Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it’s shady that there’s Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it’s even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and have their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems bizarrely starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Now that I think about it, Zuck does seem to have that effect on people. Does he actually have a mind-washing beam?
It‘s called money.
I think there’s probably a reasonable explanation for this. The entire idea of Mastodon was built around getting away from companies like Meta. The admins arent going to just do a 180 on that.
It’s more likely that Meta wants to do a similar thing as Truth Social and they are doing some consultation work. It would be good money and I don’t blame them for taking it.
I hope this is the case and they don’t try to federate
Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.
As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.
There’s also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they…Don’t really need their own public app to do that), and so on.
Upvoted for mentioning EEE. Meta has been really active in facilitating progress in the opensource community lately with their work on LLAMA, so I’m not surprised to hear they are involved elsewhere.
Like much of big tech, they’ve been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it’s a nice sounding alliteration, but it’s a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
Google successfully EEE the internet. They embraced chromium, extended such that they were the main (only) force that determines internet standads, now they extinguish all competition or obstacles in the ad space by setting the rules. This was done through free open source software.
Would love to see Mozilla come up with a few new standards
sorry to be so direct, but if anyone is parroting anything, it’s you with the “they would never do that thing they always do, i’m super reasonable” position. EEE is literally covered in the first leaked Halloween document as a strategy to displace open standards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II
this is a strategy microsoft has consistently used for years and continues to use to this day. hell, they are embracing and extending javascript right now with typescript.
Once again, you’re referencing documents from the 90s and typescript continues to be open source. Are you expecting javascript to be extinguished?
Off topic joke: As a JS dev, I wish it were extinguished 😂
Thank you for understanding.
“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” might be difficult to make work with Free Software because it can be forked, but that doesn’t categorically exclude it from being a strategy companies can try. It’s still relevant to warn the community about.
Oh it’s past warning at this point, it’s irrational paranoia led by people who haven’t the slightest idea how any of this works. Users are up in arms because Mastadon admins had a meeting, Lemmy users are demanding their instances sign petitions to defederate Meta instances immediately, all citing an outdated business strategy from the 90s that doesn’t even apply to this situation. This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source, nobody can take this away from you, and I’m pretty sure Meta has other things in mind other than absorbing the existing 1M fediverse users into their 4B userbase.
My point is, everyone needs to calm down, watching and waiting is absolutely the correct move here. There is no operating in the shadows when contributing to open source software, so let them contribute. Honestly they probably just want to hit market faster and it’s easier to build on top of open source software than to build it all from scratch.
This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source
I didn’t say “free software;” I said Free Software. Quit being a condescending jackass who assumes anybody that disagrees with you must be ignorant, because that isn’t true.
Sorry for misunderstanding your use of “free software”, but is the direction you’re taking in this discussion really just going to be calling me a condensing jackass? Guess we won’t be escaping Reddit culture here after all.
Sorry for misunderstanding your use of “free software”
Apology accepted, and thank you for tacitly acknowledging that other people might have a better understanding than you initially assumed.
but is the direction you’re taking in this discussion really just going to be calling me a condensing jackass? Guess we won’t be escaping Reddit culture here after all.
Condescension is no less uncivil than vulgar language. In fact, I’d assert that politely arguing in bad faith (including the tone policing itself, by the way) is much more toxic than impolitely calling it out is. (I would even go so far as to argue that rules enforcing superficial “civility” instead of good faith were one of the largest problems with Reddit).
If you’re truly concerned about not perpetuating Reddit culture, examine your own actions first.
undefined> does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
Not to be a contrarian, but I feel this is a false claim here. After some time we will lose the mind share that gets people to switch over. People won’t switch from Messenger and WhatsApp to Telegram or Signal. At one point people are just too situated.
I think it’s different with those services, as they weren’t slowly built on top of eachother and as messaging apps they require your personal friends and family to also migrate to fully utilize. I didn’t know anyone personally on Reddit, so the switch to Lemmy was easy as soon as users started moving here overall. Also the build style of a single piece of software makes it easy to fork out when needed rather than having to fully migrate, and since it’s all built on ActivityPub theoretically you could still interact with those instances.
If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they’ll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it’s just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.
It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.
Yeah. I have some concerns about moderation, but, like, it’s 3 or 4 clicks to just silence the whole domain and pick and choose who I want to follow by hand.
I heard Facebook was going to make something “built on Mastodon,” but I didn’t think federation was on the table too. I would think a company wouldn’t want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
Likewise, if I ran a Mastodon server, I’d block them immediately. I don’t use Facebook for a reason, and anyone who would just blindly let Facebook scoop up their community data is part of the problem.
I posted this on Mastodon, but I completely disagree with the idea of defederating from Meta instances on principal for the same reason I don’t want my Fastmail account to stop interacting with Gmail accounts just because I feel Google is too corporate. That defeats the entire purpose of open standards and federated content. I should be able to choose to personally block content from Meta instances if I want to, but it’s to the detriment of the community to fracture the Fediverse just because it’s starting to grow large enough to attract attention from one of the big tech companies.
The reality is, a federated Meta service would at least initially grow the idea of federated social media as a whole, and likely drive traffic to Kbin/Lemmy/Mastodon from people who want to get off of the Meta platforms, but don’t want to cut contact with their friends/coworkers/enemies entirely. While I probably wouldn’t make an account, I’d be interested in at least being able to follow a few of my friends who I actually have interest in seeing updates from via my Masto/Kbin accounts.
And I’m aware of the embrace/extend/extinguish paradigm, but premature defederation isn’t the answer there either.
I’m an advocate for federated content for convenience, not on principal alone.
Strongly agreed. Federation becoming mainstream accessible is a good thing IMO. Content is what made reddit good and let’s face it: we don’t have that much of it. Eg, my local city sub used to be fairly active. I don’t have anything like that here. I even tried to make it myself, posted a bit, and tried to promote in relevant places, and last I checked it’s population: me, myself, and I. We clearly need far more people to be able to have many of the smaller, niche communities that I love.
I agree, I think we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by immediately defederating. This is an opportunity for a lot of people to get their feet wet with the Fediverse, and potentially bring them to more open parts of the platform. I don’t think a lot of people understand that Meta is free to set-up their own dystopian corpo-instance without that carrying over to affect the independent ones.
I don’t think a lot of people understand that Meta is free to set-up their own dystopian corpo-instance without that carrying over to affect the independent ones.
Absolute darkest timeline, they wave enough money to buy out their competitor platforms or the owner of Activitypub itself, open source is closed now, and the concept of federation becomes corporate like everything else already is and apparently always will be. Not entirely likely and not to that extent, but it’s technically possible. While they aren’t guaranteed to take the world’s biggest shit in the pool, it would be naive to suggest they’re going to play nice with everything forever, given who they are and how much control they could have if they just put enough time into strong-arming it.
You and the comment you were replying to make really solid points and I enjoyed the expanded perspective. It’s these longer, actually nuanced comments that are beginning to really make me feel how ridiculously people treat the downvote button. And I think overall I’ve been swayed to support meta being blocked by individuals rather than defederated by whole instances. But I’m still not going to pretend this is all they’re going to do if they can possibly do more. It was inevitable, but I don’t have to trust facebook over it
I would think a company wouldn’t want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
As if Facebook does actual moderation.
They’ll build bots and ban users algorithmically, as usual.
And use the fediverse to spread metric shit tons of misinformation, lies, and garbage, all while scooping up Fediverse user data to sell.
There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing either of those things right now though.
Of course that’s true, but we already know Meta to be a bad actor… remember Cambridge Analytica? Why would anyone trust them to do the right thing in entering the fediverse in a desperate search for more users to abuse? They’ve fucked over society so many times that they dont even have real sections on their Wikipedia pages for it, instead there are whole other Wikipedia pages just devoted to Meta criticism, controversies, and lawsuits. At what point are people justified in noping out? I dont blame anyone for wanting to shut the front door before their shitty neighbor starts knocking.
Sidenote: I sound way more triggered than I am, I’m currently bored out of gourd due to circumstances beyond my control and just have a lot of time on my hands for ranting, lol. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. 🤪
undefined> As if Facebook does actual moderation.
Post boobs and find out how fast they moderate.
Facebook is just looking for more content on the cheap and more corners of the internet to spread their tendrils into.
That’s what’s got me curious. I suppose they could just not provide an option to turn off their nsfw filter, but wishing everyone would appropriately tag their damn porn still doesn’t ensure a family-friendly environment. The best practice would be for platforms to rework their communities/magazines to add specific auto-tags to every submitted post. Technically even then, all posts in m/ boob being auto # boob-ed doesn’t stop anyone posting boobs to m/kittens. In fact, it would probably encourage it a little.
If they want zero porn anywhere ever, their best step would be to not even federate with anyone but themselves. So I wanna know if they’re just…gonna embrace the boobs out of necessity.
I think meta is deliberately trying to fly under the radar until it too late. Several fedi communities have signed a ‘pledge’ saying they will actively block meta fedi content from their servers. (Similar to what most are already doing with Truth Social which is just another mastodon instance).
Truth.social was actually never part of the Fediverse. It does use AcitivtyPub, but it doesn’t federate with other instances: https://pocketnow.com/trump-truth-social-network-removes-most-freedom-friendly-features-fediverse/
I’ll be honest, part of the reason I didn’t come to the Fediverse earlier was I knew that Truth Social was “on” Mastodon. That discouraged me from investigating anything about it. When Reddit forced my hand and I looked into it further, I realized that avoiding the whole space because Truth Social ran on it was as absurd as avoiding the Internet because Fox News has a website.
If I’m not mistaken, I think Gab and Parler were also just re-branded ActivityPub Free Software (which sucks, but changing the license to prevent bad actors from using it would make it un-Free and therefore the cure would be worse than the disease). It just goes to show how those hypocrites are happy to claim to be superior in their rugged individualism, but actually just take from others instead of accomplishing anything themselves.
undefined> hypocrites are happy to claim to be superior in their rugged individualism
Few Libertarians would be able to live, let along enjoy living, in Latin America outside of the rich neighborhoods and resorts.
Removed by mod
The thing is because it doesn’t federate, for all intents and purposes it’s simply a Twitter clone that just happens to be based on mastodon
Very interesting. I had no idea truth social used ActivityPub.
My [paranoid] take: its vaporware designed to distract from the reddit fiasco, with plans fo mr meta to later absorb reddit instead of a reddit IPO. Reddit users are very different than Twitter users; the mass exodus didn’t happfrom Twitter to Mastodon, but looks very promising from reddit to lemmy/kbin. And it takes only one social media giant to crumble for the rest to follow. Once people are on Fediverse there is no going back
Honestly, yeah. If I ever jump ship again, it’ll be to another fediverse platform.
I think it has absolutely nothing to do with Reddit and everything to do with Twitter.
I think they scrambled to get something up and running quickly so they could get the wave of disgruntled Twitter users and jumpstart a new social media for them, and the only feasible option in 5 months was to use Mastodon/Activitypub to get there.
It will be interesting to see how much they give back to the community and if they federate.
I’ve heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.
And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We’ve had enough of corporate socials lately.
The shocking news this week was that a couple of admins of large Mastodon instances were talking with Meta (under NDA’s!), so it seems your hope (and mine) will be in vain.
It’s really going to be up to the users to push back should the admins get a payout to do something not in the communities interest.
Everyone is going to have to remain nimble and not rely on finding a permanent server until corporations get the message that this is a space that cannot be monetized in a capitalist way.
Given the “anyone can join in” nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.
There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there’s a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But… there’s definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.
probably an unpopular opinion but facebook does also have a sort of track record of contributing to open source projects in ways that benefit everyone. facebook wanted to use subversion (or some other non-git source control) and contributed significantly so that it would work great for huge repositories like theirs. and facebook use memcached for their caches and contribute heavily so that they can use it more efficiently.
i’m also skeptical about end motivations, but in terms of being able to lend engineering effort to open source projects and helping to create a better product for all, it’s not such a bad idea.
It’s amazing seeing people who, after everything destructive action taken by these large corporations in these settings, still think maybe this time will magically be different and look to a corporation like it’s their potential dad who they can’t possibly survive let alone thrive without.
Even in here some are like “but we need the corporations”.
I certainly don‘t and I‘m fully prepared to go to an instance which stands with me on this. Defederation from all big corporations (small ones are probably impossible to weed out and hopefully less dangerous but should be kept an eye on). If that makes my version of the fediverse smaller, so be it, I like small communities anyway.
They infiltrate these spaces, they take over and “make it better” to lure people, then they centralise and then when people become dependent they enshittify it to sell us, sell our data, sell anything we say and also sell shit to us which we don’t need. All the while condescendingly applying their “codes of conduct” on us to be allowed the privilege to make them money.
I repeat: I don‘t need them. I don‘t want them.
If the majority accept this and my small communities here die too, this will be the last time for me. I‘m just gonna live like a monk in some Austrian forest without internet. All I ever wanted is to talk to some cool people around the world about life and stuff I like.
Well said! I’m in complete agreement.
I feel you completely. I spend most of my free time with my family, hiking or paddling, or reading books. It’s nice to have places online to burn some time, but I’d sooner give it up than be forced into some corporate playground. The past 15-20 years have shown that it just doesn’t work.
💀
Honestly, a lot of people might disagree but, corporate involvement is essential to FOSS projects surviving. The biggest FOSS project on the planet, Linux, is literally propped up by the biggest corporations on the planet.
The only potential issue I see here is maybe Meta forks ActivityPub and it becomes a “Meta Project” or some other fuckery. Outside of that I don’t see any major issues with it. If we want ActivityPub to become something greater, we’re going to need corporations on board. We have strong protections in place right now with a lot of the stuff that’s being used being under strong copyleft licenses, and decentralization by nature is going to allow us to opt out of a lot of the ads and tracking that takes place by being forced to use an official app.
They certainly want to compete with the fediverse with their own fediverse product, and are just approaching ActivityPub to learn as much about their open standard as possible, so that they can adapt it to be proprietary. But even that could work for me if it was still compatible with the fediverse, although they might be defederated from. It could actually be cool if it was defederated like on a protocol level, so that users from all lemmy instances could interact together on meta posts separately from users on meta instances
My problem is that they will have their own mods, their own communities and their own content. They will flood the federated space with their content and ban people and servers they don’t like. It could easily centralise due to the sheer amount of users they bring and you will find it hard to find non Facebook based communities.
While that is true, I anticipate that as a user you can choose to block all of that, just like I could have a reddit experience without r/conservative and without ads. We will always be able to find our niches, the size of which is determined by how many people share your values.
That being said, it’s indeed up to us to make sure the largest communities don’t end up on some weird fork that has ads.
Linux is propped up by the corps that would lose if Linux went away. Not by Zuckerberg.
Here are the Linux foundation members.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
Meta and Microsoft are among the Platinum members in the Linux foundation. Basically a lot of international mega corporations are sponsors of Linux.
Because they depend on it. The whole internet runs almost exclusively on Linux. To replace it would cost so much more money than just paying to the foundation to sit at the table and at least get a word in decisions. Trust me, Microsoft tried very hard, and burned billions of dollars, never got anywhere near to threatening Linux’s supremacy.
because they depend on it
They are also the biggest contributors to linux projects such as io-uring, btrfs, rpm’s, and more. They don’t depend on it, they are part of it.
Both things are true at the same time. GNU/Linux existed for decades before Fuckerberg squirted Facebook out of his rear end. They’re a part of it, because they depend on it. There’s no alternative.
Agreed.
it’s an interesting development that will have a direct impact on lemmy since mastodon and lemmy users can interact with each other.
time will tell how closely they follow microsoft’s old “embrace, extend, extinguish” game plan for combatting open standards. who knows? maybe they will be good faith actors in this new space, or won’t be able to gain enough user share to truly do nasty stuff.
I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it’s shady that there’s Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it’s even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and haave their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems a little starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
On the one hand, embrace-extend-extinguish is a classic playbook for big evil companies.
- Facebook runs a version of mastodon or lemmy or whatever that is actually good
- People get on board because it’s usable and ostensibly open
- Facebook invents features that, sadly, are not possible with ActivityPub (actual private messages come to mind)
On the other hand, it remains to be seen if anyone takes Meta up on a new offering. I’d have complete faith in the future of the open Internet if it was Google trying this.
I’ve heard some rumours but I’m not worried.They can create an instance if they want, by fediverse nature if they do something nasty others would be able to defederste from them.
