great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)
Those who advocate for the surrender of the fediverse to the Zuckerberg surveillance entity have been busy mischaracterizing adherents of the FediPact alliance in various ways. More needs to be said about this, but for the moment, let's unpack one of their more persistent slurs, the claim that we are "gatekeeping".
The term itself is one they have inherited from Silicon Valley crypto-fascist propertarians who, themselves, have seized power by overseeing the construction of a number of rigidly gatekept "walled gardens"; and the corporation they are so eager to collaborate with and invite in to colonize the fediverse is one of the most draconian of those gatekeepers.
But why accept this metaphorical territory on which to battle? Beyond the "walled gardens" and "marketplace of ideas" of neoliberalism, anarchist thought provides an alternative lens for viewing the predicament - the ZAD.
Within the Zone To Defend - the acronym derives from the French equivalent - there is safety, autonomy, solidarity, and yes, real freedom - freedom to express and freedom from the poisoned expressions of those who seek to weaponize speech to declare others inferior, excluded, and unworthy of existence.
However, as often when ideal meets reality, a contradiction is encountered. The presence of a "zone" infers the dialectical presence of space which is not the zone. Ultimately, our autonomous zone is one we would like to see grow to be boundless, which would be the fulfillment of its natural condition.
But provisionally at least, our zone is situated in the world as it currently is; a world in which we are surrounded by enemies on all sides. We do not ourselves choose the boundaries, but we acknowledge them, as we must. Unhappily, the Zone To Defend is bounded, and at the boundaries, we make our stand.
The defense of the zone is necessary, not just to guard the terrain, but more importantly, to defend the souls who have taken refuge and find community within it. This is a conviction the Meta collaborators don't appear to be able to grasp. They hunker down in the topography of protocols and MAU analytics, unable to catch sight of the actual people nestled in its hills and valleys.
In fact, the boundaries of the ZAD are not calculated, but rather emerge spontaneously from the defensive needs of those within. Their struggles, traumas, defeats and victories form the positions, shapes and composition of the barricades. Those who point this out are sneered at; as in, for example, the recent blog post of a prominent mega-instance admin and pro-Meta activist, who rolled his eyes at the "almost religious overtones" of our argument. Speak of people rather than protocols, and one will be waved off as a woo-dazed fanatic.
The communards of the Zone To Defend don't want to live in a bounded world, but they have to. And certainly, there is no interest in swinging open the gate now, as they observe the approach of perhaps the most dangerous of enemies - a totalitarian empire which has claimed its power by enabling and profiting from exactly those elements and forces which the ZAD exists to shelter them against.
Sorry Zuckerbros, but we will be keeping our gates.
now that #Threads is launched, remember to demand answers from your admins. will they sign the #FediPact or not? will they #DefederateMeta or not? tell them that by not acting, they put their instance that they worked so hard to build, and its entire community, at risk
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
"...there’s no way to make Threads show you only the posts from accounts you’ve chosen to follow. There’s also no way to make your feed ordered chronologically — instead, it’s organized by what the Threads algorithm thinks you might find most interesting."
"At launch, Threads has no ads. But don’t expect it to stay that way. Meta, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from tracking what users do online and using it to target them with ads, says it may open the door to ads in the future."
"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
Let's talk science and learn about Maxwell's Demon. A physics and info theory by one of the greatest physicists ever. I did a podcast about it in 2019.
If you don't know about it, perhaps you should. It's critical. Because big data DOES know about it and is using it against you.
I wonder if all the admins considering proactively discriminating against all Meta #Threads users by blocking their domain also have googlemail.com, outlook.com and the likes blocked in their mail servers...
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!"
The Free Fediverse resource website is being continually updated with links to information, statements and thoughts on the upcoming incursion of the Zuckerberg surveillance entity into the fediverse. Feel free to hop over and check it out, or recommend a link to me here!
Detailed announcement in the toot at the top of this thread!
🐸 A ton of new article links on Threads
🐸 New FediPact instance announcements and essays
🐸 New Facebook Nightmare sections on transphobia, digital colonialism and racially exclusive advertising
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.
To all the #Meta defenders maintaining that the corporation formerly known as #Facebook is not genocidal, it just happens to have such catastrophic privacy and moderation failures that happen to enable genocide, a friendly reminder that the purpose of a system is what it does.
#Facebook as a site doesn't meet the standards of the Mastodon Server Covenant, due to hosting bigoted material it regularly deems acceptable.
Assuming a low standard of moderation of any #ActivityPub / #Fediverse engagement, until proven otherwise is a choice that mods can make.
An instance you don't block is an instance that costs you money. Standards apply.
People complaining that the claims of the #Fediverse being resistant to #corporateTakeover are at odds with the proposal to #faceblock Meta are kind of #missingThePoint about how the Fediverse can defend itself from corporate takeover.
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.
I strongly disagree that it doesn't. I think the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact is a poor strategy, and a failure of solidarity. For reasons laid out by Mako in the comment linked here:
FediPact gets a mention on the BBC! (article titled Threads: Meta sets out planned new features) (www.bbc.com)
Nice to see the Pact getting a little bit of press :)...
FreeFediverse.org wiki <3 (freefediverse.org)
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)
Why Defederate Meta?
(x-post from Fedia.org/m/DefederateMeta)...
Instances with 25+ members that have signed the FediPact
The list below is being updated manually, so if an instance is incorrectly listed, or its signup status has changed, please let me know....