The obvious recommendation here is to defederate with extreme prejudice any and all #Facebook-associated instance. We know how it will play out, we've seen it happen again and again. It doesn't matter how nice and cooperative they will be in the beginning, this is a power move against the #Fediverse, a move against which it has no chance of resisting if even an inch is given.
The only measure in which this news can be viewed positively is that the decision confirms the #Fediverse as a threat to the social silos. Let's keep it this way. Do not trust #Facebook. Do not forget that just last week #Instagram tried to block the #joinPixelfed tag <https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110338112401101688>, lest people became aware of the existence of the world outside, a world that still has the appeal of early-days IG, and not subject to the threat of enshittification.
I'm quite confident that most of us (and most of our admins) will know better and avoid #Facebook affiliation (pardon, federation). But here's the million-dollar question: will @Gargron, or will he fall for the lure, trustly welcoming the Trojan horse of a #Facebook-managed #ActiviyPub instance, believing it a sign of “victory”?
I stand corrected, the amount of people deluding themselves into thinking we should welcome the upcoming Meta instance with open arms is much higher than I expected. Truly people never learn anything from history. Seriously, how can we ever hope to find a solution to things like anthropogenic #ClimateChange when we can't even cope with the threat of surveillance capitalists siphoning off all the energy from the opportunity of a breakout?
@oblomov You might well be right, but it’s hard to imagine a way of presenting your argument that could be less persuasive or more alienating. Categorically dismissing POVs you don’t agree with as delusional and ignorant is bad enough, but tacking on some gratuitous apocalypse? I agree with a lot of what you say, but after reading your thread I don’t want to. 🤯
The problem with awareness is, again, frustration: knowing how things are going to turn out, being powerless against people with stronger voices or more power dismissing the warnings and insisting on pursuing their delusions of impermeability to the laws of physics (for climate change) or surveillance capitalism (on the Internet), so that the only thing that's left in the end is being in the position to say «I told you so.» when things inevitably go as you predicted.
It gets worse: unless the Fediverse starts guarding against the Facebook torpedo (and by the looks of it, I'm starting to doubt it will) NOW, the people that don't believe the warning now will come up with excuses why all energy will have been siphoned off the ecosystem, blaming everything but the elephant that they let in thinking it couldn't lay waste of the china shop. They'll add insult to injury.
There's one thing I've been thinking again these last couple of days: would the situation be different if the client-to-server part of the ActivityPub specification has found the same level of adoption as the server-to-server side? One of the ugly things in the Fediverse today is that each platform has its own API to communicate, which is burdensome for clients, and fragments the ecosystem.
I know there are historical reasons for this (most major Fediverse platforms either precede the a ActivityPub spec and later adopted it for federation, or tried to emulate the existing ones also client-API-wise), but I still wonder: is the C2S protocol sufficiently specified to allow the same functionality currently implemented via ad-hoc APIs in existing platforms?
If so, it would be good for platforms to start moving towards it (possibly initially supporting it side-by-side with the existing APIs). If not, it would be good for the C2S protocol to be improved (and/or better specified, if it's a problem of underspecification), so it could be adopted as above.
So, #askFedi question: are there platforms that support the C2S protocol too? Maybe #GoToSocial or #Vocata? How's that working out?
BTW one thing I realized is missing here (because as I was writing this thread I was also discussing this elsewhere, and my mind tried to avoid duplication): #RSS isn't the only thing Meta aka #Facebook and #Google siphoned the energy off: there was another important protocol that they #EEE-ed into oblivion: #XMPP, which was a federated (reminds you of anything), open, extensible protocol for chat/instant messaging.
@oblomov
I generally agree with the sentiment of your thread, thanks for the write up!
I just want to clarify that #XMPP was not consigned to oblivion - it existed before Facebook and Google, and it still exists after them. That it became extinct when they dropped it is the narrative they want people to hear. There are many active projects such as @snikket_im , bringing XMPP to ordinary people without any involvement of big tech.
@mattj@snikket_im just like RSS (see the other thread linked above) the (reached) objective has been to remove them from the public discourse. They are still being used and developed, but they are not a threat anymore because the vast majority of people is simply unaware of them . The purpose is to do the same with ActivityPub: it won't matter if a few hundred thousand people keep using it, as long as the majority will not consider it a serious alternative anymore.
@jabberati@mattj@snikket_im standards alone aren't sufficient anymore. FB is just HTML+CSS+JS, it's still a silo. It could implement ActivityPub and only federated between Meta services (FB/IG/Barcelona) and be “standard complainant“
When #Google and #Facebook adopted #XMPP for their messaging products, a lot of people in the ecosystem were thrilled. Open source had won! The Big Ones were finally joining the #FLOSS community with an interoperable, federated product that allowed any client to be used with their system, and communication between people with account on other servers!
Yes, the rhetoric at the time was exactly the same that we're seeing from people looking at codename #Barcelona with enthusiasm.
The rest of history. The #XMPP protocol at the time has some glaring inadequacies in some areas, so it had to be extended to cover those use cases. Instead of working with the community at large to converge towards common extensions for logging, device switching, audio/video and conference calls, #Facebook and #Google went with the classic #rugPull, first by defederating their servers (lock users in) and then by switching out of the protocol altogether.
(Interestingly, #Facebook was much more successful in locking people in than #Google (probably partly due to the very schizophrenic approach to products that the latter has), but Google also kept their XMPP compatibility for longer: access was shut down only a few months ago, years after the defederation and transition away from Chat.)
I'm sure you can see now why I am less than thrilled about the enthusiasm with which people are looking at #Facebook “joining” the #Fediverse with their #ActivityPub-compatible #Twitter clone, despite there being literally NO INDICATIONS that their attitude today is any different from the one at the time of #XMPP —and if anything, the opposite, as we've seen with #Instagram blocking the #joinPixelfed tag.
So I'm going to make a prediction now, about how this will go if their server isn't treated exactly like Gab. Feel free to bookmark this for reference and set a reminder for a couple of years from now to tell me (and everything still interested in listening) how right I was (and rest assured I'm not the only one: everybody with a good memory thinks along the same lines).
Prediction: #Facebook#Barcelona joins the #Fediverse. Many instances (especially large ones and ones with an obsession with “growing the network at any cost”) federate with it. The #Fediverse sees a growth like nothing before, with the #TwitterMigration paling to a glitch by comparison. Smooth sailing for a couple of years, but nearly every new account is created on #Facebook's side. FB possibly brings #Instagram in. @dansup rejoices
Prediction, part 2: a couple of years in, with over 90% of the #Fediverse on #Facebook servers, the company goes for the #rugPull, either on bogus technical claims on the protocol, or on the basis that “everybody is here anyway”. They defederate from everything. The Fediverse idea loses momentum, participation falls back to diaspora* levels. Tankies explain to us that this was due to #ActivityPub not being good enough and not due to Facebook killing it because it was a real threat.
@oblomov I understand your fear, but my perspective here is that fediverse only staying a geek niche thing isn’t all that much better.
I want tech to actually provide value to everyone, not just techie geeks. Like, do people not understand how implicitly elitist that is?
Say what you want about Facebook (and I don’t have much nice things to say about them), but the user-friendly nature of their friend system means that a lot of people who simply where not able to successfully communicate with things like email actually where able to do things like get in touch with enstranged family (for instance).
There will be no fediverse revolution without making it actually user friendly to computer novices.
@torb to reply to both this and your other comment: I'm a strong believer that the Fediverse is (or should be) for everyone, but this must not (and in fact cannot) be achieved with a Facebook takeover: the whole reason if existence of the Fediverse is to break out of the surveillance capitalism silos and give control of their Internet presence back into the user hands: getting everyone on the Fediverse by getting “everyone” on one instance completely defeats that purpose.
@torb in fact, I don't even think that Mastodon is a good representative implementation of what the Fediverse should be, as the admins still exert too much control: it's but a step in the right direction. But the Facebook takeover that will come with my prediction would be a major step back rather than the step forward we need.
@oblomov I think maybe that having a having a system that truly could handle being federated with Facebook is prerequisite for open federation succeeding.
Kinda like early web and internet in the 90s. There where some many attempts at taking over the web with something else, but what happened was that the web just took over them instead.
Many of the companies behind those attempts did survive, but only by playing ball with the web and the internet. I know many kept trying, but it’s turned out to be remarkably resilient to takeovers.
I wonder what it would take to get a similar dynamic going with the fediverse.
@torb the single most important feature currently missing in the Fediverse is nomadic identity, iè the possibility to detach your identity from the particular server you're on. That, especially with ideally content portability, would go a long way in ensuring that people weren't locked in to specific platforms or servers, so that joining the Fediverse became a kind of “poison pill” for the giants that didn't want to play ball.
@oblomov Oh yeah. It would help solve other problems too. I know so many people who reject the mere notion of joining because they’re afraid they’ll join the wrong instance, or they think they won’t find an instance they like (as if the instance matters the way an IRC chat server does).
@oblomov I think your analysis is pretty spot on. One thing I would add that might make things even harder to predict:
FB especially, but also Google are not really growing or increasing in popularity in the profitable ad markets. They are starting to look like Yahoo circa 2006. This might just be one of many desperate, superficial lunges to maintain the absurd growth they had in the first 1-2 decades of their existence. But I think they are both tipping toward decline.
I think ... you should go outside and touch grass. Feels like a random gloop of fear-tech-porn ... Fedi will always be alright. If any of the big mega players grab on, it will be because they're dying, not us.
Also refusing to federata with Meta would be dumb .. people would find out about all the stuff they "can't see" and it could probably drain people away from some of those networks.
@djsumdog yeah, I'm going to file that under “people unable to recognize a threat”, in the excellent company of all the minimizers and enablers that are responsible for the lack of action against anthropogenic climate change and the absence of a force capable of standing against the rise of fascism worldwide.
I think that the main delusion that shines a positive light on the Barcelona thing is the illusion that this kind of connection can help bring people out of FB/IG, despite there being no indicator that this would actually happen, white there are several ways for Facebook to extend their control on the Fediverse through that same gate (see for example this write-up by @darnell on a possible scenario for the takeover <https://darnell.day/facebook-fears-the-fediverse>)
@oblomov let me counter argument just for the fun of.
Each time we saw this thing happen, userbase was such small compared to 2023 internet. I never was into rss (started using rss with podcast) but i do remember putting all instant chat in a single app, we were something like twenty-three users, on fixed computers, putting all the networks together. There was no aunt, no colleague shit chat, i’m gonna cry 🙂
Can a 10 millions user network be killed that old way ? In the moment they are compatible, we are 210 millions, in the moment they broke/extend, we are back 10 millions. We will attract new users if we produce interesting content.
@luca that's the thing though: there's maybe 1 or 2 million actually active users, and a lot of them are here begrudgingly, lamenting the absence of all the connections they used to have. Now Barcelona comes along. They can reconnect with those people. FB pulls the rug, they are going to follow them back there. And your grandma will still be on FB.
they meet, they talk as they were at the circle of old little grannies...
It's fun and easy.
If you take away the nasty billionaire part, you see that this grandma-like people, they don't want complication, they just want a simple nice place where to chat.
If you offer them that, they will go there.
Which is not what they will find here. I don't really think it can be what they will find here.
It's...like...a completely different sort of mentality?
@ju_and_the_cats@luca the problem isn't the grandma on Facebook per se, the problem is that the grandma on Facebook is bait. And it's bait because beyond the ease of use (which actually gets worse as enshittification progresses) the only thing that really matters are connection. So even if today you had an app that is easier to use than FB and WhatsApp, and could set it up for your grandma to use with her nephews, she would still use FB/WA where the other grannies are.
@ju_and_the_cats@luca the problem is that they all have to switch at the same time. And the larger the existing networks, the harder this is. Moreover, often people will keep their feet in both shoes, but end up primarily using the one that is better at sucking them in. Since one of the primary selling point of the Fediverse is to NOT be addictive, it's a battle lost from the start. Even if it was perfect under all regards.
@darnell thanks, a very valuable (and credible!) perspective/prediction. I appreciate it raises the point that multiple giants joining could be out way to prevent the catastrophe, although I'm still skeptical (remember, XMPP had both Facebook and Google). I suspect the only reliable way out would be to integrate nomadic identities to improve account portability, but this is still a long way coming (which is probably why FB is moving in now, probably).
@mario that's an interesting point. I still don't think it can prevent them from defederating, since nothing requires specific server to server connections (or they would be forced to connect to Gab, for example), and that's all they need to kill the Fediverse momentum. But interestingly, this reinforces my suspicion that things would be different if the client to server API had seen wider adoption, as they couldn't shut that down as easily.
@radio ouch. Does Yacy have a way to block/defederated other nodes? This was probably one of the most important features that allowed the Fediverse success in defending from Gab.
@oblomov There’s a serious tradeoff here which depends on your goals.
If you want to keep what fediverse is now, not federating with big ones is probably smart.
But if you want to have most people have a chance at actually getting the benefits of federation then you actually want big adoption (and federation with them).
Personally I think the value of a geek niche fediverse is a limited, I want federation as a concept to just take completely over social media. My guess is we don’t get there without playing ball with the big guys.
The million dollar question is this: is there a way to do both? I don’t know the answer to that myself.
@andreasm RSS was ubiquituous before the Facebook+Google double whammy. In comparison, now it's all but extinguished. They did the same to XMPP, and the Fediverse is next.
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