The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
Personally, I’m not planning on using the Meta service, but I’m not a fan of pre-emptive defederation either. The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as @username, not @username.
I’m totally fine with Meta releasing an app who’s posts are exposed via ActivityPub, along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub. If anything, I would like to think it’ll drive more people off the Meta platform and into Mastodon, as moving to a federated app doesn’t mean they have to completely break connections with their network on-platform with Meta.
Overall, I’m more in favour of allowing a personal user to choose to defederate from specific instances, because regardless of what happens, if Meta joins, there will be other companies getting on the bandwagon, and endlessly splitting up based of which instances federate with which others will eventually lead to the whole damn thing falling apart and the big players becoming the de-jure instances anyways.
I mean, the vast majority of Lemmy/Kbin users migrated from Reddit, as did the vast majority of Mastodon users from Twitter. I’m fine with keeping things open to help facilitate more user growth to community run instances, while also having a place for the less tech-savvy to get their feet wet.
There’s an argument to be made that that’s exactly why everyone else should defederate preemptively.
Edit: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
My thoughts are similar to yours, I don’t think instances should be defederating unless there’s a serious issue with the content of another instance.
Good instances should be winning over people by being better than whatever Facebook’s ad ridden, algorithm driven, instance ends up being.
I mean worst case you’ll see @meta.com accounts in your Federated feed in Mastodon (which for pretty much every instance is already a complete mess), I don’t even really see how it’ll affect Lemmy or Kbin, as they’re community driven rather than user driven. I follow users with Mastodon, I follow communities with Kbin.
I dunno, maybe I’m being necessarily optimistic, but I do have friends and family who are posting on Insta/FB, and I basically maintain an account there to keep up with them. I’d love to be able to keep that connection without having to actually be locked into Meta’s platforms. And I do think at least a few of my tech savvy friends would be willing to give a client like Ivory a go if they’re able to do the same.
That is not the worst case, by a long shot
And you’re not just being optimistic, you’re being naive
Since you clearly didn’t read the article the commenter linked I’ll sum up the important point:
Corporations routinely infiltrate and integrate with open source in order to destroy it.
Meta will implement federation, then they will “extend” the specification with a bunch of new features that the other places of the fediverse can’t put out as fast, making anyone talking to a meta user at a disadvantage, just like how Apple calls out non-iMessage participants in a group text.
They’ll also likely implement a different specification than they publish, so that anyone implementing the meta features fails due to bad instructions
It’s been done multiple times before, for decades
Ffs, I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats
these corporations are not your friends, they are not on your side, they don’t even see you as slaves, you are livestock
A majority?! Fucking hell!
Using the iMessage analogy, we’re currently in a state where green bubbles can’t interact with blue bubbles at all. Nobody should be expecting full interop with a corporate platform, but for the long run I’d rather have partial interop at arms length.
Embrace extend extinguish only applies if platform is so focused that it cannot sustain itself without the extend phase, and the extend phase cannot happen without something to embrace.
XMPP suffered a lot from what Google and Facebook did to it, so I understand people’s fears regarding Meta’s take on ActivityPub.
It’s more than justified
Especially with their patent moves, this is a malicious attack on the network
I think this is the logical pragmatic take. They’ll start on day 1 with more users than the entirety of the fediverse. Defederating just allows them to ignore us and pretend they own the fediverse. We should at least try to win over those users and prevent FB adware software overtaking Mastodon as the dominant fediverse platform.
I don’t understand why people think the end goal should be one network of Fediverse instances connected to each other. We already don’t have that and never will.
Meta adding “more users than the entirety of the Fediverse” is irrelevant. They already have more users and content from Facebook, Instagram or whatever else Meta owns is not showing up on my Lemmy or Kbin front page. How would I notice any difference if the tech behind Meta’s services is different?