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FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta's ActivityPub Platform
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Meta has the users, over 1 Billion. Shouldn’t we be trying to get those users to transition to open source? They can scrape everyone’s data now and even if instances defederate.
We don't need billions of users here; just a healthy community.
I think this post is the most important thing that all these "Why would you block Meta?! They're a huge source of potential growth!!" people don't understand -- who cares about growth? This "growth and user counts are the only metric that matter" mindset is exactly why we all fucking loathe Facebook/Meta/etc. That exact attitude is what makes them so despicable.
Yeah, to Meta growth=money. Fediverse (generally speaking) isn't after money.. we want community. Healthy growth is fine - meta's mutant hormone growth isn't what we want.
Many people still miss their niche topics. Some size is required for certain things to become viable.
First of all, this is Meta attempting to co-opt and take over the fediverse.
Second, if I want to see content from my friend's racist grandma I would be on facebook.
Outside of the US everybody is still on Facebook. I used to work on a pretty young company doing work in tech, and all of those guys are active on FB but not on Twitter (or here, for that matter).
I am outside the US. I have to interact with fb for work occasionally, sure. Less frequently these days.
That doesn't mean I need or want Meta all up in my fediverse account, any more than I needed it linked to my reddit. It's just not necessary to do that.
Also outside the US, Facebook has been heavily implicated in incitement to genocide over a period of years. They are not a trustworthy or ethical company.
I mean... I hate to break it to you, but no company is "trustworthy or ethical".
Not under the current set of incentives, not unless forced by regulation.
If the "fediverse" needs unregulated, unsupervised ethical behavior from all participants to survive, it won't survive. Ditto for democracy, for the record.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy.
All companies are not created equal.
Inciting a genocide for years, followed by actively impeding a genocide investigation by the International Criminal Court, that's a really high bar of crappy that not that many will reach.
Not wanting to federate with something like that, is not the same as a demand for ethical purity - that's argumentum ad absurdum.
The fediverse doesn't need to federate with huge multinational for-profit companies that have a proven track record of anti-competitive behaviour. We have much to lose and little to gain.
So that stance effectively becomes a size cap. ActivityPub is free! You can make your instance and join the club! Unless you're big, because we're not selling out and we were here before it was cool.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm not here to defend Meta's track record. They are guilty of destroying liberal democracy. But all social media is. I'm not convinced that the iterations of social media hosted currently in the "fediverse" have any in-built safeguards against that beyond being small and mostly made up of like-minded people.
What I'm saying is that the guardrails must be structural and regulatory. I don't care if Meta destroys democracy while federated with Mastodon or stand-alone, I care that they don't destroy democracy and get appropriately punished if they do.
I'll edit this comment when I get to my computer to link to a great article about this and a history of companies effectively killing federated services .
Edit: article here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
But the main issue isn't the data. It's that when 99% of the users are coming through a company, they have too much power when it comes to updates. Meta can effectively control how the fediverse grows. And if they decided to defederate it's the normal Lemmy and kbin users who are forced to use meta services to keep in contact with the same people
I believe this is the article you were going to link: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Best reading I had in the week
But here's my thing with that argument, which is valid btw, but why would I want to keep in contact with the "head in the sand" people who continue using Meta's instances (or whatever monster they end up creating)? I can't imagine anything meta could offer me that would make me use their fediverse product. And the people that migrate over to them - okay? have fun supporting an evil corporation that's using you as a money printer. Sayonara.
I mean... because those people include all my friends and family? It was not a big problem to leave Twitter, which was used by only a couple of people and not exclusively. If there is an ActivityPub social media site where there is you guys and one defederated one where there's all of them... well, I'm gonna go with them.
Just so we're clear, unless you make AP no longer open, defederating from Meta if they're around here means they have the network effects, not Mastodon or the rest of the pre-existing instances.
ತ_ತ
Forget contacts. Imagine Meta has
The more money they throw at this, the more people will feel tempted to join or at least try their service. It offers objective benefits. It would feel like using lemmy 0.09 when others already enjoy 0.18.
As others (source 1, source 2) have put it, this spells huge trouble for ActivityPub if Facebook joins in. Which is what this organized effort is trying to prevent.
Read this. You'll understand the issue a little better.
Federation as an ethical concept is completely foreign to Meta. Most of their users LIKE what they have: a huge monolithic social media company. If they want to use something federated, they will make the effort to switch. Might be worthwhile to educate some of those users...maybe. But not to take on Meta wholesale. I agree that eventually the whole concept of this federation would become defunct or at best an anomaly.