although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we’ve signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here’s a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
I hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse.
I suggest to rephrase with this better: “I hereby agree to block any instances owned by, governed by, supported by mostly, funded by only or affiliated with Meta, its subsidiaries, major involving partners and influenced involving affiliates should they pop up on the Fediverse.”
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I do not provide my suggestion “as a legal advice” but as a thought to share that may be considered or configured by legal experts. I will not be held liable for any error that any revision upon or any derivative from my suggestion may cause.
This pact isn’t legally binding, but more of a moral “I stand against Meta” thing
I really don’t think this pact has any legal value to begin with.
Look at you, coming in with your legalese.
Godsspeed.
Good. To quote WarGames:
The only winning move is not to play
Meta is at best looking to profit from the Fediverse, and more likely looking to extinguish it. I think blocking them at the borders is the only solution.
I guess I’m the odd one out when I say I fully support this decision. I do not trust Meta, I Do not trust their intentions, and they have given me no reason to trust them.
Thanks Beehaw.
Meta was one of the killers of democracy. No one should ever affiliate with it.
Good call from the instance admins. Meta’s been a known actor for over 10 years at this point, which is more than enough time to observe their behavior (including up to a few weeks ago when they got fined for violating the GDPR). They’re not going to be participating in good faith and we don’t need to give them a chance to shit up the Fediverse.
I 100% agree with this decision. At first I wanted to give Meta a chance, just to get a big player in the Fediverse, but after reading this article it totally changed my views.
I just finished reading it. I must admit that I wasn’t blown away at the start. But the last few paragraphs, especially about the “Embrace, Extend, Exterminate” strategy really convinced me.
I did not remember that Google chat was once a XMPP client and that they pulled the plug on this.
Anyway, I’m totally convinced that the fediverse is most probably better off without Meta. Although, I’m not sure how the fediverse admin can really block them. At some point, some people will want to see meta’s stuff.
It almost feel like we need a legal organization around the fediverse. Just some unorganized random people won’t save whatever we have here. If we still want this to be as free as possible, there will be a time where a giant company will fuck thing up and we may forget why we didn’t want them here in the first place.
Awesome!
This is fantastic news and applaud this decision. I used to work in digital marketing and having seen how Facebook, (and Twitter, Google, etc.) makes their sausage and how they operate, I advise everyone get off Meta/FB, or really any centralized social media platform for that matter.
Well hell man, give us the details.
Meta is not a brand new, fresh-faced corporation that maybe needs a chance to prove it’s good intentions in the fediverse. It is an established entity that has a history of killing competition and often being on the wrong side of social issues. It should be rejected from federation outright because of its track record, if nothing else.
Corporations will attempt to infiltrate anything they see as a threat to their profit margins. Long live the Fediverse. 😀
As a user of the fediverse, I appreciate you for doing this.
Really pleased to hear this. I will be staying on Beehaw for the foreseeable future, I’m on the same page as the admins.
Good choice, who wants to deal with a hundred thousand instagram users sitting in between every fediverse user.
Fuck meta and fuck Facebook. No one wants this place to become like that dogshit site. Fully support defederating from any meta owned instances
I’m disappointed.
“The fediverse is open and interoperable!”
“No, not them.”
Well, we’ve defederated with other people in the past (and will continue to do so in the future most likely). Federated systems are not an all or nothing situation. IMO that’s the biggest draw and improvement over a distributed system for social media.
I agree, but why defederate before knowing any details? What is the harm in hearing them out
it’s literally Facebook. i think we’ve heard and seen more than enough to from Mark Zuckerberg and the platform which actively continues to be one of the worst vectors of online harm, misinformation, and advocacy for social and political violence (among many, many other ills). particularly with respect to our instance: their project can get fucked as far as i’m concerned.
I’d also add that they have, in the past, conducted unethical experiments on their users to attempt to manipulate said users’ emotional state. I’m just a cross poster here, but I respect the stance.
Yea, i’m not sure how much benefit of doubt we should be handing Mark Zuck of all people. There’s few people in the world who make their intentions more clear than him. Not that i’m trying to paint him as evil, i’m not and i don’t think he is, but i also see no reason to expect self-run instances to offer an olive branch to him.
We should be vary paranoid about Embrace Extend Extinguish in these communities.
Anyone here into cross stitching? I’d like to send the Zuck a cross stitch that just says, “Get Fucked”
ahhh, now i think it’d be a funny collaborative idea to send him a fediverse communal “Fuck Off!” blanket
The details are under NDA and Facebook has a really bad history of having a terrible moderation culture. I don’t see any reason based on their past history to believe that they will change.
It feels kinda like giving a gun to a serial killer and just waiting it out. It’s an exaggerated analogy but I think it illustrates the point well.
before knowing any details?
before? facebook is almost 20 years old, they’ve had plenty of time to show us who they are and they have. If you have any doubt about their moral fiber then I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and enter the fucking 2020s
The same harm the inhabitants of the henhouse would come to if they decided to hear the fox out.
because history
Corporations are motivated by profit. One of the ways Meta profits is by using your personal information for targeted advertising. For them, “community building” is a means, not an end. What else could you possibly need to know?
If a known con artist asks you to listen to their pitch, are you going to “hear them out”, or slam the door in their face?
I think if this were a new player in the market, say for example a new social media platform that was going to venture into the fediverse, most people here would give them the benefit of the doubt.
However this is meta, they shouldn’t take get the benefit of the doubt with how they’ve been operating over the last decade. There’s no good faith that they’ll be good participants
If there’s no issues then we can refederate at any later time.
What is the harm in waiting?
Can’t find the source, but I did see a rumor they’ll be turning on federation a few months after the official release so as to not spring all of this place on a bunch of old people. So if they do that, they’ll already have their own ecosystem/culture in place. I’m also a bit worried the extended introduction is going to lull people.
I think regardless, it always needs to be at the forefront of user’s minds that they’re not averse to playing it slow. Likely, they’ll be on their best behavior starting out, especially since having a working platform at all means making as many friends in the fediverse as they can. They’re not gonna come in swinging their junk around like spez.
Acting the gracious benefactor will not stop them from leaving this place a haunted backwater once they gather enough standing to start poaching users via shiny toys and high engagement. The kbin dev hasn’t said anything to my knowledge yet, but being an overly reliant lapdog was XMPP’s mistake and I support defederating as honestly the best way to avoid that.
Theirs is always going to be a numbers game, any niceties will be presumed by me to be a fakeout, and I’m pissed off that what was supposed to be a way to worm out from under the corporations semi-permanently stands to be drowned out immediately by corporations.
there are instances in the past where big players acquire the small ones and while at first they seem to be cooperative, it ultimately destroys the small players, one such case is XMPP the open chat protocols long before we have Matrix, killed by Google
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I guess this is a cautionary action, better to grow slower rather than be killed by Meta.
Do you really think Meta wants to be “one of us”, that they plan to be on equal ground as the rest of the already existing instances managed by individuals and not by corporations? Are you that naive?
it’s the paradox of tolerance. We (fediverse) cannot be tolerant of the intolerant (meta in this case), lest we be destroyed by them. And do not for one second ascribe any benevolent properties to meta, they are evil through and through and have been pretty much since inception. Tolerating their presence would be akin to tolerating nazis, the second that happens I’m fucking out of here
This talk of tolerance reminds me of something I read[1]: Tolerance is a peace treaty, not a moral obligation. With this line of thought, the intolerance of intolerance stops being a paradox and makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. Intolerance broke that peace treaty before it even entered into it, IMO.
It may have been this opinion piece: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376 ↩︎
Regardless of how untrustworthy Meta as a company is, it also tends to hold the kinds of “mainstream” social media platforms that I have actively been avoiding for many reasons, including their communities. Beehaw has already defederated from other instances for having open sign-up and a disproportionately large number of users on them who needed moderation actions taken, and I can see a Meta-run instance posing the same kinds of problems.
Plus, like others said, it’s not impossible to federate later if it ends up being an overreaction. It’s just that Meta and its userbase already exist, so it’s possible to make pre-emptive judgement with that knowledge and correct the judgement later, potentially avoiding a flood of unwanted content.
It’s ok to not tolerate algorithms that promote intolerance for clicks and advertising.
Don’t pretend like Meta is going to be open and interoperable.
You can’t look at their history and think letting the fox sleep in the hen house is a good idea. The house is for hens.
I agree this seems kneejerk. If Meta refuses to abide by the standards of interoperability and openness then lock them out, but by doing so ahead of time the fediverse is committing the crime it’s pre-punishing Meta for.
The thing is that this isn’t really a marriage of equals; if Meta joins the Fediverse then Meta will swallow the Fediverse, simply by dint of having several orders of magnitude more users.
It would be akin to India applying to become the 51st US state; if we let them in, they’d end up controlling 80% of the House and the Electoral College and the US wouldn’t really be the US anymore.
While I appreciate the analogy, the electoral college is a seriously broken system which hasn’t protected proportional representation in a long, long time.
Oh certainly; my point was simply that in a system where population = influence, letting in a new group with several times as many people as all of your existing groups put together means that that new group effectively takes over.
The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation. The whole idea of equal representation in the Senate was to avoid high population states running roughshod over the smaller ones. This obviously dilutes the influence of higher population states and amplifies the smaller ones at the electoral college.
The system is not broken though. It does exactly what it was originally intended to do 240 years ago. You just don’t agree with it’s intention and results
Each state gets a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (senators plus representatives). If the number of representatives weren’t capped it would go a long way towards making the Electoral College more representative of the population.
As much as I don’t think the pact will do much, it’s their right to defederate whichever instances they want. The protocol is still “open and interoperable” and this does not change that - in fact, this move is only possible because of that openness.
Your argument only sounds kinda sane when applied to Meta, but the same could be said about instances made by bad actors (spammers, for example). Please do further research before commenting on this.
What? Are you arguing tolerance of intolerance?
I’m arguing the protocol was designed this way for a reason. Each instance is meant to be able to implement their own policies and defederate who they want, exactly what Beehaw is doing here. The idea that this is against the spirit of the protocol is entirely inaccurate. Hope that clears it up.
