Meta and Mastodon: What’s really on people’s minds?
Meta and Mastodon: What’s really on people’s minds?
There has been a lot of chatter about the decision of some instances on Mastodon to pre-emptively block Meta’s purported new ActivityPub-compatible service: Dare Obasanjo: It’s a weird own …
A very detailed article about the whole Meta (Instagram/Threads) vs. Fediverse discussions. It's a long read, but well-worth it if you're interested in the subject.
People act like facebook isn't a hellspawn of far right hatred, fascism, and general stupidity in all of it's glorious forms. I'm just fine with my instance defederating them because Im just fine with not seeing posts from Moms for Liberty, or proud boys, or ivermectin treatments, or whatever the fuck goes on over there now a days. If I wanted to see facebook shit, I'd go to fuckin' facebook wouldn't I? It has little to do with corporate or not corporate.
It has little to do with corporate or not corporate.
It does a little. Because controversy sells better. And scandals are free marketing. So these platforms thrive off this shitty content. At a minimum they tolerate it. Maybe they even actively push it.
Given that they default to showing an algorithmically curated feed, instead of just by most recent, a strong argument can be made that they're actively pushing the content you see.
But the guy above is right, it's more about the choice of affiliation. Certain communities will want their privacy just by their nature.
Just yesterday i was seeing this comment by one of the Calckey maintainers. pasting here for the lazy the relevant bit:
Okay, if your community can’t survive Meta using ActivityPub, then it doesn’t deserve to exist.
I frankly cannot fathom how can somebody be so blind to how odious it is. And yeah, when called up on it he also fell into "But the protocol!" arguments, which seems to be the take people holding the pro-Meta arguments are holding. They just don't realize that this is not a technical problem but a social one, it's not about the marvelous internet machine, but about the people that rely on it. Like Treebeard said, "a mind of metal and wheels".
"then it doesn't deserve to exist"
When I hear that, I hear an implicit value judgement with Meta as the standard. The value of an instance is in if it can survive against a social aggregation to Meta's instance. Only then is it worthy of existing, if it can compete with the degree of funding, advertising, and account creation streamlining that we would expect from a social media platform giant.
When I hear that, I hear that small, self-hosted instances don't deserve to exist.
That sounds like a very naive view on part of that developer. He probably never heard of Microsoft’s „Embrace, extend, and extinguish“ approach. This is going to be similar with Facebook. They have a lot more resources than all current instances combined and can provide a much better user experience. They are going to be the main instance on the federated network slowly starting to extend it and support features others lack. Making it a unique selling point until it’s too late.
And that’s not even looking at the moral/ethical standpoint of getting involved with Meta.
„Embrace, extend, and extinguish“
In the case of Facebook, it's "copy, acquire and kill"
The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it's a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.
It's kind of like Microsoft's adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn't completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it's still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.
I agree with your point. Metaface is the most hilariously transparently bad actor on the internet. That well is so poisoned there's no olive branches that will save their reputation. The incentives for these companies are clear and produce a consistent pattern: build something useful and start building walls around it so you can exploit whatever you've built to produce the most shareholder returns. Any instance that cooperates with a Bookmeta instance is willfully ignorant how it will end, even if MaceTook truly does not have malicious plans at the start.
But beyond the other responses, I think it's worth thinking deeper on this. It's easy to reduce it to "It's simple. We kill the Zuckerberg."
There have always been bad actors, and will always be bad actors. There are probably bad actors in the room with us right now. If this whole threadiverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able robustly handle them even when the bad actors can bring a lot of resources to bear.
Also the real fun happens when TheMeta.Com starts proposing changes to ActivityPub. Even if the changes are purely technical and make perfect sense there's going to be slapfights.
The first quote is an great demonstration of using logical fallacies to sell a point, and I am glad the article breaks down the argument. Anyone using a loaded question such as:
Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness?
Doesn't fundamentally understand the fediverse. Almost every projects goal is supporting the decentralization of these technologies. To quote the website fediverse.to:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Allowing a single entity with a larger and more dominate platform, more power in the legislatures of the world, and effectively infinite times more capital to come in destroys the decentralized nature. Meta also doesn't stand for "community-owned", "ad-free", nor "privacy-centric". Meta's goal here is pretty obviously to centralize and control the networks as much as possible, and scrap the remaining data from other instances, using the ActivityPub protocol. Meta is a corporation who's motives are to increase shareholder value. The fact these are community ran instances is like Walmart coming in to stomp out the local grocery.
If I run my own instance, I can choose who I share with and who I don't.
The simple fact of the matter is that I don't want my data to be Zucc'd, and clearly I'm not the only one who thinks that way.
I don't use any Facebook products for a reason, and I would not want to have to move to a different instance if the one I chose would federate with Meta. And the same goes for other data-hoarding companies out there, in case they try to enter this space.
Exactly, and that's why the response has been so negative. Every instance that federates with another stores a complete copy of the posts and comments from every federated user.
If the majority of instances do not defederate from a Meta instance, that Instance will inevitably become the primary destination for discussion, even between and by non Meta-Instance based users, just because the communities in that Instance will be so large and active. And even if they don't, Meta Instance will have a stored copy of every community whose Instance is federated.
Meta will then have carte blanche to collect data on a huge collection of users from outside their own Instance.
I acknowledge that they could get the same data by scraping the public Instances anyway, but still... Fuck all of that.
To quote myself from an earlier thread:
It's probably a good idea to limit/defederate with this when it shows up, as it's a vector for EEE and Meta will be doing the usual data collection shit they do with their users, but now with Fediverse users as well. They just got hit with a big fine for violating the GDPR.
I would be ok with allowing federation until they (inevitably) cause problems.
- Push Ad spam: Defederated
- Allow hate groups and blatant disinformation to spread: Defederated
- Try strong-arming changes to the fediverse?: Believe it or not - Defederated
I want something different away from that crowd. I want a community of nice people that get along. I want to get away from Facebook, meta, and all. They just suck the soul out of everything
Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants. Nothing is stopping you today from paying your friendly local business or association to host a mailbox for you. Of course self-hosting e-mail is an absolute pain, but that's because most e-mail sent is spam, the drastic blocking is just needed. Similarly if the Fediverse sees any kind of meaningful adoption, preemptively blocking small instances will just be needed to crack down on spam.
I'm cautiously optimistic about Meta adopting Activitypub for their new platform. It might signal enough interest to make other smaller (and more trustworthy!) actors follow suit and set up their own platforms or Mastodon instances.
Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants.
Indeed. It's a bit of fake news that the e-mail market is dominated by a handfull of big players. It's enterely possible to self-host a small e-mail server and have to e-mail accepted without problems. Of course, don't run and open relay, and make sure your reverse dns and DMARC and DKIM records are correct.
I think a difference between email and ActivityPub-based social media is there's arguably less of a need to have federation between any two servers. If you can't email the government, your sister living abroad, or a client, that's a big problem. But if you can't follow a cat pictures account or your friend's constant stream of baseball rants because the servers don't federate it's not quite the same.
If Meta becomes ActivityPub interoperable instances may or may not federate with them. Either way it's not necessarily going to change my social media experience.
From my paltry observations it seems like opinions about federating with Meta spread into the following:
1: All for-profit corporations bad, so no federation
2: Meta bad, so no federation
3: Meta bad, but wait & observe first
4: Growing the influence of fediverse is usually preferred
5: Free speech for allHonestly the article resonates with me a lot. I assume many old-guards of Mastodon are ppl who are fully aware of how federation works & are somewhat left-leaning and anti-capitalist, so they have a tendency to not want to federate with Meta.
So it certainly doesn't help that a few very influential people signed the NDA to join the Meta meeting, which would almost signal that they are more right-leaning (which is not what most people are like on fedi). Regarding the NDA part: people sign NDAs for too many things in pharma (my undergrad field) so I didn't realize it was such a big deal... I think it probably rubbed too many people in the wrong way.
Also, for large general instances, I wouldn't be surprised if many people have ideological differences with their admin or their neighbors, which probably resulted in some "fun" discussions.
Finally, PSA: I know some people hate their admins now but please do not ever send death threats to people, seriously
I understand 1-4 but not 5. Is it saying meta and meta users have a right to free speech too or is it saying they will destroy it to attract advertisers?
Ah so there are some people on the fediverse who believe that any restriction is bad... Like the ppl who think domain blocks are too strict and stuff like that.
Pretty much everyone I've seen on Mastodon knows that Meta is bad. However, I've seen quite a few people echoing the sentiment that "hey I know Meta is bad but blocking is wrong & they haven't done anything wrong on the fediverse". The thought comes across as a bit naive to me but... to each their own.
Just let these instance owners do what they want ? 🤷 If they want to pre-emptively defederate, that's fine, let them. There will be instances happy enough to federate with them. Once there's trouble, they'll probably defederate.
The great thing about social media, is that you don't have to reach everybody - you just need to reach your community. If your community isn't on GAFAM then defederating won't change the experience.
@giallo I like the “to quote myself from earlier‘, so I will as well.
I want to address the uproar in the Fediverse about preemptively blocking the Meta ActivityPub product. And whether it should be at the instance or individual user level. A variety of reasons for and against this have been given.
At the moment, I would go with the latter. But no matter the arguments, the reason every single Fediverse user should block it is that Meta is a box of c*nts.
They have always been a box of c*nts. And they will always be a box of c^nts. Meta should be trusted as far as I can kick Zuck. About six feet. They will immediately or eventually try to enshitify whatever product they launch. At that point, administrators should block them at the instance level.
Maybe I am wrong, but maybe the Easter Bunny is real.
Do I need to remind anyone these are the mofos greenlighting the spread of misinformation of all types, science denial, propaganda from the enemies of democracy, conspiracy theories from every lunatic on earth, election stealing, suicide instigation for teenagers, and the mass genocide of Muslims in Myanmar?
While I fall on the other side of this debate (I'm pro-federation with Meta), this article helpfully distinguishes between people's conflicting priorities. For some users it's important to defend Mastodon as a community and a set of social norms. For me the goal has always been wide adoption of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon was just a useful way to kickstart adoption, and Meta adopting it would be a huge boon to the protocol.
I'm not personally very interested in a small community of like-minded people on a mini-Twitter. I want a mega-social network linking multiple services, including big corporate ones and small community-run ones, like email or podcasting (as someone else here mentioned).
This too should be a selling point for the Fediverse, no? There will be Mastodon, kbin, etc. instances that do federate with Meta, and some that don't. And that's fine, because the platform encourages the choice in freedom of association.
But, as demonstrated by the quotes that begin this article, there seems to be an abstracted, ideological opposition to the idea of anyone defederatinfg with Meta. I don't necessarily want "a small community of like-minded people on a mini-Twitter" either (we'll put), but I do want my information to not be (easily) accessible to corporations who openly intend to abuse it.