🧵1/3 Tested for you: If I #block an #instance or people privately, I can no longer interact with them after a short wait, even though I can still see the profile. But I have tried this with #Threads and it does NOT work!
Regardless of whether I block the whole domain or just one account (test with Insta-Boss), I can still interact and comment (he probably, too?). So I will have to move to another instance with #blockThreads ▶️ https://fedipact.online/#privacy#dataSecurity#GDPR@Gargron
🧵 2/3 I understand if people love #Threads and federations with big #corporate platforms but I want to have a real choice. @Gargron
I didn't leave the big platforms to get them back without any protection. I could post for followers only, yes, of course, but this takes me my reach.
If it stayed that way (described above), I could go straight back to large platforms.
If for whatever reason you never wish to interact with #Threads, you can personally block it for your account. This hides all posts and profiles from Threads, prevents anyone from Threads from following you, and stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads. Simply click the "Block domain threads.net" option on any Threads profile or post you see in Mastodon.
AVVISO: come responsabile di sociale.network, non accetto di rendere ogni membro della community un utile idiota che alimenta con i suoi contenuti una azienda che ha sulla coscienza brexit, suprematismo bianco, propaganda russa e genocidio in Birmania. E non accetto che il colonialismo parassitario di aziende come #Meta possa filtrare i nostri contenuti per mostrare quelli che generano più bisticci e revenues, sovraccaricando i nostri server per riempire le loro tasche. #metablock#sntutorial
This will preserve our community from the abusive corporate policies of a company who's monetizing our digital interactions with others, even if this means profiling users and monetizing hate speech fostering violence IRL.
Is there a handy list of medium to large Mastodon instances that won't federate with Meta/Threads.net?
I know about https://fedipact.online/, but that looks to be a huge list of emails for tiny instances. I'd like to be on an instance with at least a few thousand users.
#metablock: I won't cut out the community served by @Gargron even if he will keep a federation with #Meta because:
I respect other admins' freedom of choice
I won't punish thousands because of the choices of few
I am not the moral judge of other admins and communities
I want to preserve as much as possible the integrity of fediverse
Defederation is a last resource for generalised and systematic sociopathic behaviours of hostile communities with non-cooperative admins. Just like #Meta.
Our community won't cooperate with #Meta, an evil company monetizing hate speech, used as an effective tool for UK nationalism, US white supremacism, Russian propaganda and genocide in Burma
It's my duty to protect us against the abuses of a huge and poorly moderated community where cyber bullying and verbal violence are tolerated and monetized
We won't serve corporate interests with our servers, time and money
This string was found by https://wetdry.world/@w - I have confirmed its presence in the Threads APK from apkcombo, "Threads, an Instagram app_289.0.0.68.109_apkcombo.com.apk", sha256 83a1f270aa2447f4e7310072b4d3217f9af8a03b7679b7760db03ff0bbf8e432, valid signature by "C=US, ST=California, L=Menlo Park, O=Meta Platforms Inc., OU=Meta Mobile, CN=Meta Platforms Inc." (rsa-4096 + sha-256, cert expires in 2053)
at offset 0xB7AE in assets/strings/en_GB.frsc
"Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as <b>@%1$s</b>."
@dznz On the #metablock#fediblockmeta thing, I think there's something people often get wrong, perhaps because they have never seen a large org from the inside or perhaps because they prefer to see the world in black or white moral terms. The thing about #Meta is that it's a huge company with lots of different people with different agendas. It does not and cannot act as a monolith. I have no love for nor account at FB, I'm just saying black/white thinking isn't productive here. Look at actions.
Last boost, WAY too many people seem to be freaking out about Meta's move, in a way that seems counter to why I like the Fedisphere.
Even if it was a Microsoft style, Embrace, Expand, Exterminate tactic, that would involve US moving to their servers, which... sorry ain’t happening.
Yes, we should look at what Meta is doing skeptically, but we should let them do it because damn it, if they implement correctly, it would also mean moving OUT of their environment is easier.
Open Data is a two way street, in AND out of a system.
what is protecting those users from the numerous unknown instances that are already here from doing whatever it is Meta is going to do?
Batshit. Insane. Gobs. Of. Wealth.
Facebook is scale at scales the mind simply boggles at.
3 billion monthly average users (MAU).
5 billion items posted per day. That's about 60,000 per second.
A market capitalisation (after a couple of bad years, I'll add), of three quarters of a trillion dollars.
Compared to its home state of California, that's a wealth of $19,000 per person in the state which Facebook can leverage to do its bidding. Facebook bought WhatsApp, then making a loss on $10m in sales, for $19 billion, largely cash. Keep in mind that the typical US household would struggle to meet an unexpected $400 expense. Facebook's price was more than $400 per resident of California, which is to say, Facebook's buying power is comparable to that of the wealthiest state in the United States.
Yes, there are threats that small instances may pose to the Fediverse. Yes, there are privacy and surveillance issues I've long been aware of and have warned against, as have others (see @alex particularly, who ... has greater pedigree than I do in this space). But those instances don't have access to Facebook's resources, combined with Facebook's nearly-twenty-year record of abusing its dumb fucks, excuse me, users, and violating condition after condition after condition regulators have imposed upon it.
I don't really think I see why everyone is so up in arms about #meta starting up an activity based server and joining the fediverse.
Other than being owned/controlled by a corporation rather than she rando, how is their server going to be any different?
It's not like they can just take everything over. If you don't want to federate, you, or your instance admins, have the power to block. So why is this such a big ordeal?
@finner There was a long-standing false trope about free software development that conflated the potential for anybody to contribute to the code with anybody can contribute to a codebase.
The licence permits redistribution, modification, and by extension, forking. The project administrator however exercises control over what goes into their branch of the project. As Linus Torvalds has often said, his main job (for a few decades now) has been to say "No". As in "no, that patch is not entering the kernel*.
This gets more complicated when a single large entity can control and direct both development and specification. The capacity to empty dumpsters full of cash on developers to do what you tell them to do ... is an effective mechanism for control over a project, and if you happen to own a money-minting machine (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, IBM), then you're going to have an outsized influence on development. Indeed we've seen Linux affected in this way to an extent, Chrome (and with it the HTML/CSS/JS specs) immensely by Google, and various communications protocols by numerous entities (chat, email, voice, social media, video).
In the case of ActivityPub and the Fediverse, I see two main concerns:
FB swamping the cultural dynamic and information flows. Even conservatively FB are at least 1,000x larger than the present Fediverse, and I suspect that's an underestimation.
FB hijacking aspects of the protocol and clients themselves. There are plenty of extant examples of this, and it might be possible even without malicious intent. Mastodon has (/me checks Github...) 830 contributors, and I'd suspect that a power-law distribution holds, with a small fraction of those dominating. FB have > 58k employees, and even if only 10% of that is engineering, that's approaching 10x Mastodon's development team. Keep in mind that non-engineer contributors can also provide useful roles (PMs, QA, etc., etc.)
The fact that both the comms protocol and the development licence are open in no way whatsover compels other Fediverse instances, or the Mastodon project itself, to accept traffic or code from FB. And the harms which might come from doing so, based on historical precedent, are huge.
Anyway, I'm just recalling one of the favourite analogies of explaining fedi microblogging as "think of it like email," and for no reason whatsoever, no reason at all, I'm also recalling how running your own non-gmail/outlook365 mail servers these days is a fool's errand of vainly trying to make into whitelists and not getting marked as spam. Don't know why I'm even thinking about that. #fediverse#metablock
>You cannot set up a home email server.
>You cannot set it up on a VPS.
>You cannot set it up on your own datacenter.
>At some point your IP range is bound to be banned, either by one asshole IP neighbor sending spam, one of your users being pwned, due to arbitrary reasons, by mistake, it doesn't matter. It's not if, it's when. Say goodbye to your email. Game over. No recourse.
>The era of distributed, independent email servers is over.
Meta is not gonna buy Mastodon or any server, this is based on absolutely nothing and untrue.
Yes, some of us indeed got contacted by Meta/Insta because they are working on a new social platform (this was in the news) and they are looking into joining the Fediverse (Mark Zuckerberg also told this in the recent podcast)
SO.
This contact was about a "heads-up" for a potential big platform to join the network and not for a "take over".
@stuxIf US and EU antitrust / competitiveness authorities cannot secure compliance from Facebook and Zuckerberg for existing and longstanding orders, what makes you think a rag-tag bunch of Fediverse admins will fare better?
Facebook are manifestly bad-faith and untrustworthy actors. Preblock, now.
Facebook is a repeat violator at the FTC. There was a consent decree that goes back close to a decade, which the FTC in 2019 found that they violated. The recent news suggests that they may have also been in violation of this latest consent order. And that is really prompting a step back and a close look at: What does it take to make sure that firms across the board are actually complying with the law? ... I think when you have companies that are repeatedly before a law-enforcement agency, you need to ask serious questions about whether these companies are recidivist and whether they have a challenge in abiding by existing laws.
-- Lina Khan, Chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, interviewed by Kara Swischer,15 May 2023
At the very least, a precondition for any cooperation would be full compliance with existing antitrust actions, sanctions, consent orders, and the like, for a period at least as long as noncompliance (so, four years in the case of the 2019 order).