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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Before everyone freaks out, this has zero impact on our communities. Chill.
They can already do this by bringing content from Mastodon to Meta platforms via links and screen grabs, this only speeds up the process.
Personally, I love that they're not federating day one. Because I don't want any instances I use to federate with them, I don't want to be connected to a Meta platform unless I deliberately go to a Meta platform to use it.
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don't let them access that data through ActivityPub. They can build their own platform on the Fediverse and we can have our network of smaller connected instances.
Them doing this does not affect our communities unless we let it. Defederate from them and we can go on our merry way and they can have their own ad laden instance that's not connected.
Everyone, relax. Continue building your communities here and ignore Meta in their unconnected instances.
There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I've seen that article and no, we still don't need to be worried. Just defederate and that's all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we're golden.
Everybody relax.
One important key lesson that everyone misses is funding ... we have to normalize paying a bit of money through donations or subscriptions to those people that maintain instances and those people who maintain, update and build the software ... if we all just keep tell ourselves that we all just keep our heads down, lock the door and don't bother to pay anyone to keep the door locked ... the same problems of the past will always emerge .... Owners, developers, programmers, instance maintainers just running out of money and enthusiasm because they have the shoulder the financial costs while everyone ignores them and takes everything for granted.
If we all just keep expecting volunteers to keep everything running for us for free ... eventually we will run out of willing volunteers as the community grows and the costs add up over time as instances grow more popular
SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE ... whatever platform it is and whatever amount of money you can give ... even if it means we just give a dollar a day, across hundreds or thousands of user, it will protect your instance owner, and ensure that the people running your instance never run into a situation where they have to decide on either ending their work ... or selling everything they have to make a bit of money back.
Couldn't agree more! I think that message might deserve it's own post but you did a great little write up here on the importance of supporting your instance!
good point
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to "destroy" the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that "everyone" will be here, and it'll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don't think they're actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don't even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: "It feels like what X used to feel like". And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren't pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
This might all be true, but personally I don't care about Twitter or any alternative version of "microblogging". That's not the kind of content or engagement that I am looking for.
If Mastodon and other instances like it throughout the Fediverse are taking the majority of Meta's attention, even better. Let them be the army at the Black Gate distracting the Eye from two little hobbits approaching Mt Doom. Totally fine with me!
That is very shortsighted. Just because "its twitter and microblogging" doesn't mean it doesn't affect someone on lemmy that doesn't have it - people from mastodon can still read and reply to your comments there. Furthermore you yourself are on kbin that has an even larger integration with mastodon and other microblogging platforms, magazines themselves can be configured with specific tags so you get automatic engagement from other parts of the fediverse that aren't on either lemmy or kbin.
And this is just ignoring the simple basic truth that it still affects other people that you are interacting with. Just because you don't care doesn't mean others don't care, and if they leave, or want federation, or switch platforms, it affects your feed too.
Thank you for writing multiple paragraphs explaining that you don't care about this topic that you voluntarily clicked on, read, and engaged with.
Yeah, it is very possible for us to not let Meta win. Acting like the Fediverse is doomed isn't productive at all.
It's not even that, just change your perspective so whatever Meta is doing or not doing is irrelevant. They can't "win" if we are on a different field playing the same sport with different players and our own equipment. Even if they have better equipment and 40,000 fans to our 1,500 that doesn't mean our thing isn't happening and meeting our needs.
I'd say it's exactly as productive as saying "It's no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It'll be fiiiiiine".
We should watch everything very carefully.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can't.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don't want to be affected by Meta then don't join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You're done. Problem solved. That's the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that's just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don't lose as long as we have the communities we've built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
"Explain how Google would impact XMPP servers if they defederate from Google Talk"
Spoiler: They can
Seems like you haven't read that article at all, otherwise you'd understand this already happened multiple times.
It only doesn't matter if the majority of us are conscious of it and want to stop it. We need to place sanctions in a true democracy, that's not easy and it requires everybody be educated.
We're lucky that we're still in the tail end of the early adopters phase so most people in the fediverse will be open to gaining education. Also both sides of the heavily populated fediverse (Lemmy and mastodon)* feel recently betrayed by corporate greed.
All to say, it won't be a big deal as long as most people know what's going on. (I didn't before reading this.)
*Not sure where to put kbin
The issue is that the fediverse is not going to present a unified front at this rate, it is already split over whether to defederate meta or not. We don't know whether the administrators of largest instances that joined the NDA talks with meta are going to defederate too.
I agree there's no reason to panic, but that doesn't mean that nothing should be done. The anti-meta-federation act or however it is called is a good step to get the community on board, as well as sharing articles like these and informing people about what is coming.
Some of the largest server admins are actively excited about Meta showing up, so yeah, we shouldn't expect them to defederate. I wouldn't expect them to federated even after it becomes clear that it was a bad idea. I think you'll see those particular instances close, or be handed off to new admins, of even be sold before you'll see them defederate, because people don't like to eat crow.
I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!
From the Wiki (quite enlightening):
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.
IIRC they had to be sued by the US federal government and Sun (over IE and Java, respectively) to back off. Which is not going to happen for the Fediverse. And it's not going to happen again in today's day and age period.
To wit, remember when Google took over the web and now defines the browser standard on both mobile and PC and nobody can do anything about it?
This is a great read, I'll definitely bookmark this for when someone says it won't be problem.
When Twitter had an exodus to Mastodon and a lot of new instances popped up, several were quickly defederated because they were scraping data from other instances, which made a lot of people uncomfortable.
There were also a few far right instances that spun up that were also defederated and blocked within 24 hours so the communities ability to respond to situations like this is very much there and I'm sure that the vast majority will not want to have a single thing to do with meta
@Dee_Imaginarium At this moment I am more un-relax with your insistence of telling me to relax.
@giallo
@Dee_Imaginarium @giallo I wish most Mastodon instances were planning to defederate from Meta by default but sadly that's not the case. Meta reached out to the admins of some of the big instances and a whole bunch of them don't plan to. One of the admins shared this — https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836
Some admins are going for a "trust but verify" approach. These are the only instances which have agreed to defederate from the start —https://fedipact.online/
why does their conversation have to be "off the record" with an NDA when they are discussing a public federation? They will never get the idea of public social media because they can't understand the point of anything except squeezing the last drop of revenue from their decaying monolith.
Ok I can get behind the "fedipact" as an idea but who the hell designed that website, nobody is gonna take it seriously if you're greeted with bright pink background and floating hearts. Who's leading the fedipact project anyway?
I haven't seen a website that looks like that since 1996.
It just needs a spinning "Under Construction" sign and it could go on Geocities.
@Kaldo it was put together by VantaBlack. I'm fairly sure most of the people who signed up to it do take it seriously.
It looks like a student/chatgpt created website. Not sortable in any way, no links to the source of the declaration, just a list of names and no proof anyone signed anything.
The extremely small "why" contains an explanation of what the pact is, but it's kinda cringe being written in lowercase and every second sentence having "lol" or "lmao" at the end of it. And then her personal donation links at the end? I thought this was supposed to be a community effort against meta, not a place for her to promote herself and herself only, at the very least put links to donation sites of the admins that sign the pact or the opencollective thing
Like the idea is fine but ugh, seeing this just made me extremely pessimistic about how is this gonna end.
@Kaldo
'no proof anyone signed anything'
I don't know exactly what kind of proof you expect.
I agree that it could be more clearly explained. There was a fair bit of discussion on 'Mastodon' about it so some of that context might not be clear.
Re the donation links. It is quite common for people who show up on the fediverse and put in some work to ask for donations.
I mean it is a attempt to rally community to a cause but it was put together by one person off their own bat.
How about a link to a public toot of the administrator where they actually agree to this?
On their personal site of course, I am not arguing that, but if this is supposed to a community effort and an "official document/rallying point" then it has no place here, it comes off as desperate and unprofessional. You don't make an appeal to ethics and for everyone to come together and then use that space and community to ask for money just for yourself.
I mean I hate it that I'm being so negative, I know it doesn't matter in the large scale of things but I'm just shocked that this is how the fedipact is being organized. It comes off as extremely amateurish and unprofessional.
My banking app just changed to neon pink and green. I wish I was joking.
I've seen all that too, and there's a reason I'm not on any of those instances. The instances that want to federate can, the people who care will not be on those instances. It's inevitable that they were coming to the fediverse, all we can do is defederate and protect our communities that we build.
But whoever wants to join them can do so, that's the beauty of the fediverse. We join whatever instance or platform provides us with what we want. Which for me, is a Meta-less experience.