As a lay user, I plan on having an account on Mastodon and one on Calckey, one of which allows Meta and one of which doesn’t. I hope admins will include on their instance’s home pages whether they allow or block Meta before people join or migrate.
Thanks for the contribution. The purpose here is to 1) define what behaviors instance operators should expect from actions they take and 2) to motivate the development of specific recommended actions (aka protocols) instance operators can take.
It would be good to develop a recommended procedure for "blocking Meta" that will achieve what instances want with some uniformity and minimize loads.
There are hundreds of examples like this of Meta/Facebook's amoral behaviour over the past decade or so. There was even a leaked memo where they said they knew it was going on and didn't care:
The point of the Fediverse is to provide interoperability and choice. It is an open, distributed solution to walled gardens, not a cudgel to punish companies you hate. Do not forget that this is a battle of interoperable protocols vs. proprietary platforms, not of good vs. evil or of socialism vs. capitalism.
@supernovae
Empathy and compassion are for humans, though, not massive multinational companies. Framing a desire to stay away from corporate social media as "segregation" and harming others is also pretty wild imo.
For my own part, I'm hoping I will be able to connect to friends on who use insta and who can't be bothered to try the fedi, but i fully understand the deep mistrust of FB/Meta given their deeply unethical business practices @feditips@mastodonmigration
@supernovae@_dmh@feditips This discussion is exactly the thing we need to be doing. As stated previously:
"Communication is our superpower. This account will boost and report on reasoned discourse on all sides of #Meta#P92#Threads discussion. No position is taken at this time other than support for open social media and opposition to corporate domination of the Fediverse."
The Fediverse has always been about servers choosing not to federate with certain other servers. This idea that you must federate with everyone has never been the case, that's why defederation features exist.
How bad does Meta have to get before you defederate? Does its algo promoting genocide not move you at all? What about its record-breaking fines for privacy violations?
@feditips@supernovae@ohiorob@mastodonmigration@_dmh I think that your average Joe will care much more about the average Joe's child than about some report that doesn't influence him personally by an organization reporting on things that don't influence him personally. Genocides are bad but people simply don't care while they're safe.
So no, I don't think that 90% of users will care about Meta's genocide shenanigans enough not to use their Twitter clone.
@feditips@supernovae@ohiorob@mastodonmigration@_dmh this is starting to sound like a rhetorical thing George W. Bush used to do. He would say basically, do you love America? then you have to support my invading Iraq to prove it. What, you don’t want to invade Iraq? WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA
@feditips@supernovae@ohiorob@mastodonmigration@_dmh besides Amnesty there is also the OHCHR, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the principal human rights official of the United Nations.
@supernovae@vorsos@feditips@ohiorob@mastodonmigration You are misrepresenting the arguments against you. People do not "hate [you] for providing people their own agency". People are upset that you are actively advocating for a more uniform fediverse experience ("deep federation") AND advocating to welcome Meta/Facebook into the fedi despite their surveillance capitalism business model and the many harms they have been involved in. I suspect part of the frustration people are expressing is due to your insistence on rewriting their counterarguments as "not caring about users".
Can we stop using amnesty international as some great organization to reference, given their reports on the genocide happening in Ukraine both sided the invasion and blamed the victim? So much so the UA team resigned in protest????
I asked you to stop referencing a SHIT organization in your argument. It was a minor request, and shouldn't have any impact in your ability to make a cogent argument. So let me be more clear; your appeal to this authority is weak, doesn't help your argument, and makes you, THE BRAND fedi.tips, seem quite unwell. You do you though.
It is certainly generally true that when debate on any side of a matter starts to become hyperbolic (and here both sides are getting into hyperbole and adhominem arguements), it tends to drive each side further into their respective corners.
@feditips@pauliehedron@supernovae@_dmh Apologies. Perhaps hyperbole was the wrong term. Certainly Meta's horrible record is germain to the discussion, and seems like most everyone stipulates to that fact.
That is is happening because of talk about a POTENTIAL corporate doing a thing, which they haven't even DONE yet, and may NEVER DO, is astonishing.
But this is how the Fedi rolls, you and I have seen this play out like this many a time, and likely will continue to be. :blobsalute:
It's a funny to ponder if they actually do join the fedi and people flock to them because they feel SAFER with them than the rest of the fedi, I wouldn't be surprised and gonna meme the shit out of this place. LMAO
Human interactions outside private companies, done for social progress and not for profit, without filtering algorithms focused on monetization of content and without metadata harvesting for paying spin doctors is a different endeavour from private platform of social networking, regardless of the protocol adopted.
@feditips@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh So in your opinion there's no value in seeing what Facebook users post? Or in them seeing what you post? Interesting. We need to be uniting people, not dividing them according to your politics or theirs.
Agreed Meta should not control the Fediverse. I can't see any way they can.
Influence? Yawn. Everyone has an influence.
You can't have it both ways. If Meta's users are to be cut off from the Fediverse then the Fediverse isn't a free and open place. Pick one - a new walled garden run by you, or openness. I vote for openness. Federate with everyone, regardless of YOUR politics. :)
@feditips@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh "Failed to prevent genocide" isn't "genocide". Good luck finding any companies with clean enough hands to interact with. Shall we defederate Red Hat (IBM helped the Nazis in WWII)? How about VW? Etc.
Because a huge company's moderation policies / software weren't good enough for you is hardly a reason to chop a billion users off of the Fediverse.
@ohiorob@feditips@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh And yet in my country "separate but equal is inherently unequal" is a basic belief. Excluding a billion users from the Fediverse because you don't like the company that owns their instance is ... absurd.
I'm kind of wondering why all of the people having a go at me in this thread are on universeodon.com. That's the server whose admin was the one praising the meeting with Meta.
Maybe that server has a particular pro-Meta atmosphere or something?
@ohiorob@feditips@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh Yep, this is a deeply flawed place, with instance owners acting like entitled HOA board members - enforcing their personal beliefs to the detriment of their users and openness. It's likely what will make the Fediverse irrelevant to the masses forever, and a niche and very fragmented place forever. :(
It’s been that way since its conception. And it has only grown. Meta didn’t give 2 shits about Mastodon until Twitter started to burn and the #twittermigration started.
The "embrace extend extinguish" concern has been greatly discussed on here, and was exacerbated by the NDA nature of meetings and the rumours of financial support from Meta.
Even ignoring all of that, the entire concept of a massive mega-instance from Meta dominating the Fediverse is concerning, because it would have more power than all other servers put together.
Since the Fediverse as it is today is indeed a rounding error on Meta's user count it's true that free and open communication between them will be biased towards them initially. That's hardly a reason to exclude their users.
We have no idea if the NDA is a non-issue because it prevents us knowing what was discussed.
"That's hardly a reason to exclude their users."
I don't know how often I have to say this, but it's not about excluding users. They can join via existing servers or set up their own, as we saw happen last year during new waves of users from Twitter.
@feditips@ohiorob@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh Now we're going in circles. Yes, I can stand up an instance. And if I do, and federate with someone you don't like, you'll defederate me. Resulting in multiple fragmented Fediverses instead of one. That's the sad outcome of this weird position ... a small, fragmented, weak place where some folks can talk and others can't. But we've had this discussion before, and folks are starting to repeat themselves, so it's time to go away and think a bit. :)
"Resulting in multiple fragmented Fediverses instead of one. . a small, fragmented, weak place where some folks can talk and others can't. "
The Fediverse has always had defederation. That's part of why it has worked so well, it gives power to the grassroots level. It's why Gab was excluded for example.
On Meta, the power is all in the hands of the board of directors of a massive corporation.
@feditips@sammydee@ohiorob@supernovae@mastodonmigration The web is fragmented. If I read someone's blog and want to comment, they can decide if they want to integrate comments using a platform like FB or Disqus, allow logins through third parties, collect their own comments, allow anonymous comments, whatever. It would be weird to expect that every website included a comment section for Facebook users to comment. Why should the default be "require everyone to connect with Facebook/Meta" rather than "let people decide what they want and if the community they're a part of goes in a direction they don't like they can seek a new community", the same as people do with forums and knitting groups and churches and group chats. It is a natural aspect of human social self organisation that new groups will form and dissolve and interconnect and disconnect.
@sammydee@feditips@ohiorob@supernovae@_dmh Agreed. The original purpose of this post was to make it clear what happens when an instance blocks Meta. It also highlights what auth-fetch ON does, and why instances may want to do that too.
It's fine that a spirited discussion ensued about blocking Meta. We should be doing that. And we should also be figuring out how such blocks are going to affect Fediverse communications going forward.
That's just a blog post saying "nothing to see here".
It doesn't clear anything up because it cannot clear anything up. NDAs by their very name forbid disclosure. NDAs are legally enforceable, the accuracy of blog posts is not.
It is simply incompatible with open volunteer projects that depend on goodwill at a grassroots level. Corporations use them because they're not interested in such things.
@ohiorob@sammydee@feditips@supernovae@_dmh Absolutely! We need to remind ourselves that both fedi.tips and supernovae are valuable members of the Fediverse community who have each contributed uncountable hours to building and sustaining this amazing social media platform. Strong feelings go with the territory, but we all have much more that unites us than divides us, and we all oppose corporate control of the Fediverse with every fiber of our being.
I don't think people who meet with Meta under NDAs are "opposing corporate control with every fibre of their being". They are giving Meta a degree of control by signing such documents.
The admin of Fosstodon responded most appropriately to Meta's suggestion:
@feditips@mastodonmigration@ohiorob@supernovae@_dmh Having spent the past 45 years in the software industry, I can tell you that your concern over NDAs is overblown. Rampant fear and paranoia over having a conversation under one is not at all justified. Talking is always good.
@feditips@mastodonmigration@ohiorob@supernovae@_dmh It forbids the discussion of THINGS DISCUSSED IN THE MEETING with the public. From the participant's meeting notes it doesn't sound like anything particularly interesting / devious / underhanded was discussed. I'm sure Meta wanted one, just so they could say "hey we're considering how we interact with the Fediverse" or something else equally innocuous. I strongly doubt that in an initial meeting they divulged their plans for world domination or waved around million dollar checks. :) I guess I'll take the word of the person who was actually there over the random fears of those who weren't.
@feditips@mastodonmigration@ohiorob@supernovae@_dmh Guess you'll have to trust the person who was there. Or punish him for not telling you what he had for lunch that day. If instance owners don't trust each other than we're doomed as well.
Agree that the NDA meetings are a mistake since they create a conspiracy of silence that destroys trust. However, do not agree that this calls into question anyone's commitment to open social media or opposition to corporate control of the Fediverse.
@ohiorob@feditips@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh That's not at all what I meant. I meant that a cascade of snowflake instance owners defederating instances that aren't politically correct enough for their sensibilities would destroy the Fediverse. That would be OUR doing, not Meta's.
@feditips@ohiorob@supernovae@mastodonmigration@_dmh I'm saying that those who think "Facebook doesn't support human rights because their moderation tools failed to prevent every single thing that they could have" are taking a very extreme position, yes. Moderation of billions of users isn't as simple as you seem to think it is. :)
"Moderation of billions of users isn't as simple as you seem to think it is"
That's exactly why no instance should ever have billions of people on it.
Moderation is much higher quality when networks are spread across massive numbers of smaller instances, as the staff-member ratio is much higher on smaller servers.
@feditips@sammydee@supernovae@mastodonmigration
not expecting comfortable privileged apologists to care or understand, but that $10 vps, especially if running masto will NEVER be able to keep up with federation to a 2,10, 20x force multplier of facebooks and corp allied apologist large servers. Their sidekiq and storage will MELT.
This is corporate gatekeeping class war and allowing facebook in is willfully shutting out voices by massively increasing the cost of entry and sustaining presence to ironically be farmed as the product. "Openess" you say?
The dog whistling otherism trying to paint humans enjoying less corporate interference as nasty or censoring in the fediverse is disingenuous at best.
There is no problem with a useful, highly engaging actual fediverse even if that means islanding corporate apologists. Truth, universeodon, massoc, and facebook can happily be their own corporate theft influencer hate bucket firehose of weak engagement. But you don't seem to be happy unless YOU get to crap in everyones cornflakes. The fediverse owes you nothing and does not have to pay dearly with agency, health, safety, infra, moderation, etc for narrow minded growth fantasies.
@feditips@supernovae@ohiorob@mastodonmigration@_dmh And so the schism of the Fediverse into two ... the Open Fediverse and the We Only Want To Hear People Who We Like Fediverse ... begins. Sad, this place had a lot of promise.
There are already schisms in the Fediverse. There are very large instances the specialize in pornography, and are effectively isolated. ActivityPub is designed to support such schisms.
Given that we are not going to resolve these discussions with concensus one way or the other, the challenge going forward is to implement a response in a way that maintains the community while accommodating the schism.
@supernovae@feditips@mastodonmigration@_dmh yeah right, the way the American Civil War wasn't about slavery. Right? No one is buying this. Are you being paid to write this? Do you have hopes of financial benefit from it? Let's have some disclosure here.
Some people complain about childish comments in these discussions. This is the 1st really childish reaction I encountered.
I don't know you @supernovae, and you prolly don't care much about me, but every time I see you reacting in these discussions, you're dodging questions, blackening others, diverting, not taking people serious, while you talk about love.
It's sad. This is a serious problem we should solve together.
@supernovae@_dmh@feditips@mastodonmigration this is just grotesque corporate double speak. Facebook is actively sharing data with law enforcement about peoples' miscarriages in states that are banning abortions. They are pigs. If people want to socialize with pigs, fine. Do it on the pig website.
I'll build a wall to protect my community from a private company manipulating for profit the digital life of a billion users, held captive into a corporate environment where even the hate speech produced from that billion is monetized.
People won't be blocked by this wall: if they want to interact outside of their corporate fence, without ads and filtering algorithms, they are welcome to join 20k+ communities.
Segregation? Don't be so ridiculous, people are free to come here. It's the corporation we are shunning, not the people currently forced to use it by the network effect.
It's about maintaing a social network that isn't controlled or influenced by Meta.
If you federate with Meta, you are encouraging people to stay on Meta. If you defederate, you're encouraging them to try other platforms.
If you federate with Meta, you allow people to leave Meta and still interact with their friends and family who have not yet done so.
And even if they don't leave, so what? The point is interoperability. If YOU want to leave Meta, you can and still interact with your friends and family who don't. And they get to continue to interact with you. And that's okay. In fact, THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT. Just like e-mail, you can change social network provider and still interact. You are not locked in.
There is not a hope in hell Meta would keep such a system going if it looked like realistically being an escape route from their platform.
As soon as a sizeable number of people take such an opportunity to leave to non-Meta servers, Meta will start shutting it down (probably using some excuse about new features and/or security).
But somehow, if we federate with P92, which is going to offer a bigger reach/network on the instance that federates, we are encouraging them to stay on Meta. I would argue that it's the reverse, it will show the users on P92 that they have alternatives to Meta where they can also reach the network of people they want to reach.
I think this could be a good thing for the Fediverse, as long as we maintain our principles, which we will do. If they don't behave then we can defederate. Blocking them before hand is just keeping the status quo, which is like you said forcing the user to use Meta because of the network effect.
Meta is not doing this for the same reasons as the rest of the instances are doing it. They want data. They want profit. They want us to be under their power again.
Are you proposing a whitelist approach or defederate with anything that remotely resembles a bot mob from #Meta (#P92)? It can make #Fediverse look like digging its own hole in defencelessness, to be frank. Isn't this supposed to be an opposite that we do: absorb the #SocialMedia and let people choose what they really want in their feed?
Fediverse is not supposed to be an "anything goes" place.
It's supposed to be a place where each community can decide what is allowed and not allowed, and where people are free to move communities or start a new community.
@ollie_francis@nicdex@feditips@supernovae@mastodonmigration@jerry@jarm@kainoa@stux@dansup@jessel@oliphant and with de-federating P92 you think that will change? even alone, Meta can go to the W3C and say "we are the biggest instance, we need ActivityPub to be change like that". Meta don't need to be federated to rule the fediverse and that lead to the biggest question: instead of de-federating why not finding a solution so biggest instance doesn't mean biggest decision power?
@feditips@ollie_francis@nicdex@supernovae@mastodonmigration@jerry@jarm@kainoa@stux@dansup@jessel@oliphant W3C can't force anyone to use ActivityPub but Mastodon/MissKey/CalKey/PixelFed/Lemmy/etc... already use ActivityPub so P92 which will become the majority based on their instance size at launch (3.5B since they will enforce ActivityPub to all Instagram users) will be able to control all the fediverse through ActivityPub modification imposed at the W3C
Abandoning it or loosing the ability for instance to communicate with others projects like peertube/pixelfed/etc... will only give more weigh to bluesky.
And Abondoning ActivityPub will be a clear win for Meta because that would makes Mastodon return to a niche project.
ActivityPub is an open standard, it's like a recipe.
If someone sabotaged a recipe to say "add 5kg of salt" instead of "add 5g of salt", the cook can ignore that part of the recipe and carry on using 5g of salt.
If it looks like the W3C version of AP is being sabotaged, the developers of Fedi platforms can agree to ignore that sabotage.
A lot of people think Meta is after their datas and that's why Meta want to federate. I think Meta want to kill an open source competitor. defederation is not the solution for that.
@feditips@ollie_francis@nicdex@supernovae@mastodonmigration@jerry@kainoa@stux@dansup@jessel@oliphant Meta is more threaten by ActivityPub than it is by microblogging part of the fediverse because ActivityPub is what makes open source social network true competitor to corporatist social network by making them scalable. By destroying it the way Google destroyed XMPP protocol, ActivityPub will still exist (just like XMPP) but would no longer be a true competitor, a return to the true web.
Sorry to interup. Really appreciate your contributions, but could you edit your replies to only mention those active in the conversation. We are generating a lot of traffic and notifications for those not engaged here.
Connecting to Meta is not "connecting to the world", like connecting to Google is not "connecting to the Internet".
The real world and the real internet are not shaped by algortithms serving corporate profits.
If you measure the closeness to reality and not the etension of the userbase, the Fediverse is "the real world" with a digital biodiversity put at risk by corporate worlds.
The corporate reality of Meta opens another option that I consider more likely: user on threads, manipulated by Meta algorithms, will see tailored Fedi content that will encourage engagement and monetization for the company and not freedom and migration for the people.
@supernovae people in the fediverse are not "better people". Nevertheless, communities can help people to take the best out of them, if the goal is positive change and not corporate profit, which wants to monetize also the worst behaviour and verbal violence. If a community promoting the best attitude among people interacts with a more powerful community monetizing the worst attitudes of people, nothing good can come. "What you saw" would have been worse if someone could make money out of it.
@supernovae@mastodonmigration@jerry@jarm@kainoa@feditips@atomicpoet@stux@dansup@jessel@oliphant "you can keep the network you already have" is a weird assumption, considering that we are talking about a company that doesn't even allow to migrate to Whatsapp and my phone the phone numbers of my Facebook contacts, that you can just copy/paste one by one. I'm afraid that discovering the difference between what you expect/wish Meta to do and what Meta will actually do will be disappointing
Byron, you're not an idiot. Surely you don't believe what you are writing?
You and I both know a cut-throat commercial entity which has done all this bad stuff over the years like Meta/Facebook does not want migration to other platforms.
The direction Meta/FB have in mind is people who moved to Fedi now move to Meta/FB.
They are not a charity, they are not activists, they just want money.
Meta/FB saw how the Fedi became a default destination for people who left Twitter, and now they want that stream of people to be heading towards Meta/FB instead.
They are trying to hijack the success the Fediverse has had in the last few months.
they want to be the "next big thing" after Muskverse, intercepting new fediverse users and leveraging Mastodon userbase to feed quality content to their corporate hen-house.
This would turn against us, because our well-curated contents will be shown to meta sociopathic and poorly moderated audience, generating avoidable flames that will boost engagement on Meta and raise our servers bill.
I have suffered at the hands of hugely evil people that Zucky defends and platforms. If I have to block every single meta user one by one, I will. I doubt I am unique.
Now i've read this entire thread and it took me hours. Thanks to your heatened debatery here i can see a clearer picture on this issue as an amateur...
IMO:
Meta states "Facebook doesn't directly engage in philantropic activities"
But they are fuckin damn aware of what is happening through their proprietary, addictive algorithms AND they still wanna grow besides failing to moderate this HUGE meganetwork
I need a setting or whatever that not only results in all the "No" answers, but also gives Facebook Karen a li'l electric shock whenever someone clicks the boost button.
Not a dangerous shock.
More like a dog-training bark-collar sort of shock.
Sorry to interup. Really appreciate your contributions, but as a courtesy could you edit your replies to only mention those active in the conversation. We are generating a lot of traffic and notifications for those not engaged here. Thanks!
@accretionist No problem at all! The reason is that someone asked that they be removed from mentions. They helped out with the technical aspect, but then were not appreciating the dozens of notifications. Not sure english was even their native language. It's fine to keep this account mentioned/notified. That's kind of the purpose of @mastodonmigration.
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