I’m glad there were emojis in the headline so I knew how to feel about it 🥴
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
How would they even extinguish a whole ecosystem of independent instances? What does that even look like?
They could very well make some feature or requirement and demand that every single ActivityPub instance uses their version to remain compatible…
…and instance hosts can just say no, fork it and keep going unbothered.
Even buying up some big Lemmies and Mastodons is not going to get them the whole Fediverse.
from https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html :
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.
Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.
I’ve seen people bringing this up, but while they talk of EEE and XMPP, it seems like the analogy here is not being quite finished and formulated.
If we apply that to this, it seems like people are saying “if Meta changed the ActivityPub protocol to favor them and become incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, Fediverse users would choose to return to Meta-owned platforms.”
And that’s what I’m questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn’t. I’d rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
And that’s what I’m questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn’t. I’d rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out
The network effect can be strong. Say you’re now able to contact all your friends via your favourite Activitypub instance, you had to previously use Facebook.com or Threads or whatever but now they’re all here. You delete your Facebook and keep your Activitypub account to speak to all your friends who are on Threads.
Now Meta pulls the federation plug, or adds some feature that makes your Activitypub server not able to fully cooperate (Maybe you can talk, but you can’t video call anymore, or you can’t post GIF/images, whatever). Now what? All your friends are over there and getting annoyed with you. So… you eventually succumb and fire up a Threads account.
That’s no worse than you started. The fact remains nobody is going to get 100% coverage of their contact list on the fediverse without Meta, so trading a Facebook account for a threads account is no different, and it ignores the benefits of that time when you maybe able to live without either.
Right? I don’t know how to express any more clearly for the people who already are here that being here right now is the proof that there are people will choose a better platform over the most popular one. Unless they are admitting they are personally one temptation away from returning to Facebook.
I agree with you, I’m totally fine federating with them. If they choose to become incompatible with me, THEIR users will lose access to the content on the rest of the fediverse. They have an obligation to get ad revenue. If they can have someone else host the content, then use their interface to put ads and collect data on their users, it sounds like a win, as those users can still interact with me. If they really wanted to EEE and create incompatibilities, the rest of the ActivityPub instances just carry on as normal without supporting those extensions. The ecosystem already exists without the integration, so it’ll just go back to being separate again, exactly as it is now.
They don’t need to kill “every” lemmy/masto instance to kill the ecosystem. You just need to absorb enough of it that the only people left outside of your perversion of the ecosystem are certified weirdos.
E-Mail was (and still is) an open standard anyone could use. But after decades of getting EEE’d, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone using an E-Mail Not provided by the corporate giants, even like, other enterprises have rolled their e-mails into the Google/Microsoft ecosystems, and ALSO if you have an e-mail address that is outside those domains, normies who are inside the corporate ecosystem will have trouble communicating with you as your address will get autoflagged as spam more often than not.
…we already are all certified weirdoes. The average internet user doesn’t have a single clue what Lemmy or Mastodon is. There isn’t an Established Fediverse Institution that is household name for regular people on social media.
Meta could buy up lemmy.world and mastodon.social and they’d end up… exactly in the same place because most people who got into those got there to avoid big social media companies to begin with, and they’d jump ship immediately. This is the alternative social media movement. The people who are on established protocols are the ones who are already on Facebook and Twitter, and many don’t even like those. They only stick around on those because everything else sounds too complicated for them.
Facebook and Twitter are today’s social media GMail and Outlook equivalents. Lemmy and Mastodon are not.
People throw EEE around full of fear but it just sounds like it just became a sort of boogeyman mantra. It doesn’t apply. There isn’t some magic that can make Meta dominate a whole decentralized ecosystem like this. The only possible way for it to happen is if everyone decided to jump back there (which is what happened to GMail and Outlook) but paradoxically because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity, the odds of that happening are zero.
Hope my and other instances will de-federate from Threads/Meta.
We don’t need that spyware giant in the fediverse…
Looks like you’re in luck, your instance already has them defederated pre-emptively https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances (for anyone else, you can check your instances tab at the bottom right of the page, or just put /instances at the end of the url)
Thank you for sharing that link.
And man happy to be on tchncs lately! :DJesus some of the names of the blocked instances are disturbing as hell
I sincerely hope beehaw doesn’t federate with Meta. They’re pure evil
Meta is a shitbag company and I hope we can block their shitbag posts in our feeds.
“I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
If I wanted Facebook shitposts and forwards from KlanMa, I’d’ve joined Facebook. And I don’t believe Meta has good intentions, I believe they want to overwhelm the fediverse, and I believe they want to make money. Middle-manager Cottle and their team may have good intentions, but corporate certainly doesn’t, and I certainly don’t trust their users.
If I wanted Facebook shitposts and forwards from KlanMa, I’d’ve joined Facebook.
I want to connect and talk to people from the Metaverse (Facebook and Threads, is it called like that?) without using their account and applications. Meta connecting to Fediverse is a good move in my opinion and what the world needs (I’m not sarcastic at the moment). In fact, I wish every company in the world offering social media would connect to the Fediverse. We have builtin ways to block other instances if we don’t like them. Hell even Reddit should do it…
I can’t see anything good coming from a company that actively spreads hatred and racism. Most of came here to get away from reddit and I keep everyone saying fuck spez, fuck reddit but hey let’s invite someone who 100 worse than spez to the fediverse. Someone who has no morals at all, someone who admits he doesn’t care about privacy. Why? Just so that fediverse can grow? Is it really worth it? So you can speak with friends on threads? Make a threads account and use an ad blocker to talk to them.
I don’t mind bridging with other protocols like bluesky but I don’t not see any value in federsting with threads it will only fil the the fediverse with so much crap that we will not able to block it.
Well that is my opinion anyway(hi ya!) Yes, totally understandable. The thing is, I am not inviting spez or suckerburg, but the users. They don’t take control over Fediverse and we have the ability to block any instance or person we want. It’s not just that Fediverse can grow, but so that it becomes the standard protocol to communicate with others. Fediverse isn’t a specific platform.
( Edit: This paragraph is just an analogy in other areas, where bringing them together benefits the users, just so they can communicate and interact with each other. ) It’s basically asking for every game company open to cross play games or that Windows users can write with Linux users through web technology, with their favorite applications, accounts and servers.
Finally we have an universal protocol that can be adapted by anyone, similar to what HTML became for websites. I understand the concerns, and there is also a reason why I left Facebook over 10 years ago, don’t use Twitter and Reddit.
I get what you say but Facebook is full of toxic users it’s not suckerberg the problem. And defederating will not help because you will have to defenderate also with instances that want to federate with Facebook or else the messages will eventually come through. At least that how I
understand federation works. So eventually you would have to fediverses.
I would love to have a unifiying protocol but I really don’t think it will work. It will split people eventually someone will fork the protocol so that it can not federate with Facebook, splitting it.Yeah, that would zuck, if it works like this and we cannot de-federate effectively. This problem needs to be solved off course, but that is something that can be integrated later. The important part is, let the users federate if they want, let them decide. That off course should only happen if the system is working correctly (such as entirely federating, like you suggested). Edit: Too many But(t)s removed.
And if someone truly creates a fork of the protocol, then it would most probably be compatible. And you could switch to it if you truly want to. That’s the point of it, which people and we don’t get with Facebook. I do not want to use their spyware and not be part of it, but I want to talk to people using it (like family).
I am not sure it can be fixed because that is just how federation works else the activity pub would have to rewriten from scratch.
I don’t see the fork being compatible because that is the reason to fork it in the first place, people not agreeing with what should be federated or not.
I don’t think isolationism is going to help the Fediverse thrive, or that there are no worthwhile users on Facebook platforms that could be persuaded to come this way if they get to see what it’s like.
Having to deal with toxicity from that would suck, but it’s not as if the Fediverse is this pure untainted land either. Worst comes to worst, instances can defederate them.
I am not saying we should completely isolate us. As I said I open with bridging with other protocols. But I am against fedeting with Facebook because yes we are not a pure land but in comparison to the hell that is Facebook it’s better here.
Defederating with other instances can only do so much if not everyone does itI think in this discussion people aren’t putting in perspective that Facebook as a platform can suck but that doesn’t mean all their userbase is terrible and ill-intentioned. There’s a lot of different people there that could become good contributors in the Fediverse.
I don’t think we should invite Mark Zuckerberg to get the reins of Lemmy, but if some of the artists at Instagram and Threads decide that Mastodon is worthwhile, that’d be pretty good.
No we take that into perspective but the good does not outweigh the damage that all the toxic people will do.
The Fediverse has no lack of toxic people, entire toxic instances, and we can handle them just fine.
I’m not particularly worried about it. I can block them if they annoy me. And on the bright side, their large user base may help make the Fediverse mainstream enough to topple the tech giants.
You can’t topple a tech giant with tech giant tech users. The fuck?
Network effect. Users need the ability to connect to most other users, in order for them to start leaving the tech giant.
My instance will most definitely not be federating with this. It’s Meta. Untrustworthy to the core. I didn’t spin up my own Lemmy server and pay out of pocket monthly just to loop bullshit social media companies back into it.
why sad faces. it looks awesome and i love how excited they are about activitypub embracing open standards should always be encouraged
It’s quite disarming, isn’t it?
But the nice happy guys coding the thing now are not the ones who are going to make the decisions later which will bring about the extend + extinguish phases, the ads, the crypto or whatever form the enshittification takes.
That means you can interact with your friends on threads without using their app and seeing their ads. It’s a big win.
Until meta starts to slowly block small instances and we end up with the next email. Technically federated, but controlled by a few large corporations that dictates the block lists. Let us block them first so we get to define what the fediverse should look like, not them.
I want to be a good enough friend to encourage my friends to stay away from Meta. I don’t want to enable them.
This will probably be enough for me to convince my organisation to quit Twitter and spin up their own Mastodon instance if Incan te them that they will be able to reach Threads users
My concern with this (and other attempts like it) is that the initial integration will of course be done with good intentions by a team who shares the values of the community. And then they will get promotions or move to other jobs within two years and leave the technology to whims of revenue-generating part of the organization who will be merciless with it.
In terms of damage to the community, it’ll be impossible to talk to the people you want to with ten thousand spamming robots separating you.
Well, at least we’ve moved from “Meta is Satan! Defederate!!1!” to “They may mean well now but they’ll turn evil later.”
Well, at least we’ve moved from “Meta is Satan! Defederate!!1!”
No we haven’t. I never stopped screaming that.
I scream it now. Fuck Meta.
Is there a real problem there? One can always find an instance not federated with Meta.
My concern is that the toxic culture from Meta’s platforms will be imported here, and the only way to get away from it would be to not only defederate from Meta but to defederate from anything federated to Meta (essentially creating two fediverses). I hope it doesn’t come to that, but that’s my worry.
Replace “Meta” with “Hexbear”, “Lemmygrad”, “Lemmy World”, etc., and see how the multiple fediverses are working right now.
I think it will be very easy to find a host that federated from them, making it easy to mitigate the damage.
By moving to fediverse, we already left them behind. We’re being followed.
Lemmy users be like „I fucking love decentralized freedom“, until someone joins they don’t like.
Lemmy users be like „I fucking love decentralized freedom“, until someone joins they don’t like.
No, especially when someone joins that we don’t like. The ability to defederate is the freedom that comes with decentralisation. If there were no bad actors decentralisation wouldn’t be so important.
This.
There’s no “fediverse” to join. It’s not an actual place with boundaries and codified rules, beyond those imposed by the communication protocol.
It’s a free association content sharing network, and free association includes the freedom to not associate.
free association includes the freedom to not associate.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the aliens campaign for the US presidency, and can’t figure out why “abortions for all” and “abortions for none” are both unpopular opinions.
In other words, it’s about freedom of choice, not mandatory association.
Absolutely. The Fediverse has some gross ass places I don’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole.
It ain’t about people they don’t like, it’s about a powerful corporation known to be abusive, psychologically manipulative and unafraid to break laws so long as it benefits them.
You wouldn’t want such an entity under your roof either
No, but I would like to bring some of my friends and family members who use Facebook over to the Fediverse, and I believe it’s easier if they can already see what it’s like.
Then give them a URL link to a good instance.
Do you really expect Threads to provide a fair, uncompromised experience of the Fediverse when it’s actively against their interests to do so?
I think you’re conflating a couple things here.
Firstly, the notion that Lemmings are xenophobic is false. While there’s evidence to support this claim, on closer inspection you’ll see the issue isn’t about embracing new platforms, but the type of platforms. This attitude goes beyond the Threadiverse and is in fact one of the fundamental attitudes of the fediverse, as exhibited with corporate instances getting fediblocked on mastodon.
To suggest that everyone is petty because they’re not embracing corporations is a giant stretch.
Counter to the outright lie that’s being peddled here is the excitement about NodeBB and its ActivityPub implementation.
Secondly, people hate Facebook and rightfully so.
Thirdly, BlueSky is still a corporation who, doesn’t implement ActivityPub and have built a platform that pretends to give people power while hoarding all the real power for themselves.
Also, corporations aren’t “someones”.
Freedom doesn’t mean tolerating racism and hatred.
If I wasn’t trying to get away from Meta I wouldn’t be on fucking lemmy I’d be on facebook. The whole point of me being here is I am trying to get away from them and other big tech platforms :)
You come to the fediverse for a reason.
It’s not the freedom of federating. It’s the freedom of being outside corpo.
I don’t wanna be that guy, but Lemmy has had, and continues TO HAVE a very noticeable problem with tankies that does impact its reach. None of the people I know want to hang out here because its married to the hip with tankies.
Tell them to join an instance that doesn’t federate with tankies 🤷
That’s the future. All networks connected, but I can control what’s in my feed.
Its basically also the past right? RSS feeds.
How do you reply to a RSS feed?
Email?
I mean public reply.
Mailing list bot publishing everything on a web?
Just saying, but mailing lists predate the web itself, and so do Usenet news.
Opt-in only?
Also only really discusses outbound federation, how is inbound content going to work?
Meta will probably be pretty cautious and strict about what inbound content is allowed, since they have a global quagmire of laws and regulations to comply with and cannot just open up the firehose without significant legal risk. I’d imagine they’d only accept content from vetted instances that agree to some amount of common policy.
The whole thing is a preemptive move for EU laws requiring “gatekeepers” to allow interoperability with their ecosystem. Facebook is likely to accept any EU registered instance that is also subject to EU laws… and they may not bother with instances from regions that don’t require them to do so.
To be fair, it is understandable decision, as it would copy and connect data / posts to other servers automatically. On the other hand most people don’t care or understand what this is about and probably never enable it. Still better than nothing in my opinion. Hopefully all new users get a notification and popup to ask if they want to join the Fediverse too. And new user account registration will probably show an option too at registration time.
Seems unlikely. This is Meta’s malicious compliance with MDA or whatever from the EU.
How is it “malicious”?
At what exactly do you refer to? Meta does not need to federate with the Fediverse. I am not aware of any law that would force Meta doing this.
The DMA (Digital Markets Act) has clauses that force big companies that are considered “gatekeepers” to allow interoperability with other services.
Good to know! I guess that’s why Apple is forced to communicate with Android.
Yes, also why Apple is going to allow sideloading (even though they also are complying maliciously) and also MS now allows you to uninstall Edge.
All of this, of course, only applies in the EU.
On one hand, it makes sense for Threads to enable Fediverse integration only on public profiles, technically. With a Threads-only private profile, they can ensure that if you want to delete stuff in your profile or even your profile altogether, this can be deleted for good.
On the other hand, for people like me, it makes me unable to get in touch with my close ones who might choose to keep their profile on private. If they’d like to keep using the Fediverse in the future, they would have to choose between this or switching their profile view to public, and some people would dislike that.
This just makes Threads a poor choice for joining the Fediverse.
That’s the fundamental tension here.
The right to control your own posts, after posting, imposes an obligation on everyone who archives your posts to delete when you want them deleted.
For most of the internet, the balance is simply that a person who creates something doesn’t get to control it after it gets distributed to the world. Search engines, archive tools, even individual users can easily save a copy, maybe host that copy for further distribution, maybe even remix and edit it (see every meme format that relies on modification of some original phrase, image, etc.).
Even private, end to end encrypted conversations are often logged by the other end. You can send me a message and I might screenshot it.
A lot of us active on the Internet in the 90’s, participating in a lot of discussion around philosophical ideas like “information wants to be free” and “intellectual property is theft” and things like copyleft licenses (GPL), creative commons licensing, etc., wanted that to be the default vision for content created on the internet: freely distributed, never forgotten. Of course, that runs into tension with privacy rights (including the right to be forgotten), and possibly some appropriation concerns (independent artists not getting proper credit and attribution as something gets monetized). It’s not that simple anymore, and the defaults need to be chosen with conscious decisionmaking, while anyone who chooses to go outside of those defaults should be able to do that in a way knowledgeable of what tradeoffs they’re making.
With all the hate towards Facebook, my prediction is there will be two fediverses: one that federates with Facebook and the other that doesn’t. We’ll see how that plays out.
There are well over 10 “fediverses” already:
- Federates with Lemmygrad
- Federates with Hexbear
- Federates with LemmyWorld
- Federates with NSFW
- Federates with hardcore NSFW
- Federates with piracy
- … etc.
One more won’t change a thing, it’s working as intended.
You may have a point 🤔 Hadn’t considered that. Well, it’s fine. That’s the freedom provided by the protocol. Might as well embrace it.
Well, the ones that federate with Meta will still be federated with those who don’t. So it’s really no different from what the Fediverse is already: Fragmented by design.
