'Member when Facebook chat was federated with Jabber?
Pepperidge Farm remembers!
There is already a list of instances which have pledged to not federate with Meta. The landscape is going to splinter into two networks.
Is this like when they let AOL onto Usenet
Every instance and user should block meta’s shit ASAP!
Anyone operating an instance should defederate from this shit immediately. This is exactly the kind of corporate overreach that isn’t welcome here. This will end very poorly for the fediverse I think.
@giallo yeah, this is blatant embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
Should we be surprised at this, after the whole Anti-Meta Pact thing got so much traction? Like on one hand we don’t want to federate with them, but on the other we’re unhappy when they won’t?
I’m shocked! SHOCKED! Meta isn’t playing on an equal playing field? There’s no way I could have ever seen that coming!
That didn’t take long. Welp, the fediverse was a good idea. We are in the darkest timeline.
Before everyone freaks out, this has zero impact on our communities. Chill.
They can already do this by bringing content from Mastodon to Meta platforms via links and screen grabs, this only speeds up the process.
Personally, I love that they’re not federating day one. Because I don’t want any instances I use to federate with them, I don’t want to be connected to a Meta platform unless I deliberately go to a Meta platform to use it.
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don’t let them access that data through ActivityPub. They can build their own platform on the Fediverse and we can have our network of smaller connected instances.
Them doing this does not affect our communities unless we let it. Defederate from them and we can go on our merry way and they can have their own ad laden instance that’s not connected.
Everyone, relax. Continue building your communities here and ignore Meta in their unconnected instances.
@Dee_Imaginarium At this moment I am more un-relax with your insistence of telling me to relax.
There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!
This tactic even has a Wikipedia page: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
From the Wiki (quite enlightening):
The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them?
IIRC they had to be sued by the US federal government and Sun (over IE and Java, respectively) to back off. Which is not going to happen for the Fediverse. And it’s not going to happen again in today’s day and age period.
To wit, remember when Google took over the web and now defines the browser standard on both mobile and PC and nobody can do anything about it?
This is a great read, I’ll definitely bookmark this for when someone says it won’t be problem.
I’ve seen that article and no, we still don’t need to be worried. Just defederate and that’s all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we’re golden.
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to “destroy” the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that “everyone” will be here, and it’ll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don’t think they’re actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don’t even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: “It feels like what X used to feel like”. And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren’t pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
deleted by creator
This might all be true, but personally I don’t care about Twitter or any alternative version of “microblogging”. That’s not the kind of content or engagement that I am looking for.
If Mastodon and other instances like it throughout the Fediverse are taking the majority of Meta’s attention, even better. Let them be the army at the Black Gate distracting the Eye from two little hobbits approaching Mt Doom. Totally fine with me!
That is very shortsighted. Just because “its twitter and microblogging” doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect someone on lemmy that doesn’t have it - people from mastodon can still read and reply to your comments there. Furthermore you yourself are on kbin that has an even larger integration with mastodon and other microblogging platforms, magazines themselves can be configured with specific tags so you get automatic engagement from other parts of the fediverse that aren’t on either lemmy or kbin.
And this is just ignoring the simple basic truth that it still affects other people that you are interacting with. Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean others don’t care, and if they leave, or want federation, or switch platforms, it affects your feed too.
Thank you for writing multiple paragraphs explaining that you don’t care about this topic that you voluntarily clicked on, read, and engaged with.
Yeah, it is very possible for us to not let Meta win. Acting like the Fediverse is doomed isn’t productive at all.
It’s not even that, just change your perspective so whatever Meta is doing or not doing is irrelevant. They can’t “win” if we are on a different field playing the same sport with different players and our own equipment. Even if they have better equipment and 40,000 fans to our 1,500 that doesn’t mean our thing isn’t happening and meeting our needs.
I’d say it’s exactly as productive as saying “It’s no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It’ll be fiiiiiine”.
We should watch everything very carefully.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can’t.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don’t want to be affected by Meta then don’t join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You’re done. Problem solved. That’s the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that’s just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don’t lose as long as we have the communities we’ve built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
Seems like you haven’t read that article at all, otherwise you’d understand this already happened multiple times.
“Explain how Google would impact XMPP servers if they defederate from Google Talk”
Spoiler: They can
It only doesn’t matter if the majority of us are conscious of it and want to stop it. We need to place sanctions in a true democracy, that’s not easy and it requires everybody be educated.
We’re lucky that we’re still in the tail end of the early adopters phase so most people in the fediverse will be open to gaining education. Also both sides of the heavily populated fediverse (Lemmy and mastodon)* feel recently betrayed by corporate greed.
All to say, it won’t be a big deal as long as most people know what’s going on. (I didn’t before reading this.)
*Not sure where to put kbin
One important key lesson that everyone misses is funding … we have to normalize paying a bit of money through donations or subscriptions to those people that maintain instances and those people who maintain, update and build the software … if we all just keep tell ourselves that we all just keep our heads down, lock the door and don’t bother to pay anyone to keep the door locked … the same problems of the past will always emerge … Owners, developers, programmers, instance maintainers just running out of money and enthusiasm because they have the shoulder the financial costs while everyone ignores them and takes everything for granted.
If we all just keep expecting volunteers to keep everything running for us for free … eventually we will run out of willing volunteers as the community grows and the costs add up over time as instances grow more popular
SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE … whatever platform it is and whatever amount of money you can give … even if it means we just give a dollar a day, across hundreds or thousands of user, it will protect your instance owner, and ensure that the people running your instance never run into a situation where they have to decide on either ending their work … or selling everything they have to make a bit of money back.
good point
Couldn’t agree more! I think that message might deserve it’s own post but you did a great little write up here on the importance of supporting your instance!
The issue is that the fediverse is not going to present a unified front at this rate, it is already split over whether to defederate meta or not. We don’t know whether the administrators of largest instances that joined the NDA talks with meta are going to defederate too.
I agree there’s no reason to panic, but that doesn’t mean that nothing should be done. The anti-meta-federation act or however it is called is a good step to get the community on board, as well as sharing articles like these and informing people about what is coming.
Some of the largest server admins are actively excited about Meta showing up, so yeah, we shouldn’t expect them to defederate. I wouldn’t expect them to federated even after it becomes clear that it was a bad idea. I think you’ll see those particular instances close, or be handed off to new admins, of even be sold before you’ll see them defederate, because people don’t like to eat crow.
@Dee_Imaginarium @giallo I wish most Mastodon instances were planning to defederate from Meta by default but sadly that’s not the case. Meta reached out to the admins of some of the big instances and a whole bunch of them don’t plan to. One of the admins shared this — https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836
Some admins are going for a “trust but verify” approach. These are the only instances which have agreed to defederate from the start —https://fedipact.online/
I’ve seen all that too, and there’s a reason I’m not on any of those instances. The instances that want to federate can, the people who care will not be on those instances. It’s inevitable that they were coming to the fediverse, all we can do is defederate and protect our communities that we build.
But whoever wants to join them can do so, that’s the beauty of the fediverse. We join whatever instance or platform provides us with what we want. Which for me, is a Meta-less experience.
Ok I can get behind the “fedipact” as an idea but who the hell designed that website, nobody is gonna take it seriously if you’re greeted with bright pink background and floating hearts. Who’s leading the fedipact project anyway?
@Kaldo it was put together by VantaBlack. I’m fairly sure most of the people who signed up to it do take it seriously.
It looks like a student/chatgpt created website. Not sortable in any way, no links to the source of the declaration, just a list of names and no proof anyone signed anything.
The extremely small “why” contains an explanation of what the pact is, but it’s kinda cringe being written in lowercase and every second sentence having “lol” or “lmao” at the end of it. And then her personal donation links at the end? I thought this was supposed to be a community effort against meta, not a place for her to promote herself and herself only, at the very least put links to donation sites of the admins that sign the pact or the opencollective thing
Like the idea is fine but ugh, seeing this just made me extremely pessimistic about how is this gonna end.
‘no proof anyone signed anything’
I don’t know exactly what kind of proof you expect.I agree that it could be more clearly explained. There was a fair bit of discussion on ‘Mastodon’ about it so some of that context might not be clear.
Re the donation links. It is quite common for people who show up on the fediverse and put in some work to ask for donations.
I mean it is a attempt to rally community to a cause but it was put together by one person off their own bat.
I don’t know exactly what kind of proof you expect.
How about a link to a public toot of the administrator where they actually agree to this?
It is quite common for people who show up on the fediverse and put in some work to ask for donations.
On their personal site of course, I am not arguing that, but if this is supposed to a community effort and an “official document/rallying point” then it has no place here, it comes off as desperate and unprofessional. You don’t make an appeal to ethics and for everyone to come together and then use that space and community to ask for money just for yourself.
I mean I hate it that I’m being so negative, I know it doesn’t matter in the large scale of things but I’m just shocked that this is how the fedipact is being organized. It comes off as extremely amateurish and unprofessional.
I haven’t seen a website that looks like that since 1996.
It just needs a spinning “Under Construction” sign and it could go on Geocities.
My banking app just changed to neon pink and green. I wish I was joking.
why does their conversation have to be “off the record” with an NDA when they are discussing a public federation? They will never get the idea of public social media because they can’t understand the point of anything except squeezing the last drop of revenue from their decaying monolith.
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don’t let them access that data through ActivityPub.
When Twitter had an exodus to Mastodon and a lot of new instances popped up, several were quickly defederated because they were scraping data from other instances, which made a lot of people uncomfortable.
There were also a few far right instances that spun up that were also defederated and blocked within 24 hours so the communities ability to respond to situations like this is very much there and I’m sure that the vast majority will not want to have a single thing to do with meta
The fediverse is gonna be like 2 servers that act like they care about privacy in a few years
The first step to fixing a problem is identifying it. If we know the threat is coming, all we need to do is not do that thing.
I don’t know why everyone’s all doom and gloom right now. Yes, this is a massive issue, but they’re not even federating right off the bat, just allowing accounts to be imported. Who’s to say Threads will even take off? While they may take a bunch of new users, I can’t see a ton of people currently using Fedi services switching to Facebook (I refuse to call them Meta).
Yes, we need to be on our guards, but don’t forfeit the battle before it even begins.
So basically they’re just going to be a leech. Blech.
Eventually it will be “embrace, extend, extinguish”.
Importantly, posts hosted and visible on Meta’s server will be subject to Facebook’s content moderation rules, which means those policies will likely have a sweeping impact across the Fediverse.
Is it just me or does that sound like anything on instances hosted outside of meta’s own that can be merely seen from theirs? I’m all for moderation, the stricter moderation against hate-speech is part of why I joined Beehaw. But if I’m reading that right (I hope I’m not), then it seems like they plan to call the shots on other instances as if they have any say in what everyone else does right out of the gate.
Maybe what’s meant here is simply defederation of entire instances and banning of problematic users like any other instance does, ok. But it could also mean pressuring admins to enforce Meta’s TOS on a case-by-case basis which feels like the start of EEE tactics.
It just means they’ll block users who don’t abide by local site rules, which is standard practice.
Remote content is viewed locally, via mirroring, so in order for local users to see that remote content it had to be hosted on the local site. If that content does not meet local community standards, it gets removed, and the poster gets blocked.
This absolutely puts pressure on other admins to adhere to Meta’s standards, because if they don’t then they’ll risk being defederate, but that’s the whole history and controversy of Fediblock in a nutshell.
Meta won’t have control over what users on other instances post. Instead, they’ll just have very strong influence over the rules on instances that desperately want to federate with senpai Meta.
Strong echoes of Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy…
And really it’s nonsense. If we wanted to be on Facebook then we already would be. Meta coming in and telling everyone how to run their instances because a Facebook user might see their content, won’t bode well.
In a worst case scenario this could gut everything. I’ve had several 30 day facebook bans for morbid funny memes, like the classic with Dahmer asking, “Are you hungry? I’ve got Ben and Jerry in the freezer”.
Nearly everything I find on imgur that I’d want to share with my few old friends on Facebook is either too dark/morbid or would be copyright claimed. Practically everything I find funny, the mods there think is “glorifying violence”. It’s ridiculous.
That’s disgusting. Morbid and dark memes. Please share.
I made an imgur dump just for you: https://imgur.com/gallery/00M5Kle
This is wholesome in the weirdest way.
That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard all week. :)
How would they pressure admins? Threaten not to take their instances data and put ads on it? What leverage has Meta here?
I was thinking the absolute worst case scenario is a bad faith use of the regulatory laws aimed at Meta but put on a firehose and aimed at federated servers who don’t prostrate before them.
Things like partnering with copyright holders for automated DMCA floods for literally all images on the instance that have copyrighted content visible.
They will very soon have the largest userbase of any instance. If your instance gets blocked by Meta, your users suddenly have a fraction of the reach because no Meta people can see your posts anymore. That would put a lot of pressure on admins I imagine.
I doubt people who would use Meta’s instance are the sort of interesting people I’m on Lemmy for.
Me too and I don’t think it’ll be a threat to Lemmy but on Mastodon, there are a lot of old people who already use Meta platforms themselves.
If the other instances federate with Meta’s you won’t have a choice. Content from Meta users will be pouring in.
Sort of, you don’t have to subscribe to their communities or follow users from Meta. We don’t want to talk with Facebook users, that’s not why we’re here. There isn’t a single person on Facebook who would feel disrupted if they suddenly didn’t see my content anymore, either.
They could threaten to defederate from them.
Wait a minute…
Meta is going to be treating content on any instance in any way it suits them. They’re entering this as the 900 pound gorilla and expect they’ll be able to throw their weight around, naturally. They’ll treat all Fediverse content as “their” content and take, take, take.
There’s no way to win this. The only winning move is not too play. Defederate all their instances sight unseen.
That way when they claim to be part of the Fediverse we can say “so, who are you federating with, yourself?” and we will be able to point out it’s just same old Facebook with a new coat.
The Verge article is paywalled for me, but the screencaps Alex shared in his toot don’t really support his summary. The article mentions that Threads can import content from Mastodon as an example of the sorts of things ActivityPub supports, and that’s about as close as it gets.
And then there’s this:
The company is planning to create a roundtable for administrators of other servers and developers to share best practices and work through problems that will inevitably arise, like Meta’s server traffic putting strain on other, smaller servers.
Emphasis mine. How would Meta’s server put strain on other, smaller servers if it’s not federating with them?
I’m fully willing to believe Meta wants to EEE ActivityPub, but this particular claim doesn’t seem to check out.
Paywall. Can you copy the text?
Hunh. ya know- I wouldn’t be surprised if many of those “bot accounts” are infact, from meta, planning a takeover of everything here.
Wouldn’t surprise me, either.
