebook, and threads. characterized by fear-mongering, lies, conspiracy theories, dehumanizing tropes, and violent rhetoric, these posts — many by high-follower accounts — aim to boost engagement, generate revenue, and seed hateful narratives about trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. these accounts profit from such hate, and so does meta and its shareholders"
i think the whole framing of fedipact and the meta surrounding blocking threads as being "mere drama" is really fucking annoying
like... this might just be a small inconvenience to you, but this is a matter of SAFETY for us. it's about keeping our communities free from harm, both in the short and long term
brushing it aside as simple internet drama just shows you don't really give a fuck about what happens to us
With the launch of Threads, there's been a lot of interesting talk about the safety and privacy risks it poses to people on the fediverse, if and when Meta begins federating. But it's also worth examining the risks to the social systems....
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.
I've done some thinking about how I feel about the fedipact and the discourse about it.
It's not a secret that I am an enthusiastic supporter of the #fedipact.
I've also been thinking about the concept of consent, power and freedom of association.
Where you choose to post online, this gives an admin power over you. Which is fine as long as you realise the potential consequences. This is where the consent part comes in.
wanna give a transbian a nice gift on lesbian visibility week? do you enjoy the work i've done with FediPact? the rad instance i've set up? the cool clothes i DIY together? my pirate radio station, vantaradio? my awesome videos? my amazing selfies? my posting generally?
well i'm unemployed, job searching, was recently kicked out of the place i'd been staying for years, and am surviving solely off donations for the moment so if you wanna support me anything helps me keep being able to do all those cool thingies!!!
:HackerCatRainbow: https://cyberpunk.lol is open for registrations!!! :HackerCatRainbow:
WHO ARE WE?
we're a small scrappy relatively fresh-faced underdog instance of glitch mastodon. we have but one humbly stated mission: to put the PUNK back into cyberpunk here on the fediverse
WHO AM I?
i'm vanta. trans enby girl polyam lesbian gender terrorist, the fediverse's favorite pirate radio DJ, DIY clothing auteur, and rogue wordsmith extraordinaire. i've been a hardcore fedi user since 2017
THREADS?
not only is this instance a fedipact instance that has threads.net blocked, but... i'm the one who made the whole pact to begin with lmao
After careful consideration (and hearing a few nice friends of mine joined Threads), I’ve decided it wasn’t worth it to empower Meta, and I’ve signed the Fedipact. Sorry, friends. Join Mastodon for real. :fedi: :mastodon: :antifa:
Is there a website that keeps track what instances are protecting their users from #Threads and which doesn't? Not everyone joined #FediPact, yet many still blocked them. It would be nice to know how much of the Fediverse is save from Meta.
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
Hey all.
We at the #FediverseFoundation decided to block all Meta = Threads instances from all our instances.
On day 1 threads.net stood out for the (e.g. transmisic) harassment they allowed on their site.
So in case anyone still thinks, they deserve a chance: This. Was. It.
On any online space, you should consider who you give power to. Who has the control over who you choose to associate with? Power doesn't corrupt. It reveals.
People in real life do choose to avoid dangerous or toxic places.
All that the instances who sign the fedipact are doing is signalling to some of us that somewhere is safe for folk who don't want to engage with Facebook at all.
This is a Freedom of Association issue, not a Freedom of Speech issue.
With Meta's announcement today that #Threads is starting to test limited #ActivityPub integration, it seemed like a good time to update this deep dive on the different perspectives on Threads and the #fediverse -- including discussions of the #FediPact
📦 Any recommendations for #FediPact instances? Looking for somewhere with a focus on either #FOSS or #sustainability in general.
Sadly moving on from @fosstodon after the instance admin @mike made his stance on the issue clear.
I try to donate regularly to my home instance, and I can't do that in good conscience while helping #Meta#EmbraceExtendExtinguish the #Fediverse so many people worked so hard to build.
do you enjoy the work i've done with FediPact? the rad instance i've set up? the cool clothes i DIY together? my pirate radio station, vantaradio? my awesome videos? my amazing selfies? my posting generally? or just wanna give a trans gal a nice gift?
well i'm unemployed, job searching, was recently kicked out of the place i'd been staying for years, and am surviving solely off donations for the moment so if you wanna support me anything helps me keep being able to do all those cool thingies!
wanna give a trans gal a nice gift on trans day of visibility? do you enjoy the work i've done with FediPact? the rad instance i've set up? the cool clothes i DIY together? my pirate radio station, vantaradio? my awesome videos? my amazing selfies? my posting generally?
well i'm unemployed, job searching, was recently kicked out of the place i'd been staying for years, and am surviving solely off donations for the moment so if you wanna support me anything helps me keep being able to do all those cool thingies!!!
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
Transitive defederation -- defederating from instances that federate with Threads as well as defederating from Threads -- isn't likely to be an all-or-nothing thing in the free fediverses. Tradeoffs are different for different people and instances. This is one of the strengths of the fediverse, so however much transitive defederation there winds up being, I see it as overall as a positive thing -- although also messy and complicated.
So the recommendation here is for instances to consider#TransitiveDefederation: discuss, and decide what to do. I've also got some thoughts on how to have the discussion -- and the strategic aspects.
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.
Threads Will Break Kbin And Lemmy: interoperability isn't just about the protocol
With the launch of Threads, there's been a lot of interesting talk about the safety and privacy risks it poses to people on the fediverse, if and when Meta begins federating. But it's also worth examining the risks to the social systems....