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.
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
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.
@atomicpoet
"So Barcelona is coming. We need to brace for impact. And we need to be strategic in our response."
In that case, what is also coming is a schism. Then there will be a #FreeFediverse which carries on the banner of independence and decentralization, and a #FacebookFediverse which acquiesces to being recentralized and data-mined.
None of these other examples you cite comes remotely close to the gravity of a Zuckerberg takeover. The historical example to point to is not Medium or Vivaldi, it's Gab