I need more folks to know who are talking about #Meta or #Facebook joining the Fediverse that the company has coordinated with the federal government in the US to remove people from disability benefits.
No, I'm not joking. Many folks on disability know better than to EVER post pictures on that platform as they've been used against them. Or to ever talk about having a slightly better day for their ailments than usual. Having them spy on the #fediverse is NOT okay and will actively make this platform less safe for many disabled people. That #FediPact should be seriously considered.
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.
Honestly, I think the best solution to this whole #meta fiasco would be to have at least some instances block #Meta while allowing others to federate, that way people can migrate to wherever they are comfortable being. Yeah, Meta will 100% show their ass at some point, but the fediverse will potentially have access to a huge user base, and I would love for them to see how nom-meta affiliated instances work.
Embrace: what they are doing now, launch a competing but compatible service with that of Mastodon. The vast majority of users, most of whom don't care about the privacy and intimacy of the Mastodon network will go with the brand with the most name recognition.
Extend: attract users to their centralized network with features like search, which they have the resources to do but the rest of the Mastodon network does not. But also include features for tracking and advertising, sell this as a good thing, "a better place to grow your perasonal brand, your business."
Extinguish: after attracting a critical mass of users large enough to decimate the user base of the competing Mastodon network, queitly remove compatibility with the Mastodon network, this will effect only 10% of Mastodon users because the other 90% will be on Threads. "Who cares if we lose contact with that tiny minority of old Mastodon users, they should have just joined Threads by now anyways, they still can. It has search, and more people voted for it with their patronage it, and you don't have to think about what instance to join, its easier!"
Enshittification: without any real competition to keep people from leaving for an alternative, start exploiting users for more and more content for ad revenue, exploit advertisers with ever-increasing costs of ad revenue.
They are scared to death about losing control over the Internet that they had gained over the past 15 years or so, and they are fighting to take that control back for themselves. We built this, but now a corporation like Meta/Facebook feels they have the right to exploit it for all its riches until it is destroyed.
Don't let it happen. #Fediblock is the only way to protect our home-grown community from corporate take-over.
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
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
(to support cyberpunk.lol costs directly please use the separate instance kofi on our about page)
So, someone at #Meta, named Rachel, contacted @kev about having a hush talk. And now there's a screenshot of the message. What can we learn/infer from it?
Point blank, a mass Fediblock isn't going to work with #Meta.
The cold truth is that people will use #Barcelona whether it federates or not. Even if it fails, Barcelona will probably have more users out of the gate than almost every project save Mastodon. Hell, it will probably eclipse #Bluesky too.
And even if you convince every server to defederate -- which you won't -- this will not be a PR coup for the Fediverse. Newspaper headlines won't blare "Fediverse successfully resists Meta." Instead, they will probably follow @gruber take with "Open source zealots complain that an open protocol is open."
Again, as I've said countless times, I'm not saying you should federate with Barcelona or any Meta-owned property. If you want, defederate. The joy of the Fediverse is freedom of association.
But a mass Fediblock doesn't solve a few important problems with Meta, and perhaps makes them worse.
The most critical problem is that Meta users need to migrate away from Meta-owned social networks. Until now, a migration path has simply been unfeasible to most. But when Barcelona gets launched, it is possible that many of them will become aware of a greater Fediverse.
How to build that awareness? By interacting with them through services beyond Barcelona.
This approach works. I've interacted with many Mastodon users through services beyond Mastodon, and this has resulted in adoption of other Fediverse software. #Calckey is a case in point.
However, there's a bigger problem concerning Meta: Fediverse replacements for Meta-owned social networks aren't getting mass adoption. And it's not because these apps aren't good.
#Pixelfed is an #Instagram replacement. It is also one of the slickest apps on the Fediverse. Yet, Pixelfed only has 150,000 registered accounts.
#Friendica is a #Facebook replacement. It's been around since 2010. It is a mature product that does many things very well, but Friendica only has 17,000 registered accounts.
The software is great but we are failing to effectively market the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Now I'm trying my darnedest to change this, and so are many people. But facts are facts. Fediverse alternatives to Meta are a blip on the radar.
Refusing to federate with Barcelona won't change this. How do I know?
Because we don't federate now, and the status quo remains intact.
Meanwhile, Meta is practically gifting Pixelfed and Friendica an opportunity for federation, and it would be foolish to not consider broader implications.
How is it that more people aren't considering this opportunity?
Dare I say that most people -- including devs -- suffer from myopia concerning what the Fediverse is. The Fediverse is not Mastodon, and it is wrong to view the Fediverse solely through the eyes of Mastodon.
And I'll go further: by focusing Barcelona on text, I suspect that Meta is likewise making the same mistake of viewing the Fediverse as a "Twitter killer".
What they may not be considering is that the Fediverse might be a "Meta killer" too. And connecting Barcelona to the Fediverse is opening a can of worms Meta hasn't entirely considered yet.
If Barcelona is indeed text-based, what will happen when a Barcelona user encounters Pixelfed and asks, "Why does this post show reels? And why can't I do the same?"
Believe me, this is the kind of content that triggers migration.
We need to think bigger than Fediblock. Yes, for your own mental health and safety, you may not want to federate with Barcelona. However, there needs to also be a means for Barcelona users to encounter content outside Barcelona.
Perhaps there needs to be "lobby" servers that help Barcelona users enter the greater Fediverse -- helping them make the switch beyond Meta.
WHO ARE WE? we're a scrappy little 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 posting on fedi heavily 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
Alex Norris made this entry of Webcomic Name that perfectly describes Fedi right now.
Fedi grew out of groups forced out of places like Twitter and Facebook. It is a space built specifically to protect everyone here from the systems that did it.
When we talk about #P92, #Facebook, #Meta, #Bluesky, and newcomers who immediately want changes to make them more like other spaces, this is exactly that in 3 panels.
“The Kansas Reflector published an artical about Meta censoring environmental articles about climate change — deeming them ‘too controversial’.
Facebook then censored the article about Facebook censorship, and then after an independent site published a copy of the climate change article, Facebook censored it too.”
Tangled Threads: How #Mastodon admins should respond to #Meta and #Threads in a way that protects our users best. Tip: It's not through proactive defederation.
Sometimes we should step back and appreciate just how well Mastodon actually works. Watching this whole #Meta#Threads thing play out, makes it really clear how vital algorithm free #hashtag search is for truly democratized engagement.
:facebook: ☣️ FLOSS.social was launched in the (now small) Mastodon signup wave at the end of March 2018, as a result of the #Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Since then, #Meta has shown little to no sincere interest in reforming their culture of abusing their users' human rights of privacy.
As a result, there is no reason to suspect they'll be any different if they join the #Fediverse, and our instance will respond accordingly.
The discourse in the last few days regarding #Meta and #Threads gives the impression that the entire Fediverse is already blocking Threads. I wanted to take a look at the numbers and they speak a different language. The data source for my calculation is https://fedipact.veganism.social/?v=2.
Measured by user count, 76 % of all users are federated with Threads. Remaining instances with 24 % of users either block Threads or are limited (e.g. infosec.exchange).
Folks, the reason #Facebook/ #Instagram/ #Meta/ Zuckerberg hasn’t launched #Threads in the #EU isn’t because the EU is determined to protect your privacy, it’s because the EU is determined to protect The Single Market (peace be upon it) from anticompetitive behaviour. It’s because they’re using Instagram to launch Threads and sharing data between them (and not with EU startups that might want to use that data too). It’s #antitrust, not #privacy. It’s markets, not people.
and yet, by and large, the fediverse is the only major social media platform that actually manages to do this (the decent sections of it, at least)
why? well, here's the big secret: BECAUSE WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT PROFIT
big companies allow nazis to fester on their services because it makes them money, and here we're not beholden to such a corrupting influence. that's kinda the entire point
There is one legitimate reason to have attended the meeting of fediverse admins with Facebook/Meta and that’s if your goal was to leak the contents.
(We’re waiting.)
Personally, I don’t see how I can trust any fediverse admin either stupid enough or malleable enough to sign an NDA with Facebook/Meta.
No one made you sign an NDA with a surveillance capitalist that this space stands in diametric opposition to. You did that to yourselves. Don’t be surprised if there are consequences.
"The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors."
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.
"Just like Apple, Meta is behaving as though the #DMA permits it to carry on its worst behavior, with minor cosmetic tweaks around the margins. Just like #Apple, #Meta is daring the #EU to enforce its democratically enacted laws, implicitly promising to pit its billions against #Europe’s institutions to preserve its right to spy on us."
A case for preemptively defederating with Threads
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
Democrats call on DOJ to investigate tax sites for sharing financial information with Meta (www.theverge.com)
TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and TaxAct embedded Meta’s pixel onto their tax filing sites.