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.
No matter where you stand in the discussion around Meta and the fediverse, please do remember to contribute to the running of your current fediverse instance, if you at all has the possibility (and if you for some reason do not think it is worthy of support, move somewhere that is).
Main point: The Meta/FB [Thread] "P92 app will be carefully crafted as a one way bridge that is permeable for content in direction of Meta, but not so much for P92 users in direction of the Fediverse."
"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
Here's how @zkat describes caracoles: "you essentially ask to join concentric federations of instances ... with smaller caracoles able to vote to federate with entire other caracoles."
And @ophiocephalic's "fedifams" are a similar idea: "Communities could align into fedifams based on whatever conditions of identity, philosophy or interest are relevant to them. Instances allied into fedifams could share resources and mutually support each other in many way"
The idea's a natural match for community-focused, anti-surveillance capitalism free fediverses, fits in well with the Networked Communities model discussed in part 3, and helps address scalability of consent-based federation discussed in Part 2.
I would love a list of servers who have activated authorized fetch, because ultimately not being associated with facebook, twitter etc is more important to me than making it easier for people with friends still using those services to see those posts. #AuthorizedFetch exists and if it means paying my instance every month to be part of something I can feel good about as opposed to feeling like I am complicit in the crimes commited by facebook and twitter, I would happily do that. #Fedipact#AskTheFediverse
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)
A lot of people have insisted #Meta isn't getting involved with the #Fediverse to embrace, extend and extinguish it...
... but even before fully implementing Fediverse interoperability in #Threads they're already talking openly about changing its protocols to add features like monetization. 🤔
Text in a screenshot reads as follows: McCue riffed on the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content became available to subscribers only, similar to how Patreon works. For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the fediverse, too. He additionally suggested there are ways the fediverse could monetize beyond donations, which is what often powers various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone might even make a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the way some fediverse client apps are paid today.
I've been going back and forth with @folkerschamel for quite some time now about the merits of the #FediPact. Since the thread is long and confusing, and getting longer, rather than continue to boost some of my replies to him, I'm going to start my own thread summarizing Folker's "arguments" (they're so bad lol) and why I think he's being dishonest instead of merely an innocently ignorant dudebro.
It started with @steve (one for your #FediBlock) comparing FediPact signers to Charlotteville neo-Nazis. Folker agreed with the comparison and jumped in to defend it when I said it was bullshit. Here are what they have said so far:
-If you justify your desire to defederate en masse from FB by observing that Mastodon culture is better than FB culture, you're similar to neo-Nazis
-arguing against the #StrawMan that everyone who uses FB is evil
-collective action by admins deprives individual posters of agency
🖤 i'm a broke and unemployed neurodivergent trans woman
🖤 i'm currently homeless and couch surfing
🖤 i do hella cool stuff like fedipact and running cyberpunk.lol and DIYing cool clothing and broadcasting vantaradio and editing videos and taking selfies and posting lots... and money helps me continue being alive so i can keep doing all that
🖤 literally anything will help
🖤 i've been on fedi for seven years and have always done my best to help this community by constantly boosting mutual aid posts
Zuckerberg is not just absorbing certain of the fediverse's communities, but also certain of its technologies. We'll need replacements, but that's an opportunity to break the current state of developmental stagnation in the predominant microblogging service and ActivityPub. And more important still than protocols and apps are those who create them. Essentially, the Facebook Fediverse gets the techbros, but the Free Fediverse gets the catgirls - which means we win!
thanks to feedback and help from peeps on here i've made some changes to https://fedipact.online to fix some accessibility issues with the previous version of the site
🖤 there's now a toggle button to swap the background and text (dark mode), and it respects the user's system preference on first load
🖤 there's another toggle button for the animated floating hearts, in addition to them being off if the user has "reduced motion" enabled
🖤 the heart bullet points are formatted properly now so each individual one isn't read out repetitively by screenreaders
🖤 links are now underlined to be obvious as links
if there's any other changes you can think of to make the fedipact experience better for everyone, feel free to send them my way 😁
some accessibility concerns with https://fedipact.online have been brought to my attention and i'm working on addressing them. more specifically, the readability of the color contrast and the animations
i wanna put a button on there that flips the text and background colors, making it hot pink on black, and disables the animated floating hearts (they're already disabled if the user has "reduced motion" on)
i just... don't have the web design skills necessary to do so lol. BUT someone else is working on it!!! so it should be fixed and better soonsies
thanks to everyone who pointed this out :heart_cyber_pink:
@FediPact did you see that the #fedipact was mentioned in this BBC article about #Threads upcoming features?
"But a planned system to make Threads compatible with some other apps, such as Mastodon, has met with resistance.....
[C]oncern among users has grown with over a hundred Mastodon communities joining what they call the "fedipact" - an agreement to block Meta from being able to access their community under any circumstances - so even when Threads does begin to support ActivityPub, users will not be able to access everything on the fediverse."
Gee whiz. Massive abusive tech surveillance company doesn't do what they promised. Shocking NO ONE.
<https://todon.eu/@queue/112130436372737490>
queue@todon.eu - Reminder to anyone who said "Meta wouldn't do anything to Fediverse, we should let them join!"
Meta is now automatically muting all posts that mention PixelFed, so it's users can't read about any alternatives to its services.
<https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807>
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.
#fedipact #meta #pixelfed #eff
Prominent voices advocating for collaboration with the Zuckerberg surveillance entity sure do talk up decentralization a lot, when they're not advocating the subjugation of the fediverse to a single vertical silo of 100 million users. The irony, of course, is that they tend to be admins of instances with tens or even hundreds of thousands. And two of the most prominent control multiple mega-servers, which means they're not just overseeing centralized instances, they're hoarding them.
In contrast, by default Pixelfed servers are limited to a maximum of 1000 users. Though a deep dive into the parameters can override this, its status as a default is an affirmation of the decentralizing ethos. "Thou shalt keep thy instance small."
The microblogging space of the fediverse hasn't been allowed to develop an equivalent consciousness, as the agenda has been set by mega-server admins who drove the conversation around topics like "smooth onboarding". But these aren't evil people; the problem is that they have no real vision.
A comment circulated recently - receipt unfortunately not saved - suggesting that the development of fediverse tools to useful to organizing community would be an effective alternative to the "how to funnel in granny" mentality, because then there would be incentives for entire communities to migrate in together; surely a more holistic view of "onboarding" than fretting over how to pick up confused and wandering individuals one at a time. That is the kind of exercise of technical and social imagination we need.
To become viable, the Free Fediverse will need to define itself by not just what it stands against - corporate enclosure by the Meta monstrosity - but by what it stands for. Real and actual decentralization - not just shallow lip service towards it - can be one of those foundational values.
This value can then be encoded into the technology, as it was with Pixelfed; because, let there be no doubt, Zuckerberg is not just absorbing certain of the fediverse's communities, but also certain of its technologies. We'll need replacements, but that's an opportunity to break the current state of developmental stagnation in the predominant microblogging service and ActivityPub. And more important still than protocols and apps are those who create them. Essentially, the Facebook Fediverse gets the techbros, but the Free Fediverse gets the catgirls - which means we win!
Real decentralization - lots and lots and lots of quite small communities, distinct yet federated - has already proven itself to be a better facilitator of good moderation, and will enable another important value to be addressed shortly. But on the moderation issue, a timely real-world example of why decentralization matters is instructive.
There has recently been a calamity visited upon our instance, Kolektiva. Among all of the discussion following its disclosure, there was not a full analysis of its chain of causality. Let's take a flyover of the recent timeline.
April - A massive spambot wave first hits mastodon-dot-social, then spreads quickly through the entire fediverse. Kolektiva, and many other servers, temporarily limit dot-social until the invasion is under control.
Early May - Another spambot attack hits masto-dot-social, and of course, everyone else. This time, an error is made, and a Kolektiva admin defederates rather than limits dot-social. All Kolektiva users irrecoverably lose their follows and followers from dot-social. There is disquiet.
Mid-May - In an attempt to restore the lost follow-follower data, a Kolektiva admin recovers a snapshot backup of the database from before the defederation, an operation which occurs with what turns out to be "spectacularly bad timing".
Yes, there was a fuckup; in fact, a fuckup compounded by another fuckup. But - beyond noting that both mistakes were attempts to do right by the users of the instance - the wellspring of the disaster actually wasn't Kolektiva, but mastodon-dot-social, that mega-server with hundreds of thousands of silo'ed users, open registration and next-to-no-moderation; that irresistible honeypot for spammers and scammers, that 500-pound gorilla with a bullseye painted on its ass.
The mother of all instances has repeatedly proven itself to be a problem for the rest of the fediverse, as in the examples above, when the admins of literally every other server federated with it were put in the position of having to locally address a crisis not of their origination, each an opportunity to make mistakes they would not otherwise have needed to risk.
Smaller instances are easier to moderate, larger instances more difficult. And if masto-dot-social is any indication, a large enough instance becomes a lost cause - take a look at dot-social's local feed and see if you agree. Decentralization distributes moderation agency more effectively, both to admins and even to users. And by scattering targets, it creates network resiliency against threats like spambots and crypto scams. Decentralization isn't just a foss-nerd buzzword, it yields tangible benefits for those seeking safer community online.
"Nevertheless, I hope it becomes increasingly clear why the line, for some of us, isn’t about “non-commercial” or “non-algorithmic,” but about Meta’s specific record of bloody horrors, and their absolute unwillingness to enact genuinely effective measures to prevent future political manipulation and individual suffering and loss on a global scale."
FreeFediverse.org wiki <3 (freefediverse.org)
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)