Metaphorically, one of the biggest, most ruthless pirate ships on the sea just pulled up alongside our rag-tag fleet and offered to extend a gangplank. There’s no good ending for our fleet if it isn’t prepared to defend itself, even just from the sheer scale difference, even if we trust the pirate captain with the strange plastic smile and dead eyes and ignore the ship’s long history of leaving wrecks behind it.
(Lifted from a reply I just made because I love a metaphor) #Meta#FediPact
Others have said this. More and more, I think it's true: the Homeowners Association (HOA) culture on the Fediverse is hurting it.
Except, people who tend to push an HOA agenda don't even tend to be "homeowners". They don't code. They don't run servers. Many of them are recent arrivals to the Fediverse.
I don't bring that up to say that anyone's more or less important because they code or admin or have been active for awhile. But surely, if you're going to be a gatekeeper, you should have something to qualify you as the self-appointed enforcer of the HOA.
Usually, these self-appointed gatekeepers have never made any investment in this community. Instead, the HOA are outright hurting this community by being unwelcoming jackasses.
Just to give an example, why has #BlackTwitter soured on #Mastodon? It's the HOA in action. And who's currently uttering death threats to server admins? It's the HOA. They are toxic, and everywhere they go, they spread toxicity.
The worst FUD about the Fediverse isn't even coming from the likes of Big Social or Bluesky or the Press. It's from the HOA.
Who's spreading fears about "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's the HOA. Who's creating uncertainty about whether ActivityPub can survive a corporation's use of it? Again, it's the HOA. And who believes that the Fediverse will die because something happened without their approval? It's the HOA every time.
The HOA has no authority here. The Fediverse has no board meetings, never mind a board of directors. Their decision making power is a complete delusion, a total fabrication of their collective imagination.
To be blunt, I'm done with entertaining the HOA's bluster, speciousness, and pretensions.
From here on out, at least on spaces I have tangible power, I'm gatekeeping the gatekeepers.
@atomicpoet seems like you're saying only techies are allowed to speak up about the relationship between Meta and established servers, which is a fairly elitist POV. If anything, that resembles the attitudes of your average HOA more than anything #FediPact folks are insinuating (in a "you're not like me so gtfo out of the neighborhood" way)
Later tonight, after I get the satellite cameras running and everything has settled in, I am going to block mastodon.social and mstdn.social.
I mentioned this yesterday, but it likely got pretty buried in all the Meta activity.
This is really just more experimenting to see what it is like taking a more active stance against servers the are or likely will be a big source of garbage.
This isn't against the admin st* or anything like that, they are in crappy position.
#neuromatchstodon members are welcome to discuss joining the #fedipact before we call a vote in the social-wg channel in our discord. the link is in your announcements.
you're also welcome to come check in with thoughts or questions on what might have been a bewildering few days on the fediverse.
Mastodon is hard to self-host, which leads to too few instances with open registrations. Gargron's solution is to redirect everyone on his one million users server.
At the moment the 419 instances having signed the #FediPact have 387,191 users, i.e. 4% of the total number of users and 27% of the number of monthly active users (MAU) (I give both numbers because we can expect these users to be more committed to the fediverse, so more active, than lingering mastodon.social accounts)
The most enraging of the Zuckerbros is actually Gargron, exactly because he's so quiet. Say what you will about the others, they're at least in the discourse. About the only thing Gargron tooted on the day of the NDA betrayal was a snap from a concert he attended. The federation is burning because of him, but he's having a ball.
It's a complete failure of leadership - and he has claimed leadership, even calling himself a "benevolent dictator". But there's actually no such thing, and these techbros who talk up decentralization, while sneaking around with a corporation which has spent 15 years trying to singularly enclose the internet, have ceded their claim to lead.
However, this is actually a golden opportunity for the fediverse to route around the damage of these Mastodon megaservers. What galls most is the spectacle of 3 mediocre white guys unilaterally deciding the destiny of hundreds of thousands, extolling the virtues of open standards and interoperability while dragging everyone else in the community around by the hair.
We don't need "new leaders", what we need is to horizontally distribute leadership so that everyone has some of it, and all network participants possess agency and an active stake in their own community.
Some have waved away the Anti-Meta Pact, noting that most of the participating instances are very small. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's exactly what the fediverse should become - a network of countless small communities, distinct yet together. By default, Pixelfed limits instance user count to 1000. It's a good idea, and whatever we replace Mastodon with should implement something similar.
The #FreeFediverse will look back some day and see the megaservers, and the Zuckerbros that dominated them, as a aberration on the path to actual decentralization and democratization.
Just a heads up that the FediPact admin is policing who is and isn't allowed to sign the anti-Meta list
I as a queer transfemme leftist signed it and was not allowed on the list for vague reasons about our federation that they refuse to elaborate on just because trans femmes moderate differently than how they demand (we block individuals & domain block as last resort)
The Pact is BS and should not be used to determine who actually plans to block Meta
“ActivityPub is an open technology so it’s fine if Facebook uses it” is a nonsensical take.
“Houses” are also an open technology but it’s very much not ok how landlords and other capitalists use it.
If you believe open standards and open source alone will protect you from the destructive force of capital, then you’re in for a harsh awakening. Or you could listen to all the people who have been harmed by or studied these mechanisms in the past already and learn something before it’s too late.
Beim 6. #FediverseModerationsTreff wollen wir mit euch zusammen über die Situation rund um #Project92 und eine eventuell zukünftig stattfindende Zusammenarbeit einiger Fediverse-Instanzen mit der geplanten #Meta-App sprechen, die mit Mastodon interagieren kann.
@ArtBear I agree that multiple strategies are needed; the #FediPact is an organizing tactic (and a great one), not a complete solution. Also agreed that the fediverse as a whole is going to be a mix of the different kinds of engagement you describe, and that most Meta users aren't bad -- that's a key difference from the Gab situation.
All that being said, there are different perspectives on who "we" are and what does "winning" mean. So it's a complex situation!
I am not currently accepting new follow requests from instances whose admins haven't signed #FediPact. Please ask your admin to sign it if they haven't already. Otherwise, I'll be happy to accept your request once they've signed it, or from your new instance where the admin has already signed.
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.
“Some of your posts have been reported by a user and I resolved it so far.
In the future. Please make sure not to insult others and be rude.”
Here’s my suggestion to the moderators of mstdn.social: Stop tone policing people on other instances. I’m not on your instance and I’ll speak my mind as I like on my own one. If anyone has a problem with that, they can block me. It’s not your job to tone police the fediverse even if you are a mega instance.
As a small token only of your friendship Meta asks this, that you sign this NDA. It is the least of NDAs and once you sign it then we can talk freely as friends. It is a but a trifle that Meta fancies, people's meta and their data, and if you sign this NDA it will show your good will. And if our friendship continues, Meta promises you much riches of gold and the realm of the Fediverse will be yours forever.
Hear me out.
The key to keep #meta away from the #fediverse and isolate them is porn.
Meta still depends on advertisers, and advertisers and big corporation are allergic to porn.
The details are still unclear, but if their implementation has anything remotely similar to a federated timeline we need to make sure to fill it with healthy doses of the queerest porn, sex-positivity, nsfw discussions, kink-positivity and an overall celebration of queerness and weirdness.
They'll end up defederating from us. And if such content is posted from big instances like mastodon.social, we'll hopefully have their support in not banning us for content that has always been allowed on fedi.
Personally I'd just consider moving to an instance that is on the #FediPact and that refuses to budge or even respect #Snitches like the #GAFAMs, espechally #NSAbook!
#Meta 's history is filled with the collection, sale and abuse of personal data.
Their power is big enough to influence elections, countries, wars and your personal relationships too.
There is blood on their hands and they will stop at nothing to gain more data, influence and relevance.
They will exploit our beautifully curated spaces if given the chance. Resisting their presence is not an overreaction, it is the only way to start to protect ourselves.
the privilege, as an admin, of blocking an entire fediverse instance, censoring all past, current, and future content from said instance, is not trivial
the simple fact is that the "non-stakeholders" have no idea what the technical implementation will be of Facebook's platform, nor how Mastodon et al will change before or after FB's deployment
i completely agree FB is not to be trusted. but until there are actual facts and an actual threat model based on said facts, i'm doing nothing
Because to be effective, they need to able to query ablot of data.
And there are sufficient options to ban or at the very least restrict crawlers to the point that manually paying someone to scrape the Fediverse would be more efficient due to rate-limiting.
When #META invites you to secretive talks about the #fediverse and you are told to not share anything about those talks, be it by spoken agreement or an NDA — remember admiral Ackbar. It's a trap.