Later tonight, after I get the satellite cameras running and everything has settled in, I am going to block mastodon.social and mstdn.social.
I mentioned this yesterday, but it likely got pretty buried in all the Meta activity.
This is really just more experimenting to see what it is like taking a more active stance against servers the are or likely will be a big source of garbage.
This isn't against the admin st* or anything like that, they are in crappy position.
I still haven't made up my mind about blocking Meta's #Threads, codenamed #Project92 or #P92, supposedly supporting #ActivityPub, should it actually launch. As far as I can see, it's basically "keeping the evil surveillance corp. out" vs "avoiding nerdy self-marginalization".
Both are fair points. I guess, it depends. But on what? For the, the key point is if the Threads (or whatever its name) support easy migration (as Mastodon does). If that's the case, I would prefer not to block it, as it could be an offramp from the walled garden. If this feature is omitted, then i would be much more open to blocking.
But in the end, this should not be a decision by the admins, but a collective one by the users of the instance. #fedipact#Project92
I usually avoid making my position on topics of emotional debate and politics known (besides "starring"). It usually doesn't change anyone's mind and is wasted energy. However...
The whole mastdn.social (half a dozen unrelated domains) vs mastodon.art situation has a silver lining: It's the perfect opportunity to identify and block a lot of literal nazis, (crypto-)fascists, corporate apologist, equivocalists, and other dangers to a free and open society which crawl out of the woodwork in its wake.
So annihilation.social, which seems to be an instance with known issues, is running a bot to identify and post about instances that are blocking #threads.
Other users are then using those posts to send messages to the instance admins asking them to justify their decision (to harass admins of instances that block #Meta, basically).
It seems that @Gargron signed Meta's NDA for #Project92. If this is true, then if I were an instance moderator I would defederate mastodon.social and switch to some fork of #Mastodon if I didn't already use one. No quarter should be given to #Meta and other such entities. Let's not repeat the mistakes of #XMPP, the #Fediverse must not be embraced-extended-extinguished as well. I'm watching for the reaction of my current instance's admins to #FediPact and #FediBlockMeta.
:HackerCatRainbow: https://cyberpunk.lol is open for registrations!!! :HackerCatRainbow:
WHO ARE WE?
we're a small scrappy relatively fresh-faced underdog instance of glitch mastodon. we have but one humbly stated mission: to put the PUNK back into cyberpunk here on the fediverse
WHO AM I?
i'm vanta. trans enby girl polyam lesbian gender terrorist, the fediverse's favorite pirate radio DJ, DIY clothing auteur, and rogue wordsmith extraordinaire. i've been a hardcore fedi user since 2017
THREADS?
not only is this instance a fedipact instance that has threads.net blocked, but... i'm the one who made the whole pact to begin with lmao
Hi @joeroe
just read the post below & wonder if archaeo.social will ensure that our content doesn't end up in the metaverse.
Admins who have committed to #FediPact and want to ensure that your users’ posts don’t end up on #Threads: if you haven’t yet activated AUTHORIZED_FETCH/secure mode on your instance, consider doing so. Without this mode, your users’ posts can still be visible on threads.net if they are boosted by an intermediary, irrespective of whether your instance blocks threads.net.
Fediverse friends @alexis and @jo have documented the presence of vile fascist kill-list compiler accounts Moms for Liberty, Libs of Tiktok, Gays Against Groomers and PragerU on Threads. In the attached screenshot, Jo is dogpiled for harassment.
There will be many, many more like them. These accounts won't be banned from Threads, because they produce engagement. And engagement - of any kind, the more negative the better - is all the psychopaths who run Meta care about.
Now we see exactly what we're being pulled into. Facebook hasn't launched a big Mastodon. Instead, the fediverse instances that federate with it will become little Facebooks
The Fediverse grew by 4.5 million users in the last month alone. We don’t need Threads to grow, defederate Facebook before corporations take over this portion of the web too! #FediPact
Mastodon is hard to self-host, which leads to too few instances with open registrations. Gargron's solution is to redirect everyone on his one million users server.
At the moment the 419 instances having signed the #FediPact have 387,191 users, i.e. 4% of the total number of users and 27% of the number of monthly active users (MAU) (I give both numbers because we can expect these users to be more committed to the fediverse, so more active, than lingering mastodon.social accounts)
On any online space, you should consider who you give power to. Who has the control over who you choose to associate with? Power doesn't corrupt. It reveals.
People in real life do choose to avoid dangerous or toxic places.
All that the instances who sign the fedipact are doing is signalling to some of us that somewhere is safe for folk who don't want to engage with Facebook at all.
This is a Freedom of Association issue, not a Freedom of Speech issue.
"extreme anti-trans hate content remains widespread across instagram, facebook, and threads. characterized by fear-mongering, lies, conspiracy theories, dehumanizing tropes, and violent rhetoric, these posts — many by high-follower accounts — aim to boost engagement, generate revenue, and seed hateful narratives about trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. these accounts profit from such hate, and so does meta and its shareholders"
saw someone speculating that #FediPact is an inside job by meta to intentionally fracture the fediverse and, damn, i wish they were paying me for this lmao
A lot of people have insisted #Meta isn't getting involved with the #Fediverse to embrace, extend and extinguish it...
... but even before fully implementing Fediverse interoperability in #Threads they're already talking openly about changing its protocols to add features like monetization. 🤔
Text in a screenshot reads as follows: McCue riffed on the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content became available to subscribers only, similar to how Patreon works. For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the fediverse, too. He additionally suggested there are ways the fediverse could monetize beyond donations, which is what often powers various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone might even make a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the way some fediverse client apps are paid today.