- cross-posted to:
- meta@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- meta@lemm.ee
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I sure hope there’s a large group of servers that refuse to federate with servers run for profit. I didn’t come to be a product and be manipulated with algorithms.
I don’t see anything inherently wrong with servers that try to generate some kind of income (servers don’t pay for themselves after all) but it’s absolutely the right of every server to choose whether or not to federate with them.
I’d take issue with free labour (e.g. unpaid mods) on a profit-making server.
I’m glad to see my server doesn’t plan on federating with anything Meta hosts. I really don’t like the ‘wait and see’ approach; Meta has shown its true colors time and time before, they have not earned their trust.
apparently some Mastodon admins got contacted by Meta and met with them after signing an NDA. I’m quite surprised how many Masto admins want to “just wait and see, maybe it’s not gonna be that bad”.
I’d guess they were made an offer they couldn’t refuse, ie money.
I’m guessing you haven’t been on the #Fediverse very long so not picked up on the ethos of most of the folk who run the various instances.
Most are very protective of what they have created as a community and are definitely not in it for the money. Some are vehemently anti-capitalist.There are many ways to get rich. Running an instance is not one of them.
deleted by creator
Absolutely! And given that they have a gazillion users they can willingly move around they can drown us out in a day if they want
Alternatively, imagine a world where the US government passed a “privacy bill of rights” and also required online platforms to be freely interchangeable via open protocols like ActivityPub.
Won’t happen any time soon, and if you ask why, go read !news@beehaw.org for a little bit and come back.
I doubt they would be willing to let people host and control their own versions of federated facebook, and I’m wondering then what would make it “decentralized” exactly. Are they just using decentralized as a buzz word because they are using ActivityPub?
aa
Yeah I’d love to see some more concrete info on what they mean by decentralized.
A bunch of people paying their own server costs to host their own mini facebook servers that they have to moderate and that show them ads? Lol. Horrifying.
But it seems like they just mean that it will be able to communicate with other decentralized networks, not that it is decentralized itself.
Everyone who cares about their instance and the fediverse as a whole needs to defederate and block their instances as soon as they pop up.
aa
The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
aa
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄
I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Irrelevant. See above.
I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
Even though email is supposedly “open”, and federated, is no longer is really the case. Big services like Gmail are suspicious of non-big-name servers, and often flag email coming from them as spam.
About a year ago I came across an article from a guy who’d been running his own email server since the 90s, and finally gave up. I couldn’t find that article in my quick search, but I did find this:
https://twitter.com/greg_1_anderson/status/1425113874722820100
“I run my own email server. It’s no longer a good idea, because the anti-spam arms race makes delivery from small independent servers very difficult, even when you keep yourself off the block lists, so it’s a continuous struggle. Would switch, but I have too many domains/addresses”
This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as “not spam” whenever it showed up in the spam folder.
We have the power over ActivityPub
Who is ‘we’? And who doesn’t say that there’s something on top of activitypub?
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Because we don’t have multiple thousands of paid developers.
@Helix we have a legion of trans coders in pink striped programmer socks. They can do anything!
Because we don’t have multiple thousands of paid developers.
Having worked at a company with thousands of developers, that’s a significant advantage for us.
One of the “powers” of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.
Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although I’m not that familiar with the protocols here)
In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts can’t move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.
Fediverse really doesn’t offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.
At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isn’t given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesn’t seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.
If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Limited developer time.
@CanadaPlus this is referring to far in the future. In the long scale of things, developer time is not so limited. Fedi doesn’t necessarily have a time limit after all, it’s just going to go stronger over time. I don’t see a stopping point.
Ah. Yes, in the asymptotic future limit everything can be implemented twice as long as there’s social opportunity to do so. I wonder if that applies back to Gmail as well, will we see an open-source federated G-suite?
Wouldn’t the “extend” part be problematic for them since it’s W3C that define the protocol? If meta tries to change it it’d break compatibility with the rest of the federation. Not that it is that well defined right now, from what I’ve read even mastodon, kbin and lemmy all use AP in different ways, with upvotes/downvotes and post types being interpreted and used in different ways from the technical standpoint and then jury-rigged in frontend to look decent.
I think the major issue that people might be concerned about is they might try to use a carrot to get people reliant on their instances.
Then they start making breaking changes and integrating proprietary stuff into it so that it’s all much more closed source; and unless you’re on an instance that they control, now suddenly a lot of the people who you used to be able to talk to on the Fediverse just can’t be interacted with from your instance.
Like, the “World Wide Web” is the primary way people use to access the internet (we’re using it now!); but despite the W3C you’ll have commercial browsers that just don’t play nice with the standards and some websites that wind up, because of that, only working in commercial browsers (Internet Explorer was infamous for this, and apparently Chromium has its issues with this as well). You further see websites that’ll attract a huge userbase - using that open standard - and then kind of try to push everyone into using a non-WWW (but still internet!) app; meaning that what once you could have accessed from any web software you’re now restricted to one single option that’s beholden to the whims of that corporation. That’s not to say that any of these is what Facebook will do (I’m not actually concerned that they’re going to try to lock it behind an app; it’s just an example that I can think of, especially given the recent Reddit drama - Reddit is also trying to kill their mobile site and effectively move people on mobile from the open WWW standard to an app, and have made mobile painful for awhile; and they’re not the first site to add a “This site is better in our app” banner to mobile)
Of course, with the Fediverse they’d have a lot harder of a time doing that quickly without the cooperation of a few big instances. We aren’t really sure what the people who spoke to them have agreed to, but we do know that they signed NDAs meaning there’s something that Facebook doesn’t want them to talk about.
Personally if this really was something good that we shouldn’t be worried about? They should be able to be transparent about it. They’re not, and that’s concerning.
Honestly at the end of the day I’m just tired of people trying to make every single cent they can off of me. I want to live my life and have hobbies and talk to people and I’m tired of some greedy asshole taking a look at the tech and creativity that enables it and going “But how can I make money off of that?”
Some things shouldn’t be about money.
So… kinda like Mastodon then?
Let’s not pretend that Mastodon hasn’t also implemented it’s own non standard things - such that if someone wants to make an app that works with Mastodon, it’s MORE than just the ActivityPub spec they have to follow - you will see this quite a lot now where platforms will say they are using ActivityPub and are also Mastodon compatible.
Why is this a bad thing? With all the email analogies, it’s a good thing to have bigger corporations involved
I’ll answer with a blog post by a dissatisfied sysadmin: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
To me this sounds like us de-federating them early on to avoid them de-federating us. It’s an open framework enabling multi domain interoperability. As long as fediverse rules aren’t violated no one should get defederated imo
Again tbh, I don’t really think Meta needs Fediverse. They already have Facebook and Instagram. All they need is add one link and they’ll have way more users than the Fediverse has in a matter of hours
One issue with emails is that it’s actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam
