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?
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.
Admin decided defederation is the reason I left beehaw (and by extension didn’t go to lemmy.world/shitjustworks.) I get why they did it, but it was alienating in that it took away my choice to interact in communities on both sides so I had to choose a neutral instance (and eventually ended up on kbin anyway.)
Having said that, I’ve seen references to a mass defederation of Gab which I am less upset about.
The difference with Facebook though is they will likely bring a ton of users and having your instance defederate by default doesn’t really impact a massive company coming in like it did with Gab.
I’ll be interested to see what, of anything, shakes out from this.
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.
Strongly agreed. Federation becoming mainstream accessible is a good thing IMO. Content is what made reddit good and let’s face it: we don’t have that much of it. Eg, my local city sub used to be fairly active. I don’t have anything like that here. I even tried to make it myself, posted a bit, and tried to promote in relevant places, and last I checked it’s population: me, myself, and I. We clearly need far more people to be able to have many of the smaller, niche communities that I love.
I agree, I think we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by immediately defederating. This is an opportunity for a lot of people to get their feet wet with the Fediverse, and potentially bring them to more open parts of the platform. I don’t think a lot of people understand that Meta is free to set-up their own dystopian corpo-instance without that carrying over to affect the independent ones.
Absolute darkest timeline, they wave enough money to buy out their competitor platforms or the owner of Activitypub itself, open source is closed now, and the concept of federation becomes corporate like everything else already is and apparently always will be. Not entirely likely and not to that extent, but it’s technically possible. While they aren’t guaranteed to take the world’s biggest shit in the pool, it would be naive to suggest they’re going to play nice with everything forever, given who they are and how much control they could have if they just put enough time into strong-arming it.
You and the comment you were replying to make really solid points and I enjoyed the expanded perspective. It’s these longer, actually nuanced comments that are beginning to really make me feel how ridiculously people treat the downvote button. And I think overall I’ve been swayed to support meta being blocked by individuals rather than defederated by whole instances. But I’m still not going to pretend this is all they’re going to do if they can possibly do more. It was inevitable, but I don’t have to trust facebook over it
As if Facebook does actual moderation.
They’ll build bots and ban users algorithmically, as usual.
And use the fediverse to spread metric shit tons of misinformation, lies, and garbage, all while scooping up Fediverse user data to sell.
There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing either of those things right now though.
Of course that’s true, but we already know Meta to be a bad actor… remember Cambridge Analytica? Why would anyone trust them to do the right thing in entering the fediverse in a desperate search for more users to abuse? They’ve fucked over society so many times that they dont even have real sections on their Wikipedia pages for it, instead there are whole other Wikipedia pages just devoted to Meta criticism, controversies, and lawsuits. At what point are people justified in noping out? I dont blame anyone for wanting to shut the front door before their shitty neighbor starts knocking.
Sidenote: I sound way more triggered than I am, I’m currently bored out of gourd due to circumstances beyond my control and just have a lot of time on my hands for ranting, lol. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. 🤪
undefined> As if Facebook does actual moderation.
Post boobs and find out how fast they moderate.
Facebook is just looking for more content on the cheap and more corners of the internet to spread their tendrils into.
Since Musk is doing such a good job of ruining Twitter, Zuckerberg might be exploring the idea of a Twitter-like Meta product.
He sees this Meta Threads project as a Twitter killer. He’s not exploring… He’s taking aim right now and in a couple of months, he’s going to pull the trigger.
That’s what’s got me curious. I suppose they could just not provide an option to turn off their nsfw filter, but wishing everyone would appropriately tag their damn porn still doesn’t ensure a family-friendly environment. The best practice would be for platforms to rework their communities/magazines to add specific auto-tags to every submitted post. Technically even then, all posts in m/ boob being auto # boob-ed doesn’t stop anyone posting boobs to m/kittens. In fact, it would probably encourage it a little.
If they want zero porn anywhere ever, their best step would be to not even federate with anyone but themselves. So I wanna know if they’re just…gonna embrace the boobs out of necessity.