Happy to report that Kolektiva has activated authorized fetch, which will help to protect our instance's posts from surveillance and "AI" ingestion by Meta. Thank you to @subMedia@admin@moderation for defending the zone!
The only reason the algorithmic biases of the Zuckerberg entity are not dominating fedi discourse at this very moment is because they began to federate with "sharing" opt-in. If/when they switch that toggle over, 160 million accounts governed by these censorship algorithms will flood in and algorithmic creep could quickly destroy the journalistic prospect of the fediverse. Why would journalists show up here if less than 1% of the network can see their posts?
We have recently been advocating the activation of a function which is present but usually off in Mastodon and other fedi services called Authorized Fetch. As we plead with the major development projects to take safety more seriously and make it a default, we have learned that Meta itself didn't think twice about it and has activated it in their own ActivityPub implementation against us.
We know this because of news that a fascist has devised a way to evade it and force federation with Threads. They promise to then turn their technique upon us and coerce unblockable federation with fascist and cryptospam instances: https://soapbox.pub/blog/threads-server-blocking/
While Authorized Fetch remains important to activate, it is clear that even it - which remember, provides better defense than that currently implemented on most of our home servers - is inadequate to the threats facing us as the Zuckerberg incursion progresses. If we're serious about protecting our communities and expressions from absorption into surveillance capitalism and the accelerating miseries of fascism, we need to talk about a stronger grade of defensive weaponry.
To this end, @are0h has fired a first volley: https://h-i.social/@are0h/111653850819592308 Every fedi community which serves as a refuge for those targeted and under siege should be thinking like this. True safety only awaits us in a transitive approach to defederation, and further on, in an intentional federation based on the allow-list.
Some worry that consent-based federation would lead to isolation, but this doesn't need to be true. For the end user, nothing at all would change; it would be just as easy or hard to join an instance as it is now, minus the funneling into a centralized, poorly-moderated vanilla flagship.
And what about new instance spinups? Their prospects could actually improve from the current status quo, if an allow-list fediverse was structured into instance alliances as described in the fedifam concept. New intra-fam spinups would automatically federate: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110793531238090472
Fedifams could then form trust-treaties with other fedifams, smoothing federation out from the fam into the broader fediverse in whatever manner of comfort or caution is preferred (such as limited or probationary federation): https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110985194948458666
We accept and support new spinups by fellow travelers were are already in community with. The servers which entirely come in from the cold are mostly those belonging to the creatures of the dark-fedi, which cause many of the moderation problems for those of us on proportionately-sized instances (and most of the other problems are caused by the disproportionately-sized ones, who will be joining the Zuckerverse).
By assuming agency for who we choose to federate with, rather than existing in a state of constant reaction against those who would try and force us to federate with them, we can defend our federation both from the fascists, racists, transphobes and pedos of the defediverse, and from the horrifying and corruptive threat of the Zuckerberg entity, and its collaborator instances.
An intentional federation would be a more decentralized one, as we could fully affirm a collective choice to keep instances small. That's not just an abstract idea; a more decentralized fedi would be a more democratic one: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110707707012210965
And it would also be a more community-centered one. Currently, the Mastodon network in particular is being driven by an approach which denies the prospect for a riotous polyculture of small and distinct communities in favor of a growth-oriented monoculture in which "servers are not... communities" ( https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111628882009671820 ) and "it doesn't matter which one you use" ( https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter ), an outlook which Zuckerberg must find favorable.
A note also on the gaslighting we face from Meta's colluders; the latest being the embarrassing spectacle of ActivityPub co-author Evan wagging around a "small fedi". @thenexusofprivacy has a good rebuttal to this cringe exhibitionism here: https://privacy.thenexus.today/the-annotated-case-for-a-big-fedi/
Evan has seen fit to misappropriate the "small fedi" idea, then build a blog post around warping it into a smear, with a long list of patronizing and fictional mischaracterizations. But what is truly small is the thinking that the fedi's future is surveillance, algorithmic ingestion, centralized servers too big to moderate, and huge psychotic corporations like Meta. In fact, that is social media's catastrophic past, the one we're all here to reject.
A better vision for a near-future fedi requires an exercise of both the technical and social imagination, and another thing that Meta's collaborators appear to find elusive: a moral center.
Instead of a regression into another Zuckerberg-controlled nightmare of hate speech, harassment, "brand engagement" and dehumanizing surveillance, we can push forward into an intentional federation based on consent and community, which centers the non-negotiable requirement of safety for everyone who otherwise has the most to lose from the betrayal of this online space of refuge and resistance.
Did you know that, if you or your Mastodon instance is blocking Meta, your posts and account can still be data-mined by them? That is, unless your instance has Authorized Fetch activated. More info here: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/111602259275182233
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.
There are some hot and appropriate takes going around about the "leadership" at the top of major fediverse projects, and its imminent failures. One of those leaders literally describes himself as a "dictator". Well, now his technology has a new dictator, one who has no credible pretense to benevolence.
It seems there are two kinds of FOSS-folk among us. One contextualizes their technical work with a political understanding; be it anarchism, socialism, or some variant of an oppositional outlook, which posits FOSS in an anticapitalist, antiracist or liberatory context. They know there's something out there to stand against, and aspirationally, replace. I salute them and hope we can all build together.
The other, while more-or-less into FOSS, seems to be motivated by nothing deeper than a "tech is neato" ethos. One could argue that it's this second type that has brought us to the crisis.
If tech has any chance to facilitate liberatory - or even alternative - agency (and it's arguable if that chance exists), it has to be about something more than itself. As we watch ActivityPub, Mastodon and Pixelfed get recuperated into the Zuckerverse, here's hoping we can figure out a way to sustain and support those developers of next-gen decentralized and peer-to-peer social networking who understand this
Very depressing to see prominent admins reneging on their FediPact pledges. For months users have been migrating - with all the associated difficulties - to instances they thought would be safe from Meta. Do we forget all our promises and convictions just to read the vapid marketing posts of Instagram's asshole CEO?
FediPact advocates are again seeing the argument "they're scraping" dredged up and thrown into their faces.
No, they're not. Meta doesn't run a general web-wide crawler (like, say, a search engine would). Meta surveils the general web with the Facebook Pixel and other trackers installed directly on websites. No need to run a global crawler when the most of the world's existing websites willingly host your surveillance tech for you.
There's also no need to guess about the unknowable mysteries of cryptoid scrapers. That activity would appear in logs, and if persistent, incur performance penalties, especially on small-to-moderate sized instances.
Why would Meta bother manually scraping 14000 separate fedi instances while they're building an ActivityPub service that will "scrape" all of them at once through federation? Answer, they wouldn't.
Offered as raw material for your own tangles with Meta collaborators. However, keep in mind what will happen on this network if you start raising points of a technical nature. Ultimately, the scraping argument is a defeatist one, like saying "privacy is dead, so why bother protecting yourself?" Whether "they're scraping" or not, we won't throw up our hands and allow this space of refuge and community to be absorbed into surveillance capitalism without a fight. Scrape this Zuckerbros
The rash of mysterious error messages recently encountered on Meta-owned services when attempting to post fediverse links would seem to be erratic. Some links work and others produce the error. So far, We've seen reports of errors with links to the instances mas.to, tech.lgbt, and musicians.today.
There would seem to be no pattern. mas.to has 19k active users, musicians.today has 164. But there is one commonality: All three are part of the FediPact.
Moreover, the https://fedipact.online site provides a one-stop shop for a FediPact-based blocklist, so implementing such a thing would be a snap.
Folks with accounts on networks owned by the Zuckerberg entity can help to confirm the hypothesis by attempting to post any link to any FediPact instance. Let us know! cc: @FediPact
Right now Threads is testing federation for selected few accounts, and (at) Gagron (at) mastodon.social is even being poisoned at it
If I can access (at) #TalkingAngela on threads.net and NOT on mastodon.social (RN meaning it doesn't exist yet), then it will be "GAME OVER" for the #ttaf fans seeking privace and in whole.
PLEASE. Tell your instance owners to #DEFEDERATEMETA immediately.
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!"
For anyone mobilizing to defend their own account, the fedi community they administer, or the entire fediverse against the Zuckerberg incursion now underway, the Free Fediverse website has a plethora of links to helpful resources.
🐸 FediPact: Info on the pact and how to find an instance you can trust
🐸 Developments: Information on blocking Meta, account migration, and authorized fetch
🐸 Articles: An ongoing history of the Meta scheme to take over the fedi
🐸 Essays: Thinkpieces on the threat and how to save the fediverse from corporate enclosure
🐸 Nightmares: Tons of articles on Meta's many crimes against humanity