Gruber says: "...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. ... to me this feels like convicting Facebook of a pre-crime."
To me, this take feels obtuse to the point of intention - or at least self-parody. Smells a bit like the whole "paradox of tolerance" folks like to shop around in debates.
Surely you can't possibly be unaware that Meta (née Facebook) already has a rich history of acting badly, that many folks switched to alternatives like Mastodon as a response to that, and many now express wariness & outright revulsion to that same bad actor wandering into a new party?
"The whole point of ActivityPub as an open protocol is to turn Twitter/Instagram-like social networking into something more akin to email: truly open."
The point of an open protocol is to help folks build what they want to build. Not an obligation to welcome everyone into their house.
If I have a full beer keg and you have a tap that fits it, that doesn't necessarily mean you're invited to my barbecue.
@lmorchard
IMO the Fediverse is not an open federation, and it can never be one.
It's interconnected, sure, but each interconnection is subject to admins' politics, similar to BGP peerings or interconnects between telcos.
And the reason this happens is twofold:
instances aren't content-neutral, their admins do moderation
the protocol trusts remote instances in certain aspects, it doesn't guarantee the security properties people expect
@lmorchard Be wary of centrists labeling those who would defederate as intolerant. They're either ignorant or shills.
This is how they work, by shaming those of us who guard ourselves against Facebook, so that later anyone who expresses doubt or caution is called out as an extremist.
The only choice left is to be "tolerant" with those who want to rob us and control us. That's how they win.
Replace facebook with free speech absolutists, nazis, gender criticals or men's rights activists. It's exactly the same thing.
The man's kind of a fuckhead, even though some of his writing is decent.
He's always been way too loving of Apple and hyper-critical of everyone else. If it was found that Apple has been selling personal info on the level of Facebook, he'd surely rationalize it away.
@GeoffWozniak@thegibson@lmorchard I blocked the guy everywhere after his reply to the original Chrome manager being proud of not crunching for the initial release was roughly "that's why Chrome uses more battery than Safari".
@lmorchard I think that individuals can block instances, correct? So that those instances can't slurp down those individuals' content and so that meta's instance is not visible on those users' timelines? That's what I want to do.
Let everyone else make their own decisions - I don't want to decide for them. I =do= want to decide for me.
@thelaughingmuse Sure, but also some folks join instances that offer certain moderation promises. So. the folks hosting those instances do make decisions for everyone on the instance (ideally) in accordance with those promises. That way, it doesn't have to be a constant repeated individual decision.
In fact, you should choose include that in what leads you to hang out on some particular instance.
@rysiek@thegibson@lmorchard while they're busy being apologists, I'm hitting the defederate button. I'm not going to be convinced otherwise and I'm not debating. I'm doing what I'm doing, which is defederating.
Freedom of speech, freedom of association.
(again, I'm a tiny nobody, but a principal is a principal.)
@rysiek@thegibson@lmorchard Wouldn't the 'paradox of tolerance' position be to block facebook as the point of the parable is that you can't welcome intolerance into your tolerance circle? It's not a big stretch to expect facebook to bring its worst along for the ride?
I didn't realize the Popper stuff had reached the level of being considered cliched pablum yet, but the discourse moves swiftly.
@zachnfine@thegibson@lmorchard that was my meaning. As in, Gruber fails to recognize the "paradox of tolerance" narrative he's creating — "oh the paradox of openness! how can you be 'open' and yet block Facebook! I am very smart!" — and ignores Popper's solution to it, which is "block nazis".
Now, to me the whole thing is more nuanced than that, but that's the point: Gruber seems to just ignore all that nuance.
It'd be nice if Meta would launch multiple instances separated by the advertising profiles they've generated for their users. That way we could just block the Meta instances that host all the people targeted by mypillow ads and could keep the instances of people who are advertised pinkwashed pride cat toys.
Add comment