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?
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.
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.
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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 even those small communities fold and 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.
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.
Eh, I use Mastodon and had no idea. I think it only matters to fediverse supporters who care about how it works. Not dismissing their concerns, Facebook is verifiably harmful to society and democracy, but for the average user this is not even on their radar.
I just opened Icecubes and scrolled the Federated timeline for a while. Not a mention of Facebook or Meta so far as this is concerned.
I haven’t really heard that much about this. But I am very skeptical of any claims that Facebook is actually going to fedderate in good faith.
Obviously, it’ll be up to the administrators of the different instances whether to federate or not. So we’ll see
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
With that said, I’ll never say never, but I find the likelihood of this taking off to be slim to none
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
It doesn’t have to overlap if they bake it into their existing website. A huge portion of humanity has a Facebook account, even if they don’t use it. They’re baking in as much as they can with Marketplace taking over Craigslist’s former space, trying to capture VR with your Facebook account, and now they want to take over Twitter’s space. And I’m not saying the backend work wouldn’t be huge, but their whole “posting stuff to people who follow you” schtick fits perfectly with the Fediverse. There’s nothing stopping them from just federating everything.
Fair, however I’m still VERY skeptical of them federating in good faith
A reasonable stance, but as has been covered elsewhere in the thread, Facebook has a pretty good track record with open source software so far. They don’t really EEE like Microsoft, they buy other private sector companies to quash torture competitors. Kind of a different evil
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.
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.
I think comparing it with E-Mail is a bit naive. It a different history. Accepting Meta basically means making it the main instance of the fediverse. The main content and users will be over there. There will be policies what is allowed and not allowed on the main instance and who can federate with it. With new additions of features and policies the federation of will slowly become meaningless. In the end it will be a similar situation like with Reddit. Where Meta is Reddit in this scenario and the other instances are the third party clients. Yes they will still be able to communicate with each other. But in the grand scheme of things the rest of the network will be irrelevant.
There already is a tendency to flock to the largest instances. Meta can provide a larger instance than all current instances combined and will have better UX.
This is a social / business problem. Not a technical one about open protocols. Meta has shown in the past that they might have good developers and open source a ton of stuff. But their business side of things is borderline evil.
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.
