Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn’t it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…
“No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space.”
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn’t one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and “positive” vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
I don’t think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There’s a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
And my entire point is you can’t. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can’t decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It’s similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you’re afraid they’re going to put in a backdoor. It can’t be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
Raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do
How many family members have you convinced to stay off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc? How many are tired of you annoying them about it? Your statement isn’t false, but it’s also not new, and I’m arguing it’s inevitable. You’re not going to stop massive corporations by trying to group together a ton of individuals who all have to come to the same decisions. It’s a Catch22 of sorts. You’re only worried about it because people can’t beat corporations. You can’t overcome that because people can’t beat corporations.
I don’t like Meta either, and don’t use any of their products. But you’ve invited them in already.
But… the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don’t even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it’s good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You’ll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it’s not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you’ve lost all your contacts there.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that ‘self-hosting’ a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance’s ability to fully control their own rules or “laws”, where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won’t get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there’s a place where Meta won’t be, and you don’t need billions to do that.
Look at a pie chart of “internet users of x type platform” from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it’s just only a few people use them.
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I’ve never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It’s also funny that the system I’m imagining and would prefer (if it weren’t imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
I’d argue the system is working quite well, every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That’s what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
of course they can. if they don’t like their instance’s policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn’t it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…
“No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space.”
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn’t one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and “positive” vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
I don’t think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There’s a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
And my entire point is you can’t. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can’t decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It’s similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you’re afraid they’re going to put in a backdoor. It can’t be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
How many family members have you convinced to stay off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc? How many are tired of you annoying them about it? Your statement isn’t false, but it’s also not new, and I’m arguing it’s inevitable. You’re not going to stop massive corporations by trying to group together a ton of individuals who all have to come to the same decisions. It’s a Catch22 of sorts. You’re only worried about it because people can’t beat corporations. You can’t overcome that because people can’t beat corporations.
I don’t like Meta either, and don’t use any of their products. But you’ve invited them in already.
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
But… the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don’t even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it’s good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You’ll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it’s not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you’ve lost all your contacts there.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
between Mastodon instances it’s quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it’s a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
No, each instance is more like a country with it’s own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that ‘self-hosting’ a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance’s ability to fully control their own rules or “laws”, where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won’t get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there’s a place where Meta won’t be, and you don’t need billions to do that.
Look at a pie chart of “internet users of x type platform” from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it’s just only a few people use them.
There already is that someone, it’s the owner of the .world instances.
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I’ve never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It’s also funny that the system I’m imagining and would prefer (if it weren’t imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
the point of freedom is that authoritarians deserve it too, and when they want to use their freedom to take your freedom away, it’s fair game.
That’s the tolerance paradox by another name.
correct.