If Meta federates with the Fediverse, do my Mastodon posts (e.g.) show up on FaceBook?
If Meta federates with the Fediverse, do my Mastodon posts (e.g.) show up on FaceBook?
I do not want my posts from anywhere on the Fediverse on FaceBook.
I have have seen people express worry over FaceBook posts showing up on the Fediverse. But, what about our posts showing up on FaceBook.
If Meta federates with the Fediverse, do my Mastodon posts (e.g.) show up on FaceBook?
It’s not Facebook that will federate. It’s their new to be released platform. So nothing will go on Facebook.
And like any other server you can just block theirs in your account so they don’t see you and you don’t see them.
I think they're going to build it into Instagram? Instant 1.6bn users.
If the instance you are on doesn't defederate from this hypothetical Meta instance, then yes. I'd leave any instance that didn't immediately do so upon it becoming a thing, personally.
Amen.
I think it would be the new Instagram Threads app. It looks like a great way for them to get a lot of free content for their new app.
I'm very interested in what thr Mastodon and Lemmy instance admins have planned. I think there are great arguments made in: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I haven't heard counter arguments that are equally well supported, but would love to hear them.
As someone who is cautiously optimistic about Meta's ActivityPub adventure, my main disagreement with the author is over
The goal [of the Fediverse] is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer
I'd like to see ActivityPub and the Fediverse at large succeed, that is actually gain significant adoption among the average user, people that don't care about freedom, decentralization etc. I disagree with a very common take on the Fediverse which seems to be "we don't want to succeed, we want to make our happy little garden, it doesn't matter if the overwhelming majority of people stay on centralized social media" because I think widespread adoption of federation (for social media, but also for code forges etc.) and open, interoperable protocols (matrix!) is important for society: less reliance on American tech giants, more resilience (services just shutting down as they run out of VC money impacts less content/users) and so on.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn't scale. The risk of EEE is very real though, but Meta making an ActivityPub move will hopefully be a signal for others to follow, and the best way of ensuring Meta doesn't subvert ActivityPub development is by having other stakeholders that are just as important to counterbalance its influence, not by having 5k-10k-users instances de-federate from Threads because their admin (rightfully!) doesn't like Meta.
Im on the other end of this. As a recent reddit refugee and general anti capitalist i am strongly opposed to association or integration of tech giants with this fledgling infant of a democratic social network. Time and again corporations have shown that they will inevitably ruin a good thing for their profits. It happens all the time, your food gets more expensive while quality and quantity only decline. Everyday goods are now subscriptions, everything becomes a commodity. Buying a home is a fever dream for the average citizen because commercial entities buy anything and everything even over market rate just to corner the market. And to use some more recent tech examples, look at streaming services. Piracy was a thing, then Netflix came and made it obsolete through convenience and a fair price. Now greed has not only ruined Netflix but also spawned a dozen subpar clones because everyone makes their content exclusive out of greed, devaluing each other. And just these last weeks we can watch what short sighted bullshit happens to social media when billionaires (or spez) feel their fortune is in danger.
Fuck right off with yet another corporation quasi monopolizing internet communities. Any instance that associates with corporations is an immediate quit and block for me.
I am one of those people who does not want massive widespread adoption. Then we just turn into something else to be monetized with no privacy or security. If someone wants that, there are plenty of godawful social networks they can go to.
I see this in the Linux ecosystem as well. Everyone who wants it to overtake Microsoft or Apple is more than willing to sacrifice what makes Linux better in the first place just for what? Numbers? I would rather have the greatest thing in the world that has a steep learning curve so only twenty people use it but who appreciate it than sacrifice everything about it that is great so 20,000 people can use it.
Same with Signal. People complained about the devs getting rid of SMS support because now Memaw won't use the app anymore, despite the devs stating that to keep SMS support would make the app inherently less secure, which is the entire point of the app.
I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we're happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.
The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that's cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn't scale.
Why do you think donation based doesn't scale? If x percent of users donate and the server cost per user scales linearly it does. Also as large User numbers are reached you will find some power users which free to play games call whales. I don't see how it doesn't scale financially.
It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don't think we are in a hurry here. I'm not on the building a little garden side of things. It'd be great if eventually all social would be open source and decentralized. It's a must to keep our societies and democracies intact even. You can't enormously powerful tools of mass communication and mass manipulation in the hands of companies and closed source algorithms nobody knows what they do.
I do like your counterbalance argument. If multiple tech companies come in competition might reduce the risk of EEE. And I do hope decentralization reduces the risk of them putting their own sorting algorithm on things and then killing other apps by not adhering to certain standards or something.
My opposition to Facebook joining the Fediverse, through threads, is that everything that Facebook touches, becomes garbage. Instagram was a fantastic photo sharing app, until Facebook bought it, destroyed the community, and then changed the app from photo sharing to video sharing. Most of the people my age were part of Facebook, when it was young, vibrant, and a network of friends of friends.
We chose to leave Facebook for a reason. We chose to leave Instagram for a reason. For the leeches to then come, and invade yet another space is frustrating. We made a conscious choice to break from our Facebook friends, and Instagram friends, and now Meta wants to invade the Fediverse.
For me, it's not about protocols. It's about their habit of invading and destroying communities. Twitter was invaded and destroyed. With Twitter's demise, I considered dumping social media, altogether. Reddit reacted so strongly to their own changes, because we have seen how badly Twitter is being treated today. Reddit doesn't want to allow that to happen to them. For clarity when I say Reddit, I mean the Reddit community, not the Reddit owners and shareholders.The two potential roads seem somewhat equivalent to me:
- Threads federation is blocked by the main Mastodon instances. A huge user base of non-techies starts using Threads and it dwarfs the rest of the fediverse acting as a singular centralised platform. The fediverse continues to be a techie/ideological anti-corporate community as it is now with a relatively small community in the grand scheme of things.
- Threads federated with some of the big Mastodon instances. Fediverse instances outside of Threads get a large amount of growth as people see the extra content available in this larger federated environment. Growth of Threads still outpaces all other fediverse instances combined. Meta then carries out some form of EEE tactics and some large chunk of the userbase of the non-Threads instances switch to Threads. The techie/anti-corporate community continues to use fediverse instances without any interaction with Threads.
Both scenarios end in a large centralised platform run by Meta and a small community that want to avoid a corporate platform.
I think it's also wise to separate the effect of large corporate instances in the fediverse between effects on Mastodon (where users follow users) vs Lemmy/Kbin (where users follow communities). In the case of Mastodon, the effects of EEE tactics will be strong due to a more powerful network effect because it's important that a particular person is on the same platform as you (i.e. this is a similar situation to XMPP and gchat). In contrast, you just need some people to participate in a Lemmy/Kbin community to make it worth joining, but it doesn't matter exactly who, meaning that membership can be small and sparse but the community still has a meaningful existence (i.e like niche forums).
Really good distinctions about Lemmy vs Mastedon.
To counter the 'rounding error' argument, I would argue that Meta is making the decision to federate because it makes business sense. Either they see that Mastedon is valuable today, or they see that it might become valuable in that future. Either way they are acting now to move that value to their company.
A lot of smaller Masto/Pleroma/other "microblog" side of the verse admins signed FediPact. It's mostly smaller instances, but there's still a good amount of them and it's enough that Meta will at least face some struggles in wide federation.
Google killed XMPP by being the vast majority of the network and then defederating from the rest. Most of the gmail users didn't even notice anything had happened.
I see a couple of differences here. One is that it should be obvious to even the most casual of users that other instances exist. And the second is that other mega-corps have said they'll build instances too. With multiple very large instances, they may end up holding each other hostage, for fear of losing users to each other when so many people have multiple logins just because they have an account with one of the mega-corps.
One thing is for sure. Insta has 1.6bn users and it doesn't need to federate with anyone at all; the fediverse is a rounding error to them. Some people will want the massiveness of the network, others will want better moderation than the mega-corps are likely to offer, and some will prefer smaller networks anyway. There will be as many reactions as there are instances to react. And that will have to be fine.
I think large data broker businesses are going to have a hard time integrating federated sources with their existing user data. Mainly because, they have privacy policies that let them sell their user's data, retain it, monetise it and overall take ownership of it. Everyone that signs up to any of the bigger social media sites agrees to that.
But the user's whose data they will be vacuuming up by joining federated instances will not have agreed to any such privacy policy and as such could create a need to at least separate data.
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm sure there's a reason for these long and convoluted privacy policies and I find it hard to believe they work in the user's favour.
Is this not effectively what is being done by AI companies when they scrape data? I know that I never agreed to have any contributions I ever made anywhere be hoovered up and used to train any AI.
Interesting, I didn't think of this. I assume anyone does whatever data mining they want on Fediveres content, but maybe it won't be worth as much because they have less identifying info about the users?
I think they have several times more users than all mastodon instances combined, though?
Just make your account on an instance that refuses to federate with meta, there's groups of people agreeing to do so.
I don't understand what this post means. Can someone explain?