Defederate Meta

With the launch of Threads, there's been a lot of interesting talk about the safety and privacy risks it poses to people on the fediverse, if and when Meta begins federating. But it's also worth examining the risks to the social systems.

First, some background

Kbin and Lemmy are link aggregators. They work a lot like Reddit: users uprank or downrank posts and replies, and this mostly determines what content ends up having the most visibility. Reddit calls this upvoting/downvoting, and that's useful terminology - at the social level of the app, no one user has significantly more power or influence than any other. There's a certain level of democracy in this type of model.

But if Meta's Threads ends up federating with Kbin & Lemmy, using the ActivityPub protocol they have in common? Things could get a lot less egalitarian.

Threads Breaks Kbin & Lemmy

For example: let's say a Lemmy user has some followers on Threads. Suppose the Lemmy user posts something about a celebrity's new diet pills. Maybe one of those Threads followers replies, and tags the diet-pill celeb account. The post gets boosted by the celeb, and appears in the feeds of their millions of Threads followers. Even if only a small fraction of those accounts boost the post, it still easily becomes the all-time top post on Lemmy.

Now imagine things like this happening all the time. The Kbin/Lemmy rankings stop being egalitarian. A large account on Threads can instantly make a post show up in millions of people's feeds, and make it much more likely to get boosted. Your front page is now filled with posts about diet pills and limited edition sneakers.

But it gets even worse than this: Meta's algorithm is part of this dynamic too. After all, they're the ultimate arbiters of what appears in Threads users' feeds. If the algo pumps posts with certain keywords to their users' feeds? Kbin & Lemmy don't stand a chance. You'll see whatever Meta's algorithms want their users to see.

Interoperability - it ain't all it's cracked up to be

Let's break down what just happened there. Both Lemmy/Kbin and Threads are using the ActivityPub protocol to communicate, making them interoperable. Post some text in one, you can read it on the other. Boost in one, that boost shows up in the other. And so on. The standard narrative here is that interoperability is a noble and worthwhile thing in and of itself; walled gardens are opened up, new possibilities for collaboration/communication/creativity emerge, and everyone is happy and free.

Sounds nice! But clearly, some apps don't work very well when they're slapped together with others. The protocol does exactly what it's supposed to, but the applications are so much more than just the protocol. They're also systems that have social dynamics and power relations baked into their design, and even though none of the users in this example are trying to game the system - although they definitely could - Threads still makes the Kbin/Lemmy ranking systems useless. And if the ranking systems are useless, then what's the point?

The Point

Put another way: the computers can talk to each other just fine. But for our human purposes, at the social level, these two applications aren't really interoperable at all. Not all so-called interoperability is desirable or beneficial, and 'federation by default' shouldn't be assumed to be desirable or beneficial either. What's more, Meta is a monopolistic bad faith actor. Defederate Meta. Nothing good will come of them being in your network.

(see also part 2: Threads undercuts Mastodon's core mission with 'algorithm creep': https://mstdn.patatas.ca/@smallpatatas/110707812951733786)

great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)

Hi all, because this instance has tended to be somewhat unreliable, we'll be concentrating on the magazine at https://kbin.social/m/FediPact

Thanks for understanding during this whirlwind, hope to see you there :)

For the moment kbin doesn't offer the possibility of blocking an instance. The only possibility if offers is to "silence" it, that means, the user don't see the posts from this instance, but the instance (Meta in this case) can access the data posted by the user. Kbin is a quite young project, and it is still in development, then for sure the implementation of a real block/defederation feature will take a lot of time. I was wondering whether some of the new kbin instances have decide to defederate from Meta. I was not able to find the information. In other case I will need to delete all my posts, find new moderators for the two magazines I started, and delete my account without to have another alternative.

I wrote an article outlining some of the reasons why I think we should defederate Meta.

We, the moderation and administration of tech.lgbt, are signing the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact in fellowship with our peer communities. (https://vantaa.black/pact)

There is over a decade of precedent that Facebook will not have users' best interests as their guiding principle but rather profit margins, if it joins the Fediverse.

We at tech.lgbt have long held the belief that corporation owned instances are a threat to the core of the Fediverse: freedom for users to be themselves and to be a part of their communities. The 2010s saw the loss of online freedom when the majority of the Web was consolidated into a few destinations, and Facebook entering here could lead us back to centralization. Furthermore, NDAs for server admins will constrain our sovereignty online by binding us legally from disrupting their business.

We are not products. We are people, and we do not welcome Facebook in this space.

\#meta #FediPact #facebook #project92 #mastodon #fediverse #FediBlockMeta #FediAdmin #p92 #MastoAdmin

Vanta, @vantablack , has set up the Anti-Meta Admin Pact, a google doc for fediverse instance admins to show their support for fediblocking Meta (Facebook, Instagram, P92). Admins can sign the pact here:

https://forms.gle/8ctNNTGmjuEZcSSEA

Anyone can view who has signed the pact here:

https://vantaa.black/pact

It would be the cruelest of ironies if folks who are falling out of Reddit and trying to build a new community here on a community-controlled, non-corporate network were to find themselves getting sucked right back into invasive techbro-capitalism through a backdoor. But that's exactly what might happen.

For those new to the fediverse, Zuckerberg is transplanting the userbase of Instagram into a new Twitter-type social network (currently labeled P92, possibly branded "Threads") which apparently federates through ActivityPub. This service will be online soon, possibly within weeks.

When and if this happens, the scrappy little communities of the fediverse will be invaded by a single, centralized "instance" of millions, even hundreds of millions, all conversing under Zuckerberg's draconian rule.

But it gets worse, because we're all connected in the ActivityPub network. Lemmy and kbin are federating. Both of these networks are federating with Mastodon to at least some degree. The data - our expressions and relationships - are moving around, as intended.

When Zuckerberg federates, all of this data will then be moving to him. He will ingest it into his data-mining system for surveillance and monetization. Those expressions and relationships will again be enclosed as "free labor" for a psychopathic techbro billionaire.

We've all got a stake in avoiding this. Feel free to help spread the word; subscribe to the DefederateMeta magazine, and the #DefederateMeta hashtag is handy. Instance admins are particularly and respectfully invited to consider the issue and clearly state their intentions on the question of federating with Meta. We're trying to help organize #FreeFediverse admins into a united front, ping me or magazine mod smallpatatas if you're interested in tying in.

I plead my case to Mastodon's lead dev @Gargron here: https://mstdn.patatas.ca/@smallpatatas/110516124221635618

tl;dr - Meta will suck the Fediverse into its algorithmic orbit based on sheer size alone, unless we organize a large-scale Fediblock / defederation.

Curious to hear what people think.

In 2017 Meta (Facebook, Instagram) approached the mercenary group NSO - which has been sanctioned by the US government for developing a cyberweapon that destroys all security on an iPhone - to purchase spyware which would infect the Apple devices of their users so they could be more easily surveilled

archived 6 May 2023 13:48:40 UTC