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.
There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
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.
Everybody relax.
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.
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!
good point
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.
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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 you 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.
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.
Yeah, it is very possible for us to not let Meta win. Acting like the Fediverse is doomed isn’t productive at all.
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
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.
This is a great read, I’ll definitely bookmark this for when someone says it won’t be problem.
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
@Dee_Imaginarium At this moment I am more un-relax with your insistence of telling me to relax.
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.
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.
Why is noone talking about GDPR data deletion request and copyright striking them into oblivion?
Last I checked noone gave them permission to grab any of our data, much less profit off it. Let them pay fines to the grave.
By that logic though all of Fediverse is illegal and should be shut down. There is significant work to be done there, not just by Facebook but by the Fediverse community on the whole.
The Fediverse doesn’t require that anyone provide any personal information, though. Literally none. It’s the user’s responsibility to choose not to post any.
Certainly, but when you make a comment or post it gets transferred to all federated servers without your express consent and you currently can’t permanently delete anything.
True but won’t be hard to fix in the future.
Your comments and posts are PII. It doesn’t apply, at all.
“Illegal” is a harsh term, I’d rather say “legally naive”. There’s no TOS anywhere saying things like “you give us the right to publish the comments you enter” which would clarify things but if you were to take an ordinary instance to court, you’d probably be thrown out with reference to you implicitly agreeing to have your comments published by, well, writing and submitting them. Licenses are ruled by contracts and contracts don’t necessarily need written form.
Meta is a whole another thing, though, because now we’re not only talking publishing, but straight commercial exploitation of your content. There’s no equability to be seen anywhere, meta doesn’t contribute to the maintenance of your home instance, it straight-up leeches your content to put it next to ads. An implicit license doesn’t suffice for that, a written one might not even (because no equability), that’s why all the corps have TOS.
If you post a comment on a publicly accessable page, there is an expectation that what you’ve posted will also be public. That’s implied consent and doesn’t require signing a contract.
In fact, the EU generally takes the position that a Terms of Service agreement is pretty much worthless. Nobody actually reads those documents, so the terms in them cannot be enforced. A TOS clarifies what a company/organisation will do with user entered content, but in terms of what can legally be done with the data the TOS doesn’t apply.
I hate everything about this. I came here to escape the Corporations damnit!
Same here…but now trying to infiltrate this space, which should be blocked, IMO
So basically they’re just going to be a leech. Blech.
Eventually it will be “embrace, extend, extinguish”.
I’m only thinking how meta can scrape analytics.
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… let me see if I’ve got this right: Meta is going to start a Twitter-like instance on the fediverse that will be marketed to Instagram members and will be subject to Facebook’s content moderation rules, and Mastodon users who want to will be able to transfer their accounts to Meta’s instance, in which case they will be subject to Facebook’s content rules.
I keep trying to see what all of the fuss is about, but no matter how often I look at it or from how many different angles, all I see is Meta and Zuckerberg doing yet another faceplant.
It’s as if Walmart announced that they were going to open a chain of art house cinemas and market them to Walmart customers.
They’re going to try to pull a Microsoft: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Yeah… you know, I’ve seen this EEE thing so many times in the last couple of days that it’s starting to feel like astroturf.
Here’s a funny thing - I was actually on Voat when it came apart and I watched it happen, and what happened there is, I think, very much relevant.
It wasn’t always a toxic right-wing cesspool - it was actually quite a bit like this in the early days - just people posting.
But then there was this sudden push to get people all wound up about an external threat - in that case, Reddit “powermods,” and especially the SRS brigaders. The hue and cry was that they were going to destroy the free and open forum unless we did something about it.
Sort of like how Meta is going to destroy this free and open forum unless we do something about it.
But the thing is that the constant fanning of the flames just led to increasing paranoia and hysteria and infighting and harassment and brigading and general ugliness, and when the dust all settled, the toxic right-wing authoritarians had shouted down, alienated, stifled and ultimately driven away everyone else. All in the name of “protecting” the site.
Not saying that that will necessarily happen here (especially in that particular way, since if nothing else the tankies aren’t going to give in to the righties). Just saying that I’ve already seen a forum destroyed by an obsessive fear of some bogeyman, and I’d rather not see it again.
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.
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.
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.
Every instance and user should block meta’s shit ASAP!
I’m shocked! SHOCKED! Meta isn’t playing on an equal playing field? There’s no way I could have ever seen that coming!
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?
That didn’t take long. Welp, the fediverse was a good idea. We are in the darkest timeline.
