This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
Defed from anything they touch. Quarantine the meta virus. Ezpz
"i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity"
Meta won't federate anyone. They don't want to host illegal content on their servers, that would be an absolute PR disaster for them. And this is what will happen if they federate with a random instance. Even clean instances will want to play tricks on Meta if federated.
They are the prototype of the mono instance federation. They want control. They want to attract the people leaving Twitter. I don't think they care about us, what they want to avoid is that our instances become too big and start to offer an alternative.
Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we're going to end up right back where we started.
Genuinely curious as I'm new to all of this, why would it matter? Isn't that the whole point of the fediverse? If their spyware app interfacing with it is what gets the casual users into it who already have Meta's spyware installed, you can still use the fediverse from whatever service you prefer, right?
Here’s a pretty thorough explanation of why this Meta app is dangerous for the Fediverse.
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Fediverse concepts as well but the thing that stands out for me is that there is a history of private companies effectively killing open source projects.
For us, the vulnerability is ActivityPub. If Meta begins “contributing” to a foundational Fediverse technology, they have the resources to extend the protocol in a way that benefits Meta only, at a pace that only a company with the resources of Meta can.
The TL;DR is "so it doesn't become XMPP" - if a big player from the corporate internet world achieves significant sway over the Fediverse, that gives them a position of power to steer the platform itself, eventually letting them undermine the whole "open-source" and "decentralised" part of it entirely before taking their chunk of the federation private, effectively kneecapping the remaining communities outside the walled garden.
If you've ever heard "the three Es" - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, best known from the Microsoft antitrust days - that's what we're worried about happening here.
It's more or less the same problem as XMPP (end-to-end encrypted, federated chat protocol) had with Google Talk.
All users went to Google and then Google broke interoperability with federated servers, leaving them dead/unable to communicate with the majority of users.
Later Google killed the project as they always do. XMPP is still around, but the userbase is very small.
Here's a post worth reading:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The "fediverse" has been gaining traction recently, the fear is that Meta comes in with 1.2bn users, gets everyone on their service and the breaks federation, leaving the rest of the fediverse a drying carcass as they "move on".
Personally, I don't really care about the "popularity contest" - I'm not here because the community is large, I'm here because it isn't. Signal > Noise. So I'm all for defederation.
Meta has zero trust after all they've done.
Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It's very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others... I don't know who runs all of those or what they're doing with the data...
You can't be both a small community and replace for profit social networks. I thought the point of all this was the second one.
A few others have commented below, but from a top level perspective I'd argue that taking a relatively small platform like the fediverse and smushing it with Facebooks user base would dilute the community / environment.
If meta federates with everyone, it'll be a huge uplift in quantity as new people start posting, but the quality I feel would be impacted.
I imagine it would be like pouring a small cup of liquid and a big container of liquid into the same bowl, one would definitely dilute the other.
@wrath-sedan@kbin.social Defederate with any instance Meta has infected - including any instance at Mastodon who thinks this is a good idea. I left FB years ago because of this and their boosting of the alt-right
Seems to be about what I'd expect from Meta, to be honest. I'm honestly surprised the list isn't even longer.
Everything else comes under “other data” lol.
Sooo, literally everything. Are there even any categories left out? That seems pretty comprehensive.
Maybe, just maybe, they won’t collect your “permanent record” from grade school.
I’m pretty sure they just requested every single permission. There’s no good reason they need access to your Health data to make an app like this, and why the hell did Apple’s app review allow that to fly?!
They need it if they want to make more money by selling granular data of their users.
Companies like Facebook and Google don't sell user data. This is a common misconception that people keep repeating. Logically it doesn't make sense: The data is what makes the company valuable, so they're not going to give that away! If they did, Facebook would just buy Google's data (and vice versa) and neither would have a competitive advantage any more.
Instead, they let advertisers target people based on data. For example, an advertiser can specify that their ad should be visible to people aged 20-25 that like computers and live in Los Angeles. You can access Facebook and Google's ad management products and run your own ads, and see exactly the same system and data that advertisers see.
Absolutely have to love all of the people on mastodon especially being like "but this makes the fediverse bigger what can go wrong" takes.
I was unsure at first, but given the history of big names killing federated projects, well. I'd rather not risk it.
I think it's a valid take to have. If it makes it possible to follow more people from my Mastodon account who I want to follow, that seems like a good thing. I won't be making an account there, but I think I'd like to at least have the option to follow the people who do.
The MO for large companies who use open standards like this is to use the sheer gravitational pull of their ad dollars to get most people to sign up on ActivityPub, then change their own code just enough to break the experience for anyone trying to read their content from any other instance website or app.
If that happens, won't we just be back to how things are now? People like you and me who are already here probably won't be making accounts on Threads, it will be pulling in new people who wouldn't have joined the fediverse otherwise. If they break something in their implementation of ActivityPub, we'll just be separated from them again which doesn't seem different from the current situation. The open source ActivityPub protocol we all currently rely on cant be taken away, so the independent instances we're already using should be fine too.
Research what happened with XMPP thanks to Google. It’s the same thing here.
I might be missing your point since I never used it, but looking around their website and reading Wikipedia, it doesn't look like a dead standard. Looking from the outside in, it seems like Google adopted the protocol and brought a lot of new users with them, and when they dropped it in 2013, they took those users with them again.
It does feel very similar to ActivityPub today, but in a way that seems to support the point I was making. Correct me if im wrong, but it seems the people using XMPP through Google Talk signed up to use a Google service, while those who joined through independent providers did it for XMPP itself. Even with Google gone, it looks like those other providers continue to function and the protocol remains relevant to the people who want to use it, similar to ActivityPub right now.
It’s basically in zombie mode right now. Most of the users left except for those on WhatsApp.
So Google was really embracing the federation. How cool was that? It meant that, suddenly, every single Gmail user became an XMPP user. This could only be good for XMPP, right? I was ecstatic.
.
First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing.
Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime
And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users"
.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
It was a hard pass before and even more so now.
This is satire, right?
That was my first response. I looked it up and it’s real. Unbelievable.
Damn, is there anything they don’t want to know?
I'd say blood type and sex life, but that's probably under the "other information" category.
They definitely want to know about your sex life. Advertisers want to target pregnant/expecting women, happily married people, unhappily married people, men in dry spells, gay men, lesbians, kinksters and so on. Even if they're not marketing sexual products, advertisers will want to target those groups.
What you think of them.
I'm shocked. Utterly shocked.
No, really, I swear, this is my "shocked" face.
Careful, they're collecting your emotional state too.
Nothing would get me to delete my account quicker than federating with a Meta instance.
kbin probably federates with over 1000 other instances by this point. Would you really review ownership of each one of them?
You’re right. Reviewing ownership of all instances might be a bit unreasonable.
How about we just focus on the ones that stand out for things such as mass surveillance, conducting social experiments on their users, taking over markets, buying out competition, and influence upon genocidal political movements?
Does that seem a little more manageable?
You put it more eloquently than I could. @dan does bring up good points. We can’t monitor everything. But Meta is sort of a whale in a pond of goldfish. It stands out. And I personally don’t think should be given any benefit of the doubt based on their history.
lol that’s classic Meta right there
As much as it already frustrates me how much they surveil their own users, these two concern me personally. I guarantee meta will feel 100% entitled to not only their own users’ content, but that of federated posters as well. Without any kind of privacy guarantee as a federated contributor, I don’t think Meta should federated with just yet.