The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
Personally, I’m not planning on using the Meta service, but I’m not a fan of pre-emptive defederation either. The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as @username, not @username.
I’m totally fine with Meta releasing an app who’s posts are exposed via ActivityPub, along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub. If anything, I would like to think it’ll drive more people off the Meta platform and into Mastodon, as moving to a federated app doesn’t mean they have to completely break connections with their network on-platform with Meta.
Overall, I’m more in favour of allowing a personal user to choose to defederate from specific instances, because regardless of what happens, if Meta joins, there will be other companies getting on the bandwagon, and endlessly splitting up based of which instances federate with which others will eventually lead to the whole damn thing falling apart and the big players becoming the de-jure instances anyways.
I mean, the vast majority of Lemmy/Kbin users migrated from Reddit, as did the vast majority of Mastodon users from Twitter. I’m fine with keeping things open to help facilitate more user growth to community run instances, while also having a place for the less tech-savvy to get their feet wet.
There’s an argument to be made that that’s exactly why everyone else should defederate preemptively.
Exactly. I know it’s a bit elitist, but I just don’t care what meta users have to say about anything. If you’re dumb enough to participate in their little data extraction operations then I don’t want to know you.
“These dumb fucks keep giving me their data” - Zuckerberg
I think this is the logical pragmatic take. They’ll start on day 1 with more users than the entirety of the fediverse. Defederating just allows them to ignore us and pretend they own the fediverse. We should at least try to win over those users and prevent FB adware software overtaking Mastodon as the dominant fediverse platform.
If Meta wants a platform that’s larger than anything else they already have Facebook.
The one and only reason Meta’s looking at the fediverse is to scrape it for content. It’s social content they risk being left out of and they want in. It’s as simple as that.
Federate with their instances and they will scrape the shit out of yours, build shadow profiles around your users, feed all your posts and comments into their LLM, cross reference them with their Facebook data to figure out everybody’s real identity, and so on and so forth.
I like to think they see the rapid growth as an opportunity to grab some Reddit refugees. I’m not sure they see the Fediverse as a viable threat YET. They could hedge it though and try to snuff it out while they still can.
Nope
This is how they destroy competition that they can’t buy out.
Microsoft did it with office, intell did it to amd
Their network can’t survive a competitor, they depend on no other option existing
Guaranteed this is about disrupting and controlling the federated network
I don’t understand why people think the end goal should be one network of Fediverse instances connected to each other. We already don’t have that and never will.
Meta adding “more users than the entirety of the Fediverse” is irrelevant. They already have more users and content from Facebook, Instagram or whatever else Meta owns is not showing up on my Lemmy or Kbin front page. How is anything changing if the tech behind Meta’s services switches?
Edit: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
My thoughts are similar to yours, I don’t think instances should be defederating unless there’s a serious issue with the content of another instance.
Good instances should be winning over people by being better than whatever Facebook’s ad ridden, algorithm driven, instance ends up being.
I mean worst case you’ll see @meta.com accounts in your Federated feed in Mastodon (which for pretty much every instance is already a complete mess), I don’t even really see how it’ll affect Lemmy or Kbin, as they’re community driven rather than user driven. I follow users with Mastodon, I follow communities with Kbin.
I dunno, maybe I’m being necessarily optimistic, but I do have friends and family who are posting on Insta/FB, and I basically maintain an account there to keep up with them. I’d love to be able to keep that connection without having to actually be locked into Meta’s platforms. And I do think at least a few of my tech savvy friends would be willing to give a client like Ivory a go if they’re able to do the same.
Their idea is likely to eventually present themselves as the “better part of the network” and make migrating to their servers very easy.
This must be prevented at all costs.
I was talking about this with someone here the other day, and this seems like the logical direction for them. They’ll create a cloud of instances that users are able to utilize and create their own communities with relative ease compared to compiling the code and doing the base level software management, and also develop Meta-specific featuresets on those servers to lock people onto their platform. Oh, you want to break away from us and manage your own instance? Have fun doing it the hard way, and without features XYZ that are only available from us!
That is not the worst case, by a long shot
And you’re not just being optimistic, you’re being naive
Since you clearly didn’t read the article the commenter linked I’ll sum up the important point:
Corporations routinely infiltrate and integrate with open source in order to destroy it.
Meta will implement federation, then they will “extend” the specification with a bunch of new features that the other places of the fediverse can’t put out as fast, making anyone talking to a meta user at a disadvantage, just like how Apple calls out non-iMessage participants in a group text.
They’ll also likely implement a different specification than they publish, so that anyone implementing the meta features fails due to bad instructions
It’s been done multiple times before, for decades
Ffs, I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats
these corporations are not your friends, they are not on your side, they don’t even see you as slaves, you are livestock
A majority?! Fucking hell!
Using the iMessage analogy, we’re currently in a state where green bubbles can’t interact with blue bubbles at all. Nobody should be expecting full interop with a corporate platform, but for the long run I’d rather have partial interop at arms length.
Embrace extend extinguish only applies if platform is so focused that it cannot sustain itself without the extend phase, and the extend phase cannot happen without something to embrace.
I read a new article that said it remains to be seen whether P92 will allow users to see posts from other site (they’ll broadcast to ActivityPub but undecided about displaying contents from federated servers): https://tech.co/news/meta-decentralized-social-media
This doesn’t surprise me. The idea then might be to allow for people outside of their walled garden to follow (likely for big name accounts, celebrities, athletes, important people) etc, but not really be a true federated instance. In which case, I think defederating is even more pointless. Just let users on an instance follow who they want to follow.
At least here, if you’re not a fan of de/federation practice, it’s minimal work to change servers.
I’m not excited at the idea of my posts on another service entirely getting shipped off to a meta server for them to reconstruct my network through that activity. It’s the same issue of as their shadow profiles, where meta knows who you and who you know by watching the posts your mom makes on FB.
Some of this is inevitable, I know, but I’m at least here for adding more barriers to privacy theft.
I do not believe that ‘celebrities’ and athletes are important people at all.
They are important to capitalism. Not us.
https://thefreeonline.com/2015/10/20/capitalism-is-unnatural/
Most people who use social media disagree, and unfortunately for you, it’s their opinions that matter most as to whether they use a given social media platform.
I don’t really care to follow celebrities and athletes either, but I recognise at least that I am in a minority.
Oh I’m very much aware that the majority are not people that I want to interact with. That’s why I find this whole situation so ridiculous. This community could stay it’s current size and activity level and I’d be overjoyed with it.
Once you invite the majority to any platform, it’s ruined. The choice is quite clear to me. Meta have shown quite clearly who they are and what they are interested in. Any idiot left on their platforms at this point is not someone I care to interact with. I’m not sure why there’s any interest at all in what they have to say.
Indeed, what is the point? It may be as simple as them trying to coopt the movement to get ahead of it and steal mindshare. Think Hitler and the intentional naming of “National Socialism”.
“Oh, ActivityPub is the hot new thing, let’s check it out,” says clueless user #39,728 as they click on the first link in their Google search, which coincidentally now happens to be Facebook.
XMPP suffered a lot from what Google and Facebook did to it, so I understand people’s fears regarding Meta’s take on ActivityPub.
It’s more than justified
Especially with their patent moves, this is a malicious attack on the network