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.
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!
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
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.
@ophiocephalic starting by adding fedi read-only is also a naked cooptation, making us more fuel for the ad machine without building any community or giving much back.
AI Power Consumption Surge Strains US Electricity Grid, Coal-Powered Plants Make a Comeback
"Unable to keep pace, some utilities are scrambling to revise projections and reconsider previous plans of closing fossil fuel plants… Some older coal power plans will stay online, until the grid adds more power production capacity. The result could be increased emissions in the near term and risks of rolling blackouts if infrastructure continues lagging behind demand."
So now, on a burning planet, we're going to center all of our energy resources and human ingenuity on tech for incels to synthesize nonconsensual pop-star porn
Just wanted to come back and say, "You guys were right".
I guess I've been so down on bitcoin miners that I couldn't imagine AI would come remotely close to their electrical use. But..... I guess I wasn't thinking it through.
So, in my most Mastodon and not Twitter mentality:
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
@ophiocephalic@alexis@jo This is why I voted not to #federate with #Threads. It is pretty clear for servers if they comply by their rules. Meta will not follow those rules. We can start with federating, but it is a useless activity as Meta will violate the terms of most servers and not give a damn. They will have to be de-federated if our servers enforced the rules they put up.
@ophiocephalic@alexis@jo and now I'll wait for that guy who was insisting that Meta would ban and not advertise next to troll accounts to explain why this is different.
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.
@reiver
Thanks for this link! It's intriguing; but a couple of things come to mind. These guys always talk in gushing New Age platitudes about the wondrous gifts they selflessly bestow upon humanity. Also, there's that issue of the regulatory threats looming overhead. They're going to work hard to sound like they're complying. I will continue to remain skeptical that vague language like this actually indicates account portability, but I agree that the rhetoric, at least, is a new wrinkle. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
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?
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
@pleaseclap
Thanks for the link! Agree it's pointing in the wrong direction. What you point out in your post is right and why we need to think beyond a regular fediblock and absolutely beyond individual users blocking the domain. Meta is not just another single-user Masto instance shitposting hitler memes
@nilsskirnir
As a user, no. But instance admins will know if they're diligent and pay attention to logs. And Kolektiva admins are certainly tuned into opsec issues, especially after events of the past several months
Crazy how Oracle Corporation is providing database and "AI" tech to the Trump-driven "Agenda 47" project that would impose counter-democratic authoritarian rule on the US.
Ellison is a fascist billionaire who doesn't get all that much attention. He's not a performing twitter-monkey like Musk or Andreessen; but it's the quiet ones who are the most dangerous. He plotted with Trump in the effort to subvert the 2020 election, and now he's providing the technical backbone for a fascist takeover
It seems that when Bluesky "decentralizes" there will be no real way for instance operators to block or moderate other instances, and that the entire (anti-)moderation scheme depends on the prospect of end-users "consuming" filters which silo various types of content into or out of their own personal view.
Recall that Facebook-linked elements were able to fabricate a moral panic and smear the fediverse in the international press by publicizing the longstanding fact that CSAM instances exist while barely mentioning that everyone else blocks them. What do you think will happen with a protocol in which instances can't be blocked at all?
And how much do you think spittle-flecked rightwing politicians and self-appointed guardians of morality will be willing or able to grasp all this stuff about "labelers" and "app views"? The entire gambit rests on the assumption that Silicon Valley shitheads can continue to get away with anything and everything
@ophiocephalic
Being blocked by BS because you run an instance that blocks other instances. 🤔
I simply love how that would fire back on their idea that domain blocks are not neccesary. 🤗
LGBTQ organizer @Swabulah4321 is still working to fundraise mutual aid for her community of queer refugees in Kenya Kakuma refugee camp.
In addition to basic needs like food, clothes, shoes, blankets and hygiene supplies, their community is still trying to raise funds for a fence to protect themselves from thieves and homophobic repression mobs.
Data access is also limited, but @Swabulah4321 posts here when she can. Follow her and, if you can spare a few coins, contribute to her fundraiser. Thank you!
Zuckerberg is not just absorbing certain of the fediverse's communities, but also certain of its technologies. We'll need replacements, but that's an opportunity to break the current state of developmental stagnation in the predominant microblogging service and ActivityPub. And more important still than protocols and apps are those who create them. Essentially, the Facebook Fediverse gets the techbros, but the Free Fediverse gets the catgirls - which means we win!
Prominent voices advocating for collaboration with the Zuckerberg surveillance entity sure do talk up decentralization a lot, when they're not advocating the subjugation of the fediverse to a single vertical silo of 100 million users. The irony, of course, is that they tend to be admins of instances with tens or even hundreds of thousands. And two of the most prominent control multiple mega-servers, which means they're not just overseeing centralized instances, they're hoarding them.
In contrast, by default Pixelfed servers are limited to a maximum of 1000 users. Though a deep dive into the parameters can override this, its status as a default is an affirmation of the decentralizing ethos. "Thou shalt keep thy instance small."
The microblogging space of the fediverse hasn't been allowed to develop an equivalent consciousness, as the agenda has been set by mega-server admins who drove the conversation around topics like "smooth onboarding". But these aren't evil people; the problem is that they have no real vision.
A comment circulated recently - receipt unfortunately not saved - suggesting that the development of fediverse tools to useful to organizing community would be an effective alternative to the "how to funnel in granny" mentality, because then there would be incentives for entire communities to migrate in together; surely a more holistic view of "onboarding" than fretting over how to pick up confused and wandering individuals one at a time. That is the kind of exercise of technical and social imagination we need.
To become viable, the Free Fediverse will need to define itself by not just what it stands against - corporate enclosure by the Meta monstrosity - but by what it stands for. Real and actual decentralization - not just shallow lip service towards it - can be one of those foundational values.
This value can then be encoded into the technology, as it was with Pixelfed; because, let there be no doubt, Zuckerberg is not just absorbing certain of the fediverse's communities, but also certain of its technologies. We'll need replacements, but that's an opportunity to break the current state of developmental stagnation in the predominant microblogging service and ActivityPub. And more important still than protocols and apps are those who create them. Essentially, the Facebook Fediverse gets the techbros, but the Free Fediverse gets the catgirls - which means we win!
Real decentralization - lots and lots and lots of quite small communities, distinct yet federated - has already proven itself to be a better facilitator of good moderation, and will enable another important value to be addressed shortly. But on the moderation issue, a timely real-world example of why decentralization matters is instructive.
There has recently been a calamity visited upon our instance, Kolektiva. Among all of the discussion following its disclosure, there was not a full analysis of its chain of causality. Let's take a flyover of the recent timeline.
April - A massive spambot wave first hits mastodon-dot-social, then spreads quickly through the entire fediverse. Kolektiva, and many other servers, temporarily limit dot-social until the invasion is under control.
Early May - Another spambot attack hits masto-dot-social, and of course, everyone else. This time, an error is made, and a Kolektiva admin defederates rather than limits dot-social. All Kolektiva users irrecoverably lose their follows and followers from dot-social. There is disquiet.
Mid-May - In an attempt to restore the lost follow-follower data, a Kolektiva admin recovers a snapshot backup of the database from before the defederation, an operation which occurs with what turns out to be "spectacularly bad timing".
Yes, there was a fuckup; in fact, a fuckup compounded by another fuckup. But - beyond noting that both mistakes were attempts to do right by the users of the instance - the wellspring of the disaster actually wasn't Kolektiva, but 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.
The mother of all instances has repeatedly proven itself to be a problem for the rest of the fediverse, as in the examples above, when the admins of literally every other server federated with it were put in the position of having to locally address a crisis not of their origination, each an opportunity to make mistakes they would not otherwise have needed to risk.
Smaller instances are easier to moderate, larger instances more difficult. And if masto-dot-social is any indication, a large enough instance becomes a lost cause - take a look at dot-social's local feed and see if you agree. Decentralization distributes moderation agency more effectively, both to admins and even to users. And by scattering targets, it creates network resiliency against threats like spambots and crypto scams. Decentralization isn't just a foss-nerd buzzword, it yields tangible benefits for those seeking safer community online.
@MediaActivist
Thank you and reciprocation to your vision as well! There are so many possibilities for autonomous media and culture, sustained and distributed in a parallel context beyond capitalism.
E.g., envision a radical media fedifam which supports the internal spin-up of new project instances. A current problem of the fediverse is that it's easy to set up an individual account, but there are technical barriers for collective projects that want to commit to a more serious presence with their own instances. This could include not just the microblogging, but also video (PeerTube), podcast (Castopod & Owncast streaming), AP-federated blogging etc. A collectivized approach to infrastructure and tech support could make that a lot easier, and that's infrastructure that could be under autonomous control, so resilient from deplatforming
"The political project of normalizing transmitting COVID and casting basic, scientific mitigations as bad, weird, mean, stupid, and impossible is a fantastic coup for the right. It is the utter rejection of state responsibility for public welfare, paired with the complete shredding of an early-pandemic solidarity that bound those at risk (everyone) together. That solidarity was replaced with a poisonous “us vs them” worldview whereby those who have been and are harmed are weak, lying, lame, unlucky, unusual, uncool, rare, stupid, bad, mean, aggressive, psychologically disturbed and/or crazy. This schism seeps into the bloodstream of leftist organizing and splinters our coalition, shattering our incipient power as, unsurprisingly, the popularity of the fascists surges globally. I would argue it is the most thorough victory of the far-right in living memory, and it has embedded its eugenicist logic into the very foundation of public beliefs about health, disability, and who deserves safety."
"The Biden era has normalized illness and demonized mitigations for the sake of “back to normal”. We now live in a country where educated liberals genuinely think it’s okay-and in fact good- that their kids are constantly ill (to be expected given the immune system-damaging nature of COVID). Where leftists argue that killing old people is less harmful than wearing masks. Where concern for community health is painted as cowardly and using the modern scientific tools we are lucky enough to have is portrayed as rude and stupid. And terribly, this liberal political project under Joe Biden has come down like a hammer on community solidarity, leaving “the vulnerable” squabbling with their mocking former comrades. It’s hard to overstate just how much damage the normalization of COVID has done to the very concepts of public health and community."
This article offers a specifically leftist perspective. An anarchist addendum might go: If the state has dispensed with any pretense of an obligation to the maintenance of public health, it has also dispensed with that justification for it existing at all