I’m changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:
Of course, it’s possible to work with companies you don’t trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don’t trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is … risky. There’s a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as “prudently defensive” in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: “block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block.” Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:
We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though
Previously, I’d thought “some block, some federate” would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:
My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:
Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse
Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta
Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.
People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.
But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.
Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.
And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.
Meta has shown repeatedly that they aren’t trustworthy. This is like watching a wolf eat every one of your chickens in the coop and then swearing up and down that if you let it in the hen house, it won’t touch the chickens in there. Absolutely zero chance that they aren’t going to try to take over and steal data and control it. Why else are they trying to come in? These corporations don’t make moves like this unless they see a potential profit. I vote block.
Bingo. If Meta get their foot in the door, then the writing will be on the wall and the Fediverse as we know it today will slowly disappear. These huge corporations have extremely covert and efficient methods of influencing change and instilling their evil values which aren’t fully-apparent until it’s already too late.
If Meta get involved, personally, I’ll be leaving, and will just accept that the internet will never again be allowed to exist in a free state; the system won.
EDIT: I also left all social media over two years ago, and this was largely because Facebook was making me remarkably unhappy and angry. I don’t want them in my life full stop and have gone out of my way to rid my digital identity of any ties to corporate proprietary bullshit. I like it here precisely because it has no corporate overlord, and it makes me sick to think that Meta can just waltz back into my life in a space users largely want to be left alone in.
Big companies are driven by profit and power. I don’t expect us to keep them out but it would be nice to prevent them from becoming the default, or else we’ll just repeat the same thing over again
Multiple smaller communities connected together is the best strategy for a free internet IMO
I would defederate and block any and every instance owned or strongly influenced by meta on principle alone.
I‘m here because corporations are a collection of moldy, parasitic assholes who enshittify platforms, how anyone can be on here and still have this naive trust in them is what truly confounds me.
If they were willing to participate in good faith and share traffic, or anything at all, why not just go ahead and spin up their little instance? Why the sketchy NDA shit? Why come for the admins and devs?
All they want is a monopoly on our data and on how the fediverse works, this move by them is nothing but an attempt to snuff out this blossoming community (aka competition).
They dress it up in doublespeak to make it seem beneficial to us, but if they get enough admins and devs on their side, those people will come to regret it in a few years when their community has no activity stemming from itself anymore and is overshadowed by some proprietary Meta nonsense they foolishly (or greedily if money is involved) signed up for.
Having meta join doesn’t change shit here other than have a huge corporation break the wall down on what federation means to the average joe - and that’s a good thing.
Meta will meta no matter what they do - but if we can break the walled garden down and make it easy for users to move that would be great.
Ty for providing the prime example of user I was talking about, “Let‘s embrace the corporation, they extend our service!” Oops we got extinguished, who could have seen it coming? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I sure hope the devs and admins of the major instances think differently, but if they don‘t and the entire protocol turns to some halfway proprietary shitshow forcing us to use Meta to access most of it, I‘ll come and find you to write “I told you so.” Or I guess I won‘t, cause I‘ll be hiding on some abandoned part of the fediverse which can‘t communicate with you anymore cause Meta won‘t let me without signing up for their ads.
I disagree with you 100% :)
What i’m saying is people like you will never be convinced of anything so it doesn’t matter what Meta does.
But for the rest of us, I’ll enjoy following people i haven’t followed because i refuse to have meta apps installed but will soon be able to connect without them.
Activitypub is going to be here no matter what.
I’ll make it so awesome the people I like on Meta will move over
And i’ll continue to ignore the people who are just espousing hate and vitriol because they don’t matter anyway.
It’s about the people - not the protocol. the protocol helps us break the walled gardens down - but we have to welcome the people or it won’t matter.
You do realize that Meta will likely implement incentives to stay on their platform, and weed out other federations over time, right?
They’re absolutely planning to grab Fediverse members, and will make efforts to prevent the other way around. Your friends will stay with the meta product because it’s more convenient for them to do so.
You honestly seem to be more rooting for meta than the fediverse, since you seem certain that “anyone who disagrees could never be convinced otherwise”…but you seem to have only taken into account fediverse users doing this, not meta users. Like you’re arguing very one-sidedly.
If you can’t convince them to jump ship now, I just don’t see what changes when Meta provides them (as meta users) more options, not less.
Y’all seriously don’t think any of this through do you?
Right now, if they jump ship - they lose their network.
In the future, if they jump ship - they can do so and still maintain their network.
My enthusiasm for the fediverse is there because i see this as opportunity to shine.
Y’all see it as opportunity to run and lock your doors.
You’re like the Trump of the fediverse. “Build a wall”
I say fuck that.
They wouldn’t even try to interact with fediverse, if they couldn’t make hooks to keep people from jumping ship. They’re not stupid, and they know nobody in their network would jump ship just because they chose not to federate.
You argue that people who argue against you are “trump of the fediverse”? You sound like you’re the kind of person who would give Trump a chance. What’s the worst he could do?
Turns out he practically redefined what a President could do. And none of it good.
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What concerns me is that Meta will likely be on their best behavior at first, making people who are rightfully skeptical look like alarmists. Some instances will then decide that it’s okay to federate with Meta, because they’ve played nice.
If Meta is smart, they’ll only show their true colors gradually and with subtlety. We must expect them to play the long game. It’s vital to remember that no matter how friendly they seem, Meta will always do whatever looks most profitable. There is no profit for Meta in allowing the fediverse to continue untouched.
Embrace, extend, extinquish. That’s the tactic, the reason it works so well is cause of how you say, it makes them look all nice in the beginning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I would also throw in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance We could be tolerant of Meta, but as soon as it can Meta sure as hell isn’t gonna be tolerant of us.
Many people have migrated to the fediverse to get away from corporate overreach. Do not give them an inch.
Having them join fediverse doesn’t give them an inch, it gives us light years. I can’t believe people don’t realize the upper hand we have here.
The upper hand of Facebook getting BTFO. I don’t like mentioning the quote about his Harvard data collection because people post it all the time and it feels overused, but I feel it’s particularly relevant here:
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
I’d rather we not repeat the same mistake. This time we know full well not to trust him, and I say this as someone with a considerable amount invested in Meta right now.
This whole controversy irritates the fuck out of me, because it’s driven by people who either don’t grasp the nature of the fediverse or are willfully misrepresenting it.
By design, there are no mechanisms by which Meta can be prevented from owning an instance, and there are no mechanisms by which the fediverse as a whole can respond in any particular way. That’s not a bug - it’s a feature.
The exact idea behind the fediverse is that centralized authority is ultimately harmful, and that a social media network can manage without it, through the carrot and stick of federation/defederation.
So anyone who wants to start an instance can (which necessarily includes Meta). That’s not an ideal or a policy - it’s a fact. There’s literally no way for anyone to stop anyone else from starting an instance.
And every instance owner can decide whether or not to federate with any other instance.
And every individual can decide which instance(s) they want to join or follow.
And that’s it. That’s the whole deal, right there.
The whole idea behind the ActivityPub protocol is that those things are sufficient to establish and maintain a healthy ecosystem. And ALL anyone can do at this point is wait and see if that works out to be true or not. There’s literally nothing else anyone can do.
So all of this sturm und drang is just pointless, emotive nonsense. It’s fear and hostility that cannot possibly have any bearing on anything. The system is already in place and events are already unfolding and it’s all going to play out however it does and all of your hand-wringing abd fear-mongering and anger and demands mean NOTHING. They’re just divisive noise.
I also think fear-mongering won’t help. There is little we can change about it. Let instances decide for themselves to defederate or not.
Yes, there is a risk Meta applies the “EEE” strategy. We shouldn’t be naive about that. But why would you stay on an ad-ridden Meta ActivityPub server if you see there are friendly, ad-free Activity servers on Mastodon and the likes?
For a more positive view and an interesting read on the matter, I recommend:
- https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/23/project-and-the.html (Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web)
- https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/25/project-the-fediverse.html (#Project92, the Fediverse: (First Time? Part 2))
The more I read, the more I am in the camp of “let’s not.” Meta has rarely acted in the best interests of its own users; from their unethical experiments into causing depression to their privacy issue to… well, everything, they are classic examples of bad actors. The fediverse is not secure enough or big enough to counter Meta’s takeover if we open that door… there’s a reason we’re in the fediverse and not the metaverse, after all.
The decision of whether to federate is up to the individual instances, and I’d not want it any other way. But I do think we should be encouraging instances to hold off on Meta-fying. Else, we’ll be fighting Meta in a game that they’re much better at than any of us are ever likely to be.
I agree that Meta shouldn’t be trusted, and thus not federated across the fediverse.
Fuck Meta. We need to vehemently oppose their presence in the Fediverse.
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Fediverse should be free and no one should rule over it.
What Meta should be defederated or not is owed by every instances.
By the way, Meta has a lot of scam accounts now, so it should be defederated from my instance.deleted by creator
I think there is no evidence that corporations are going to do what you all say they’re going to do. Critical thinking is a thing, and judging without evidence is not a very good action. I mean, is there a tangible evidence that Meta is going to destroy the fediverse?
People have been bringing up the Google eating xmpp thing so there is precedent. It’s also not as if meta is innocent to apply innocent until proven guilty.
But also if dealing with an explicitly profit seeking corpo, why would you trust them unless you had very good reason to? I believe the burden of evidence is on that side given the context.
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For anyone “willing to give Meta a chance”, ask yourself:
Q: Why is Meta doing this?
A: To make money.Q: How is Meta going to make money out of this?
A: By having as many users on their instance as they can, so they can sell their data and advertise to them (that is Meta’s modus operandi, after all).This is already antithetical to the entire fediverse concept, where you want users to be as spread out over instances as possible.
Having most of the users on one instance means the “community cost” of defederating from that instance is enormous to the point of being inadvisable for an instance admin. This brings us to a scenario where the ‘federation’ is essentially useless, as everyone is producing/consuming content on the one instance.
Therefore, the idea of a commercial entity using the fediverse, by itself, mutilates what the fediverse is all about.
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Holy strawman, Batman!
I’m not even going to address the rest of your comment if the thing you start with is claiming that I don’t want developers to get money for their work.fucking bizarre that you think that a corporation is the same thing as a small collective of software developers or an indie studio
like I can’t even wrap my head around how you could think this way
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