EnglishMobster

HeartyBeast, 10 months ago

The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.

The beauty of the fediverse is precisely that it is not monolithic. Each instance can be different, have different policies and decide who it wants to federate with. Some instances will federate with anyone, some with most, some with a few, some with none.

The claim that that the fediverse needs to be a monolithic whole, where all instances walk in lock-step with each other is entirely at odds with the fediverse philosophy.

Perry, 10 months ago

Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.

However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.

I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.

As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:

1. Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.

2. Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.

Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.

asjmcguire, 10 months ago

I find the other demands going around even scarier to be honest.
"I don't want to federate with meta, but I also don't want to federate with anyone else who does federate with meta"

It's so terrifying that there are whole instances that are now attempting to dictate who the rest of the fediverse is allowed to federate with. And frankly I think it's a downward spiral if that is allowed. Because if they do it once, they will do it again and again.

kglitch, 10 months ago

There are over 70 kbin instances. If kbin.social is not to your liking, you can find another. https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

https://kglitch.social has defederated from Meta (well, blocked the domains that meta is expected to use). Registrations are open.

stevecrox, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Why would KBin be unsafe?

Federation works by instances (e.g. kbin.social) registering an interest (subscribe/follow) in a specific magazine or person on other instances.

That means content is only brought into an instance that members of that instance are interested in (its the same with lemmy instances, we don't see everything).

Similarly on kbin users can block individuals, magazines or whole domains. So even if kbin.social does federate with meta you don't have to see/interact with it.

For instance I respect kbin users might want content from lemmy.ml, as the people who run it are tankies I have no interest in anything from that instance and block the domain.

I have no issues with part of the fediverse walling itself off from meta but remaining in contact with other instances. Similar to how beehaw defederated from lemmy.world but kbin could see beehaw and lemmy.world.

I would treat meta like any other instance, if its a source of headache then deferate.

The Embrace, Extend Extinguish argument makes no sense.

Take C#, many years ago Microsoft wanted to build its own Java JDK. As part of that they added Microsoft specific extensions. Sun said that wasn't acceptable. Microsoft didn't just stop, the renamed it C# and launched the product.

Everyone agreeing to defederate from meta won't mean they stop. It won't prevent EEE.

The best way to prevent EEE is given in our example. Java had a huge userbase who simply weren't interested in migrating.

So you need to encourage organisations to deploy KBin/Lemmy instances which integrate with the fediverse. That gives them reach and when Meta tries EEE they cut off content their users want. So it forces them to be a good citizen.

techviator, 10 months ago

A lot of the FUD regarding #Threads joining the #Fediverse has been put to sleep by #Mastodon on this blog post:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

"The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers."

Also @daringfireball made this blog post that I agree with:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open

"the idea that administrators of Mastodon/Fediverse instances should pledge to preemptively block Facebook’s imminent Twitter-like ActivityPub service (purportedly named Threads) strikes me as petty and deliberately insular. I don’t like Facebook, the company, and I’ve never seen the appeal of Facebook, the product (a.k.a. “the blue app”). But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?"

techviator, 10 months ago

I understand, and I do remember the XMPP debacle, but I also remember that back then people trusted Google and their do-no-harm motto, and they really wanted them to lead in the real-time voice/video chat arena, and in order to make it Google made some protocol desitions that broke away from XMPP.

This time around we don’t trust Big Tech and will not try to adjust to their ways, if they want to they can embrace ActivityPub or not. The rest of the Fediverse will not try to apply their tactics or monetization to the protocol. Either they adhere to the stardard, or their users will have no compatibilty with the rest of the Fediverse.

I am not suggesting we all embrace them and try to make them feel welcome, but let's not close our instances alltogether to them, let each person decide for themself if they want to follow people from their instance or not.

BraveSirZaphod, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Not that it was ever going to be any different, but it's very funny how a userbase that so clearly sees itself as so much smarter and more mature than the average rando is obviously using the downvote as a "I disagree" button on your comment here.

I can see thinking that this is a naïve perspective, and I'd probably agree with that really, but you clearly have a position, have thought about it, and tried to explain it. This isn't what downvotes are supposed to be for.

It's almost as if people here are just as emotionally driven as the normies they detest so much.