A lot of admins of larger Mastodon (and other Fediverse) servers are showing excitement for Meta launching an App in the Fediverse. Their reasoning mostly being "growing the Protocol is good!". Most feedback, is met with different versions of "growth is good". I want to take a minute to push back on this narrative that all growth is inherently good, because it absolutely is not. This type of thinking stems from the Silicon Valley VC crowd, where they pursue growth at all costs.
Interesting new details have emerged concerning planned machinations for Meta's takeover of the fediverse. The information was revealed at a "data dialogue" in San Francisco on the subject of "Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse".
It seems that the plan is to gradually roll federation out in stages over the next year. The most telling reveal is in the screenshotted toot by Meta advocate Evan:
"Also, as far as I could tell, the most important use case for them is that a creator could move from Threads to their own server, even if they get de-platformed. I think the major motivator here is Mark Zuckerberg having to go testify in front of Congress twice a year or whatever, and getting grilled by conservative Congresspeople about de-platforming. Being able to say, you can get kicked off Threads but keep your followers, is a big win in this situation."
If correct, the impression here is that Meta is interested in ActivityPub's account portability, so they can offload problematic fascists to the fediverse without too much disgruntlement. They see the fedi as a dumping ground into which they can externalize toxic users without having to either moderate them on their own server, or provoke them by wiping out their social graph.
In Zuckerberg's scheme, our community is to become a landfill for fascism.
The notes and accounts from the FediForum in late September suggest that some of "the people who move the fediverse forward", as the conference promotes itself as platforming, are also acutely interested in moving forward the agenda of Meta.
The forum's notes tell the tale. Though a number of topics, including many of genuine benefit, were touched upon, digging through the sessions turns up a path of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Palo Alto.
Actually effective strategies against #Meta to prevent an #EmbraceExtendExtinguish are difficult, but they start from asking "what will actually help here."
I maintain that preemptive #DefederateMeta is ineffective for this and that defederating from those who won't defederate from meta does more harm than good.
But what will help is thinking about the roadmap and getting there first. What will help is building a robust and thriving community around #ActivityPub and other fediverse protocols.
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.
Discussing the threat posed by Meta #P92/#Barcelona joining the #Fediverse with some tech enthusiasts feels more and more like debating #ClimateChange with a denier.
«Look at all the data indicating that this will be a disaster. It has even happened twice already!»
Responses: «It won't happen this time» «It won't be that bad» «It's actually good if that happens» and «we can't do anything about it anyway»
Observing fedi-folk from various marginalized communities snipe at each other over the past week has been devastating and tragic. No conspiracy theory here, but if there were some nefarious plot to weaken the fediverse, provoking a conflict like this one would be an effective way to go about it.
The purpose of this post isn't to further stir the shit. But it's worth taking a look at origins, alternatives and possible consequences in light of the ongoing threat of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation looming over the fedi.
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.
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
"We're committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren't able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it's coming.
If you're wondering why this matters, here's a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that."
promises are one thing. reality, when FB is involved is something different
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
For those interested in the prefiguration of dual power, there is a perfect opportunity right under our noses - the fediverse. Moreover, such praxis may not be so much of a choice, as a necessity. The forces of authoritarian and capitalist recuperation are coming for this network.
So far, it remains largely out of the control radius of corporations, government security services and the fascists poisoning every other online environment. But there are well-resourced elements both without and within working to change that.
Consider the contrast with major capitalist services. This recent story explains how the "U.S." government has attempted to extort a price from TikTok in exchange for allowing it continued operation in the country - its conversion into a domestic mass surveillance tool under the control of state security and military agencies.
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/
Fediverse friends @alexis and @jo have documented the presence of vile fascist kill-list compiler accounts Moms for Liberty, Libs of Tiktok, Gays Against Groomers and PragerU on Threads. In the attached screenshot, Jo is dogpiled for harassment.
There will be many, many more like them. These accounts won't be banned from Threads, because they produce engagement. And engagement - of any kind, the more negative the better - is all the psychopaths who run Meta care about.
Now we see exactly what we're being pulled into. Facebook hasn't launched a big Mastodon. Instead, the fediverse instances that federate with it will become little Facebooks
Yes, there was a fuckup; in fact, a fuckup compounded by another fuckup. But the wellspring of the disaster actually wasn't Kolektiva, it was mastodon-dot-social, that mega-server with hundreds of thousands of silo'ed users, open registration and next-to-no-moderation; that irresistible honeypot for spammers and scammers, that 500-pound gorilla with a bullseye painted on its ass.
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!"
There seems to be somewhat of a misunderstanding around here.
Meta doesn't give a fuck about ActivityPub, the Fediverse, open protocols, you, your instance, the norms, the culture, any of it. Sorry to say it, but to believe anything else is wishful thinking. It's your ego talking. You're flattering yourself.
To be fair, when you care deeply about something, it's hard not to convince yourself that everybody will understand what you do. But they don't. You have to be able to step back to see it.
Meta has nearly 1000 users for every one of us. We're not a threat to them, and they haven't suddenly changed from a company that enabled literal fucking genocide in Myanmar, to one that's suddenly wanting an open, inclusive, decentralized internet. No, they're not going to let any significant amount of their userbase "migrate to Mastodon", there is precisely zero chance they allow anything like that.
Honestly. It's like the Meta rebrand gave some people a case of extreme and highly selective amnesia. Or maybe Twitter shifted the overton window for how fascist a major social media platform can get. This company is FUCKING AWFUL, remember?
Anyway, the Fediverse. They don't care about it. Not a single aspect of it. Except one: they DO need a ready-made posting factory so that they can launch a new service that doesn't start out with a completely blank screen.
In other words: Meta wants to bootstrap their new service into existence by having you get on all fours and get used as a stepstool. So, my friends, keep posting, and boost those toots please: Mark Zuckerberg needs to increase his ownership share of the world's communications networks so he can afford to get another coil of razor wire on the perimeter wall at his New Zealand bug-out compound.
The fact that they're being so shameless about it almost makes me second guess the strategy of mass defederation. Part of me thinks we'd be better off creating a few thousand bots spewing AI-level nonsense and turn Meta's shiny new Twitter-coffin-nailer into a firehose of monotonous horseshit and hope it never gets off the ground.
But I think the more powerful message is for us to calmly but firmly say "no thanks" and refuse to allow Meta to take advantage of our community.
Ask your admin to sign the ANTI-META ADMIN PACT to #DefederateMeta ... If we stand together we might actually win this.
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
Anyone surprised that it's the bunch of men we'd all suspect who are selling out the #Fediverse ? It really is time to de-platform these bourgey "fediverse evangelist" jerks. #Meta#DefederateMeta#Mastodon#p92