@panos@calckey.social on the Fediverse & Meta's Threads
@panos@calckey.social on the Fediverse & Meta's Threads
There is another reason I find the discussion about blocking #Meta's #ActivityPub project #Threads interesting: I've been saying for a while now that the #Fediverse is a new and different beast, and whoever tries to understand it simply as a direct social media replacement misses the whole picture....
For those who don't want to click through, this is the content of the post:
There is another reason I find the discussion about blocking #Meta's #ActivityPub project #Threads interesting:
I've been saying for a while now that the #Fediverse is a new and different beast, and whoever tries to understand it simply as a direct social media replacement misses the whole picture. We're also federated communities, just as much.
Today we see a lot of concern about "what will the #Fediverse do" with #Meta. Wanna know what we will do? Everything and nothing. Because the Fediverse is not one entity. This is the essence of its decentralized nature - and that's cool. If your server intends to block Meta servers completely - cool. If not, cool again.
But if you expect a unified response on something like that, you're in for a disappointment.
This is not a "schism", a "problem", something to "solve". This is just decentralization in practice. We don't need to have the same blocklists, and that's ok. Open protocols are not something you can control, so chill. When the time comes for this subject, choose a server with a policy that you agree with. But if you're worried that we won't all have one unified stance... are you sure you actually like #decentralization?
Edit: It looks like the post got copied by Lemmy anyway, but I'll leave it for now just in case it doesn't show up on Mlem or Jerboa (or if it gets deleted)
I really don't like Meta but we should encourage the use of open protocols, regardless of who uses them.
I agree, but the issue I see is that if we don't de-federate them, they could aggregate and sell our data, which is something many people explicitly switched off of Meta services for.
Can't they aggregate and sell your Lemmy activity data without federating with your sever? It's all in the public Internet.
I guess it won't be that useful if they have no way of tracking you. But, I don't think federation makes it easier to track users. Do sever admins get ip addresses of every user on a server they federate with?
That’s how I feel. If Meta is going to have social media networks they might as well follow open standards.
I don't disagree, but if it takes off there's going to be a selective pressure on instances to engage with meta's activitypub stuff and that's going to let meta scrape data. I think that being able to engage with a wide variety of users, especially on platforms like mastodon or other similar offerings, is going to be a good thing, but the protocol needs implicit ways to protect its users outside of just blocking out other instances, whatever that looks like, so that decentralization can be granular and not just "how much do you want to give your data to meta"
I agree - my main reason for sharing with this post in particular is because the tie-in it has with Beehaw's recent decision to, at least temporarily, defederate with .world and sh.itjust.works; I just found the framing about decentralization, esp. the fact that the Fediverse is not a monolithic entity mandating a uniformly aligned approach, useful.
On the whole, I do think either ActivityPub's protocol spec would need some kind of privacy revision, seeing as it's already been a Problem where microblogging admins have had to block access by servers dedicated to mirroring Mastodon posts which don't delete their copies after posts are deleted by the user, or the software itself, Lemmy in our case, will have to make adjustments to its implementation of federation like you said. Of course, I'm mostly just conjecturing here and I don't actually know what either of these might look like 😅
The main part of this which I problematize are the people who are sticking their necks out for Meta and suggesting instances shouldn't be quick to defederate because this is, supposedly, a good opportunity to bring federated social media into the mainstream. Yet, in my opinion, they're not making enough of the fact that, even with their open-source contributions, Meta's software manufactures discord and bigotry on a massive scale. Letting them federate with an instance opens floodgates on that and for the stealing and selling of Fediverse participants' data.
So, on one hand, yes. absolutely agreed, on all counts.
On the other hand, the point of social media is to engage with people. What if your mom has an account on meta's new activitypub platform? Is the interoperability of these platforms not also a huge feature? What if I want to follow my mom on mastodon when she's on facebook whatever, but not give meta my data? These all work best when we can protect ourselves and engage responsibly, and defederation/blocking at a server level, while a WONDERFUL emergency button, also rejects a lot of the funcitonality and beauty of the fediverse. And I think there's probably room to find a middle ground that protects users well while still letting them have that sort of engagement?
Their prequel on Meta: A few thoughts about #Meta's #ActivityPub project (and whether we should instantly block it)
To recap: I'm also very, very suspicious of Meta and I know they don't have good intentions - I'm not suggesting that maybe they've changed and they will do things differently, to "give them a chance" first. I just don't think that declaring to block them makes much sense at this point in time. Maybe they will give us real reasons to block them once they launch their platform. But I'm not by principle against interacting with Meta users, as long as I can avoid Meta's ads, black box algorithm and data mining.
I guess you do need to know the domain name first to block it.
That's about all I'm interested in. They took a huge shit in the kiddy pool last time, and then sold vials of the water for one million dollars each.
I don't want to swim with meta.
I find it hard to understand the argument here, mastodon is full of people dramatically distancing themselves from the "fediverse meta drama" but I don't see anyone actually talking about what the issue is. Are people just vaguely afraid of how meta will change the culture of fediverse and don't have anything specific to say or am I missing something?
I think the biggest risk is "Embrace Extend Extinguish".
Kind of like how FB Messenger is based off XMPP.
Facebook puts out their new Twitter clone and embraces the fediverse to get access to our community and content.
Facebook extends the fediverse and adds reaction emojis and videos that only show up on MetaTwitter, not on Mastodon. This draws all the users to MetaTwitter and makes them the defacto instance for federated microblogging.
After a few years as MetaTwitter becomes an institution, they extinguish their open-source competition by blocking federation, and now all the Mastodon users have to make MetaTwitter accounts if they want to keep microblogging with their friends.
This happened with Internet Explorer, XMPP, and it's ongoing right now with Google's Amp email and project Fuschia.
Any attempt to extend GPL code in a non GPL way is an attack on our rights as users.
That, and Meta has the infrastructure/paid developers to develop features/respond to issues much faster, which might cause more casual users to migrate over because they see things they desire.
Another worry I've seen around is that if the Meta instance is not blocked/defederated, it could aggregate all that data and sell it, which is something lots of people explicitly do not want.
Concerns about cultural changes from an influx of ten times the users the entire Fediverse currently has from a platform that is known for having a particularly toxic, algorithm-poisoned userbase aren't specious or something you can ignore — even if the fears are "vague" in some sense they're very valid.
I feel a little lame quoting myself, but I was just having this discussion elsewhere so I'm just going to copy/paste my thoughts rather then thinking of a different way to say it this time.
Say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They'll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn't even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it's Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It's like an absolute wet dream for them. They don't even have to coax people to use their own platform!
If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they'd have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn't on board with this, it'll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they've unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you've ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
I'll just add that Meta will state that anything on their server is their property, and Federation will put your data directly on their server, even if you're not a member of their platform.
But meta doesn't need a huge instance called meta to steal data from everyone else in the federation, they can just make an anonymous instance with a bot that subscribes to everything available and get it that way too. It's kinda the way the protocol works, this can't be solved by everyone just agreeing to block meta.
Also it is actually readable 😄
I have the same feeling than panos. I'm concerned by the Meta thing. But I'm more and more worry about Fediverse when I see people what instance admin should block or not. What is good or bad for the Fediverse. Maybe an idea to fight against big tech to take control over the fediverse could be to hard limit number of people on each instance. Let's say 5000 for example. It could promote smallest instances rather than the biggest. Because maybe the issue behind this huge instances in fediverse.
Wait, what? Meta is adopting ActivityPub? Any links about that?