Once again concerning the Facebook/Meta takeover of the Fediverse, allow me to remind you of the cultural cycle of cool, from geeks and nerds to sociopaths, as brilliantly summarized by David Chapman in his essay on “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution” https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
This is highly recommended reading, and in case you're missing the parallel, the Fediverse is currently in its MOPs phase, driven by the influx of uncaring Twitter refugees.
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.
Here's an excerpt from "Why the Anti-Meta #FediPact is good strategy for people who want the #fediverse to be an alternative to surveillance capitalism"
You've made some very good points about the limits of a defederate-only strategy, and other tactics that are also useful, but dismissing defederation from #Meta as ineffective (or performative, as you did in another post) isn't helpful.
As we debate blocking #Meta (fyi, AoIR.social is preemptively blocking), keep in mind that, in a fit of pique over being regulated by Canada, Meta is cutting off news access to Canadians:
We can have a discussion about the effectiveness of the regulation Meta is now subject to, but in the meantime, think about what this means. These companies don't negotiate -- they try to dominate.
So far I am totally impressed with #Mastodon ‘s ability to relay real time news on #Russia events. I checked the bird site as a comparison, and it’s miles behind because they don’t display posts chronologically and boost subscriber posts, which tend to be old. Yay #Mastodon !
The fact that #Meta clearly believes they need buy-in (and that they're trying to get it by pitting admins against their users) makes me even more positive that the best course of action is a mass block
There are real privacy concerns, and Meta does indeed benefit greatly from Federation (as I have been saying)
The email example people keep shouting about is bad, but also it proves the point that Meta should be Defederated because of what Google, Microsoft and other big players have done
The folks advocating that we Federate with #Meta keep trying to tell us that Federating with Meta will make no difference.
The argument is that Meta can already scrape the entire Fediverse, and probably are. Meta will gain nothing by Federating that they couldn't otherwise get.
This argument is false, and folks need to stop perpetuating it. There is immense value for Meta in federation and we shouldn't give it to them. We should #DefederateMeta
The most enraging of the Zuckerbros is actually Gargron, exactly because he's so quiet. Say what you will about the others, they're at least in the discourse. About the only thing Gargron tooted on the day of the NDA betrayal was a snap from a concert he attended. The federation is burning because of him, but he's having a ball.
It's a complete failure of leadership - and he has claimed leadership, even calling himself a "benevolent dictator". But there's actually no such thing, and these techbros who talk up decentralization, while sneaking around with a corporation which has spent 15 years trying to singularly enclose the internet, have ceded their claim to lead.
However, this is actually a golden opportunity for the fediverse to route around the damage of these Mastodon megaservers. What galls most is the spectacle of 3 mediocre white guys unilaterally deciding the destiny of hundreds of thousands, extolling the virtues of open standards and interoperability while dragging everyone else in the community around by the hair.
We don't need "new leaders", what we need is to horizontally distribute leadership so that everyone has some of it, and all network participants possess agency and an active stake in their own community.
Some have waved away the Anti-Meta Pact, noting that most of the participating instances are very small. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's exactly what the fediverse should become - a network of countless small communities, distinct yet together. By default, Pixelfed limits instance user count to 1000. It's a good idea, and whatever we replace Mastodon with should implement something similar.
The #FreeFediverse will look back some day and see the megaservers, and the Zuckerbros that dominated them, as a aberration on the path to actual decentralization and democratization.
Perhaps it's just my own completely subjective interpretation, but I'm pretty sure "losers, misfits, privacy zealots and weirdos" are kinda 99% the type of people you would like to follow, not a bunch of devrels and corpo shills pretending to be prophets of the "new world".
It's amazing that some are claiming a Zuckerberg takeover is an opportunity to advocate for migration. The Zuckerbros imagine themselves frolicking freely as pied pipers of the fediverse, on a network controlled by the same company that banned the #joinpixelfed hashtag from Instagram.
The censorship algorithms will put a quick stop to any of that talk. And there may be no indication that it's happening from the perspective of Mastodon instances, leaving them to toot into the void unknowingly. How can they be so naive?
"#Facebook/#Instagram's algorithm doesn't matter if you aren't on their instance"
?
Will you see boosts and replies to things promoted by their algo?
Will you see boosts of boosts, and replies to replies, to things promoted by their algo?
...
You could be on an instance defederated from #Meta and still have your timeline influenced by them, via instances that you federate with who are federated with Meta.
It would be less, sure - but even second-hand smoke is toxic.
That's why we all need to say no to federation with them.
It feels karma farming to mention that you've bought a notmeta domain and you're gonna spin up an instance that doesn't defederate but you're also gonna federate with Meta on your other instances?
The whole "I don't like Meta" here's an instance I'm setting up, but I'm gonna federate with them on my other servers.
Dude really doing that liberal "I'm all for choice" thing like they're relative. A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. Ugh.
Yet another question people are asking me: "How can I, a common person, help hasten the demise of #Meta through #ActivityPub?"
Again, I want to re-emphasize this. #Fediblock is not an all-purpose tool. It's useful as a hammer. But in this scenario, we don't just need a hammer. We need drills, pliers, saws, and blowtorches.
That said, we must protect communities that choose to defederate from Meta. Which means that if those servers don't want to receive messages from any Meta-owned services, we must not only be respectful of that, we should make damn sure that those servers are quarantined from Meta. So much of the success of fighting Meta will require safe spaces from Meta.
The next thing we need is lots and lots of nodes. Currently, we only have ~25,000 nodes on the Fediverse but we need more. Preferably, these nodes should be small, agile, and well-moderated. If you have the finances and/or skill to run a node, it's important that you do so. To compete with Meta, we need to build scale -- and the easiest way to build scale is by adding more nodes to the Fediverse.
What will also be key is lobby servers. These will be servers specifically set up for migrants from Meta-owned services to help onboard them towards the rest of the Fediverse. To run such a lobby server, they need to be welcoming, moderated well, and free of the elitists and gatekeepers that poison so much of the Fediverse currently.
How to get people from Meta to try out the rest of the Fediverse? We need people willing to be ambassadors on #P92 who are ready and willing to evangelize the rest of the Fediverse. Folks like @tchambers are very good at this on Twitter, and I have no doubt that we can do the same with P92. Except this time we'll have the benefit of federation already happening 😉
Now if there's one thing I've learned about the growth of the Fediverse it's that bad corporate decisions pay dividends. We've already experienced waves of migration from Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit. And I have no doubt that it's only a matter of time before Meta makes another corporate mistake -- as they tend to do.
In which case, we need to strike fast. When another Cambridge Analytica happens, we need to remind everyone on Meta about the lobby servers that are on standby, and ready to take them on. Unlike previous migrations, let's not be unprepared for this. Let's be especially prepared since Meta plans to join the Fediverse.
Finally, we need more devs. Specifically, we need devs willing to build innovative server and client software that takes aim at Meta. And to do that, we need to support the devs that currently exist -- show evergreen devs pondering whether they should invest here that we, as a community, are appreciative of our current devs.
If you like #Mastodon, #Calckey, #Kbin, #Friendica, etc., it's important that you open up your hearts as well as your wallets and fund the next stage of Fediverse development.
This will take a lot of work. But if you want to fight Meta, challenge their dominance of social media, this is what must be done.
Personally, I'm hyped about the future of the Fediverse -- regardless of whether Meta eventually lives to tell the tale.
"So much of the success of fighting Meta will require safe spaces from Meta."
If, as you correctly point out, federating with Meta is dangerous to users, then any server federating with Meta is in breach of the very first requirement of the Mastodon Server Covenant.