Announcing Free Fediverse, a website resource for all of us fighting to save our communities from absorption into surveillance capitalism!
There are lots of stories, thinkpieces, links and statements flying around and disappearing quickly, and it would be handy to have a place to store and reference them all. Free Fediverse is that place.
Free Fediverse is a wiki-based site linking to resources of the following categories:
Links to and information on the FediPact
Essays on the Meta threat to the Fediverse
Articles on P92 in mainstream media outlets
Announcements from instance admins on joining the pact
Links and information for development projects beyond corporate enclosure
Articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity
Free Fediverse will continue to be updated. Just hit me up to suggest a link for any category. More links to FediPact instance statements are very welcome!
The website has no ads, trackers or analytics. Ferdi the Free Fediverse Froggy sez "hop on over!"
Bei @digitalcourage haben wir noch nicht entschieden, ob wir Metas Fediverse-Instanz(en) aus unseren Instanzen aussperren werden. Noch funktioniert bei threads.net das Föderieren nicht. Das kann sich aber jederzeit ändern.
Wer vorbeugend ausschließen will, dass die eigenen Tröts zu Meta/Threads gelangen, kann sich mit folgender Anleitung abschotten:
Since #Facebook/#Meta is apparently going to start testing #Fediverse/#Mastodon integration for their #P92/#Barcelona/#Threads “platform” soon, let's do another round of reminders of what this entails and why their instance and IPs should be blocked now with extreme prejudice.
We, the moderation and administration of tech.lgbt, are signing the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact in fellowship with our peer communities. (https://vantaa.black/pact)
There is over a decade of precedent that Facebook will not have users' best interests as their guiding principle but rather profit margins, if it joins the Fediverse.
We at tech.lgbt have long held the belief that corporation owned instances are a threat to the core of the Fediverse: freedom for users to be themselves and to be a part of their communities. The 2010s saw the loss of online freedom when the majority of the Web was consolidated into a few destinations, and Facebook entering here could lead us back to centralization. Furthermore, NDAs for server admins will constrain our sovereignty online by binding us legally from disrupting their business.
We are not products. We are people, and we do not welcome Facebook in this space.
Because of the recent events on #Habitica I've created a #Liberapay page to get some support to fix what will happen on August 8th.
My plan is to create an advanced chat for the uotpify.org community (~5,000 people) and to keep providing high quality challenges on Habitica. More information on the Liberapay page: https://liberapay.com/utopify.org
This will be a lot of work and I hope for some #support
I provide challenges for about 6 years on Habitica for free, but it took a lot of time to write programs automating a lot of work (anti-cheat), scanning the chat for challenge participants, processing challenge data and creating high score lists, announcing new challenges, winners of challenges, etc. Now, that chats and guilds will be removed on Habitica, there will be even more work and the motivation is not really high, if a company destroys it within a week what you built up over several years.
Liberapay was the only solution I found, which is #foss and fits the values for what utopify stands for. If you know others/better, please name them.
I appreciate every Cent and thank you for your support 🙏
My problem with money donations are always, that not trustworthy companies have to be used. Currently I use #paypal, but #stripe is supported by Liberapay, too.
Is it necessary to have a Stripe account or is PayPal enough? Because reading the privacy policy of them makes me a little bit dizzy and if it can be avoided, I really want to avoid it. But if people will say, they want to donate, but only with Stripe, I would create a Stripe account.
It took way to much time, but I wanted to be sure it is the right thing and that everything works even better than before in the old utopify.org guild chat on #habitica And after a lots of struggles, it looks like it is usable, now.
The new lemmy instance covers topics like #selfdevelopment and #sustainability and everything what is connected to it. I will create a lot of communities the next weeks and almost every #challenge I provided on Habitica will be accessible publicly there, too. (And I will announce them on Mastodon).
It should be a safe space to focus on important topics and define fulfilling goals, create a habit to work on them and to reach them in an efficient way, even if the "All Feed" is activated, which can be distracting very fast, because it shows federated posts. I recommend to stay in the "Local Feed".
I've put so much energy, time and money in a self-hosted Lemmy instance, because what happened on Habitica was the last time that a company will be able to destroy the utopify community.
We had a healthy routine to set goals, have a sustainable mindset, motivate and inspire others and all was gone within a short time. This time the plan is, that it will stay for much much longer and that all experience will be saved and can be shared by everyone :)
The Lemmy instance is free of GAFAM spyware (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) or any trackers/ads and it runs on a private server and WE DON'T FEDERATE WITH #META (#threads, #project92, #p92)
Politicians, quick! Get your institutions to onboard on communication systems designed by monsters* who've literally designed previous products to target and abuse working class teenagers! The masses could get a free internet, so don't waste a second, and create your free account now!!
Analysing power relationships, it makes more sense to assume billionaires to only have one value, which is to amass as much economic capital as possible, making any humanization contrary to trivial sociological common sense. (Ask me about sociological modelling!)
So, open message: if you're from #Meta and you are working on this #P92 service, you should contact the #W3C#SocialCG to work on compatibility with #ActivityPub.
We're excited about your project and we're here to help.
It's so easy for political elites to switch to #Threads, a lot of things are already decided for with Instagram integration.
They get exact same handles they used on Instagram, and it's almost like a shoo-in. I have been looking at IG profiles of the Finnish political elite and it's all there, of course.
When #Meta releases the EU version of Threads I expect it to skyrocket.
@Ciantic The fact that #threads was released explicitly WITHOUT the ability for EU citizens to sign up says everything you need to know about #meta and their abhorrent user #privacy track record.
That they decided it was easier to exclude nearly half a billion people rather than face the consequences is rather wild.
One of the "defederate with Threads" arguments being advanced is that "Threads is about harvesting user's data"
Which, ok, sure - Threads is about harvesting Threads users data, that part I get.
What part of this setup, though, allows Threads to harvest other people's data (ie, the fediverse in general), in a way that can be genuinely blocked by defederating with them?
@asjmcguire Honestly my stance is that I cannot prevent #P92 from using my contents to hurt their users; if they want to interact with us, they need to do so on our own terms.
I'm really pondering federating with #Threads on my own, self-hosted @bonfire instance, and I'm leaning towards not federating by default, for this reason and also because if I defederate from their instance later on they'll assimilate the Fediverse with drama, especially because social media provide affordances to seem and not to be, not to write ideas as affordances, enabling action, but rather to give a picture-perfect representation of yourself.
By the way, if we federate with Threads there might be strong economic incentives for creators to play this game instead of being more authentic. I could pull half a dozen of other reasons I've found from the top of my head, but I really don't want to reject Threads users, they will be free to read me by joining any free server implementation of ActivityPub.
Hot take 1 : Zuck va tenter de construire une interdépendance économique saine sur le papier, mais déséquilibrée par un rapport de 3000 utilisataires de Facebook pour un·e fédinaute
Hot take 2 : #P92 ne veut pas EEE Mastodon mais Bonfire/ValueFlows
Hot take 3 : P92 permet à Zuck d'avoir un coup d'avance face aux alternatives qui pourraient émerger sur le fédivers (telles que Bonfire, mais pas que)
I've got a funny little story for you. So, a while back, someone was all like, "Hey, #Mastodon and #ActivityPub are totally done for because Bluesky is this massive gorilla with loads of cash!" And you know what? I've been saying for ages that if Bluesky is a gorilla, then #P92 (or #Threads, as the kids now call it) is a ginormous whale! And guess what? Tonight, my friend, I've been proven right!
Hold on to your hats because Threads has gone from zero to millions of users in less than a day!
Un problème majeur avec les comparaisons entre l'EEE d'XMPP et #P92 est qu'elles semblent ignorer qu'encore aujourd'hui, XMPP est un protocole acceptable pour des communautés techies qui en connaissent et acceptent les limites. Il ne peut pas en aller de même avec mon chéri si je ne les connais pas moi-même, ou si l'un·e d'entre nous utilise un serveur mal géré, et donc potentiellement non fiable ou/et non sécurisé (par exemple, mon chéri ne veut plus entendre parler d'XMPP depuis qu'il a été au Maroc sans pouvoir me joindre ; l'admin m'a dit, six mois plus tard et sans embarras, que les appels ne fonctionnaient pas et qu'il ne savait pas pourquoi).
Pour des communications internes dans une communauté techie c'est pas un souci, mais pour ramener des potes, ou pire, un groupe militant, c'est un super moyen d'être perçu·e comme “pas sérieux·se”
No, Mark Zuckerberg won't meet you in the lobby Chris Trottier.
Recently one of the fediverse's most ardent proponents of collaboration with Meta produced a long thread in which he details his argument for embracing the P92 gambit with open arms. This post is a response.
If you're wondering why he is not tagged or addressed directly in his thread, that's because Chris is want to block anyone who offers up even the most polite of substantive counterpoints. We'll just toodle along over here thanks. The intent is not actually to debate him, but to provide food for thought to those who might have been persuaded by his relentless advocacy to federate.
Trottier seems to believe that ActivityPub possesses extraordinary powers: "ActivityPub means that whatever of Meta’s userbase that’s exposed to federation will diversify into other platforms […] This diversification reduces the dependence of users on a single platform, giving them more choices and potentially drawing them away from Meta."
But he never acknowledges that Meta platforms comprise an algorithmically-governed censorship regime which repress information of many kinds - for example, the #joinpixelfed hashtag, which was banned on Instagram along with the Pixelfed account itself. Why would this entity allow pied pipers of the fediverse to frolic freely on P92 and evangelize escape from its enclosure?
For that matter, why does he think that would work at all? The userbase of Instagram will be prompted to join Threads. That means something of the existing network effect of that longstanding service will be transplanted in; and rest assured, there will be no account migration functionality provided.
In fact, the number of teen-dream travel-snap influencers who will, upon exposure to a single post by Chris Trottier on the magic of W3C protocol development, leap to wrench themselves away from the highly addictive and even financially-incentivized dependency on their established social graph and plunge themselves into the X11-Wayland religious war waged among the beloved catgirls of the fediverse is statistically very close to zero.
There is also an unsettling absence of agency in Chris's characterization of the lost souls of Meta, as if they're just sheep waiting for the good shepherds of decentralization to lead them to greener pastures. Instagram account holders are free to sign up for a fediverse account right now, and many have already done so - and by the way, the reverse flow is also quite possible for anyone here who wishes to connect to friends and family on Meta networks.
To open this "revelatory" "Pandora's Box" (his words) of the ActivityPub Rapture, Trottier proposes, with great bloviation, something called "lobby servers". As he describes: "Lobby servers can bridge communities. They act as intermediaries that connect different social media platforms, including Meta-owned ones, with non-Meta platforms. […] By federating with Meta, lobby servers can pull content from Meta’s network and redistribute it to other federated platforms. This syndication allows users on non-Meta platforms to access and engage with Meta users’ content, thereby exposing them to different perspectives and encouraging cross-platform interactions…"
The flowery language continues on, but he is not actually proposing some novel new technical development. There is nothing described which is not already part and parcel of ActivityPub federation. The "lobby server" is simply a rebrand of "an instance federating with Meta".
This Hotel California doublespeak is indicative of the most problematic aspects of the communications of pro-Meta luminaries. In a ploy more typical of the contemporary reactionary right, the values and intentions of the opposing fediverse opinions on Meta are inverted. Trottier's post begins: "Federation with Meta actually hurts Meta."
He continues, referencing the FediPact community: "… it’s not everyone’s objective to fight Meta, and there should be spaces where fighting Meta isn’t top of mind. Not everyone wants to be part and parcel of a fight, and that’s okay." So, in this new upside-down reality, the anticapitalists trying to save at least part of the fediverse from colonization by one of the most destructive corporations in the world "don't want to fight Meta"; the true revolutionaries are those eager to collaborate with that corporation.
The Orwellian trolling degenerates from there. He claims that turning away from P92 - a single vertical silo which may comprise tens or even hundreds of millions of users - will paradoxically harm decentralization, because all those little servers federated with each other somehow result in "fragmentation" instead. And the anarchists and marginalized communities in the FediPact? They're actually pro-police authoritarians! "To enforce total defederation will require whitelisting, and policing of that whitelist." The term "whitelist" is repeated over and over in this paragraph, which is a subtle dig in the direction of a general and very nasty propensity among pro-Zuck advocates to associate the FediPact with the "HOA" and the absence of diversity.
On the whole, the most visible proponents for Meta collaboration have been big-instance admins who have done neither themselves or their cause any good over the last couple of weeks. Chris Trottier is something of an exception. We have repeatedly noted people explaining that they were on the fence over the Meta issue, until convinced by Trottier's arguments. He may fancy himself as fighting Meta, but by relentlessly arguing in favor of federating with them, he is actually serving as their most useful and effective asset in the fediverse.