Could we get official word on what Kbin's stance is towards federating with Meta?

We (meaning the whole fediverse, all instances) need to be de-federating that crap immediately.

Nothing good will come from having Facebook streaming into here in anyway whatsoever.

The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.

Also, if Facebook is allowed to "work with" the development of the fediverse at all, they absolutely will eventually destroy it for profit. And "working with" it absolutely includes them federating with it.

When their vast resources are taken into account, and their existing userbase also, they would rapidly become the main instance (or collection of, but probably just one) of the whole fediverse. Once that's them, they can use that position to dictate terms pretty hard.

Before you know it, everyone that would eventually have come here are there instead, and they're now the fediverse. They can also fork the software and leverage their Dev teams to make their fediverse vastly more polished... No donations needed on their fediverse, less bugs, everyone you know is already over there... Seem familiar?

How does that effect us who aren't there, how isn't it just the same thing as now? Our fediverse dies off because the users leave, instances close down through lack of population/need, before you know it there's nobody here and the idea just dies.

Literally been done before. The playbook is absolutely common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

@Roundcat

Meta is facebook who engaged Cambridge Analytica to purchase our lives.

Not from us, but from them. Facebook literally sold out the world

Facebook nearly destroyed this country for a buck.

Fuck facebook. I don't want to avoid federating because I dont want them around; I want to avoid federating because anything I can do to starve them of every resource for growth that I possibly can is the best thing I can do about facebook.

There are over 70 kbin instances. If kbin.social is not to your liking, you can find another. https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

https://kglitch.social has defederated from Meta (well, blocked the domains that meta is expected to use). Registrations are open.

Meta cannot harm you by federating. If they want your data that you posted on kbin then they already have it. They run curl and they can swallow all your posts and metadata associated. Whatever you post is given for free to everyone with an internet connection.

Also Meta probably will never federate since it involves a huge risk that they will end up hosting illegal data against their will.

edit: also think in legal terms, meta will never publish content on their site if a federated server hasn't signed a mountain of legal documents beforehand. It's simply not happening. I'm only speaking on a user level. If our admin adopts a pro-facebook stance then of course it's a different story.

edit: The more I read about this the more doubt I have about this story. It seems that kbin still hasn't signed the fedipact? It's becoming a big deal and it will affect kbin even if we adopt a neutral stance. There is in fact no more neutral stance. We should sign.

We somehow defederated with the nsfw Lemmy instance over a big nothingburger.
If we stay connected with those hate groups however, then I'm out. That's where I draw my line for support.

I would like to know if I can feel safe here

If you have privacy concerns, you should probably not post here for time being.

It is prototype software. Doesn't remove EXIF geotags from photos, for example and posts here are public (and indexed by webcrawlers). Treat this as "open Internet" for your safety/privacy purposes.

Meta isn't federating yet, so we have time to discuss and make a decision.

A lot of the FUD regarding #Threads joining the #Fediverse has been put to sleep by #Mastodon on this blog post:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

"The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers."

Also @daringfireball made this blog post that I agree with:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open

"the idea that administrators of Mastodon/Fediverse instances should pledge to preemptively block Facebook’s imminent Twitter-like ActivityPub service (purportedly named Threads) strikes me as petty and deliberately insular. I don’t like Facebook, the company, and I’ve never seen the appeal of Facebook, the product (a.k.a. “the blue app”). But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?"

Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.

However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.

I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.

As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:

1. Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.

2. Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.

Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.

Why would KBin be unsafe?

Federation works by instances (e.g. kbin.social) registering an interest (subscribe/follow) in a specific magazine or person on other instances.

That means content is only brought into an instance that members of that instance are interested in (its the same with lemmy instances, we don't see everything).

Similarly on kbin users can block individuals, magazines or whole domains. So even if kbin.social does federate with meta you don't have to see/interact with it.

For instance I respect kbin users might want content from lemmy.ml, as the people who run it are tankies I have no interest in anything from that instance and block the domain.

I have no issues with part of the fediverse walling itself off from meta but remaining in contact with other instances. Similar to how beehaw defederated from lemmy.world but kbin could see beehaw and lemmy.world.

I would treat meta like any other instance, if its a source of headache then deferate.

The Embrace, Extend Extinguish argument makes no sense.

Take C#, many years ago Microsoft wanted to build its own Java JDK. As part of that they added Microsoft specific extensions. Sun said that wasn't acceptable. Microsoft didn't just stop, the renamed it C# and launched the product.

Everyone agreeing to defederate from meta won't mean they stop. It won't prevent EEE.

The best way to prevent EEE is given in our example. Java had a huge userbase who simply weren't interested in migrating.

So you need to encourage organisations to deploy KBin/Lemmy instances which integrate with the fediverse. That gives them reach and when Meta tries EEE they cut off content their users want. So it forces them to be a good citizen.

If ans when it federates, you have a handy-dandy button that lets you block instances.

Probably an unpopular opinion but I'd rather defederation be left to the users. I don't want to see content from Meta, but I want the ability to make that decision myself.

This is FUD, slow down take a deep breath and just give it time.

If you're truly worried about federating with Meta, you should probably also avoid all the other products they have their fingers in.

This includes all their web properties:

• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Onavo
• Oculus VR
• Beat Games
• Kustomer
• Lofelt

But this also includes many web technologies that are ubiquitous around the web. Meta has either created or contributes code and resources to:

• React.js
• MySql
• Memcached
• HHVM
• Cassandra
• Scribe
• Hadoop
• Hive
• Apache Thrift
• Varnish

I suspect you'll have a hard time finding any website on earth that doesn't use at least one of these technologies.

I'm not sure, but I'm running my own instance at https://fedi196.gay and I have already put threads.net into my defederate list