Point blank, a mass Fediblock isn't going to work with #Meta.
The cold truth is that people will use #Barcelona whether it federates or not. Even if it fails, Barcelona will probably have more users out of the gate than almost every project save Mastodon. Hell, it will probably eclipse #Bluesky too.
And even if you convince every server to defederate -- which you won't -- this will not be a PR coup for the Fediverse. Newspaper headlines won't blare "Fediverse successfully resists Meta." Instead, they will probably follow @gruber take with "Open source zealots complain that an open protocol is open."
Again, as I've said countless times, I'm not saying you should federate with Barcelona or any Meta-owned property. If you want, defederate. The joy of the Fediverse is freedom of association.
But a mass Fediblock doesn't solve a few important problems with Meta, and perhaps makes them worse.
The most critical problem is that Meta users need to migrate away from Meta-owned social networks. Until now, a migration path has simply been unfeasible to most. But when Barcelona gets launched, it is possible that many of them will become aware of a greater Fediverse.
How to build that awareness? By interacting with them through services beyond Barcelona.
This approach works. I've interacted with many Mastodon users through services beyond Mastodon, and this has resulted in adoption of other Fediverse software. #Calckey is a case in point.
However, there's a bigger problem concerning Meta: Fediverse replacements for Meta-owned social networks aren't getting mass adoption. And it's not because these apps aren't good.
#Pixelfed is an #Instagram replacement. It is also one of the slickest apps on the Fediverse. Yet, Pixelfed only has 150,000 registered accounts.
#Friendica is a #Facebook replacement. It's been around since 2010. It is a mature product that does many things very well, but Friendica only has 17,000 registered accounts.
The software is great but we are failing to effectively market the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Now I'm trying my darnedest to change this, and so are many people. But facts are facts. Fediverse alternatives to Meta are a blip on the radar.
Refusing to federate with Barcelona won't change this. How do I know?
Because we don't federate now, and the status quo remains intact.
Meanwhile, Meta is practically gifting Pixelfed and Friendica an opportunity for federation, and it would be foolish to not consider broader implications.
How is it that more people aren't considering this opportunity?
Dare I say that most people -- including devs -- suffer from myopia concerning what the Fediverse is. The Fediverse is not Mastodon, and it is wrong to view the Fediverse solely through the eyes of Mastodon.
And I'll go further: by focusing Barcelona on text, I suspect that Meta is likewise making the same mistake of viewing the Fediverse as a "Twitter killer".
What they may not be considering is that the Fediverse might be a "Meta killer" too. And connecting Barcelona to the Fediverse is opening a can of worms Meta hasn't entirely considered yet.
If Barcelona is indeed text-based, what will happen when a Barcelona user encounters Pixelfed and asks, "Why does this post show reels? And why can't I do the same?"
Believe me, this is the kind of content that triggers migration.
We need to think bigger than Fediblock. Yes, for your own mental health and safety, you may not want to federate with Barcelona. However, there needs to also be a means for Barcelona users to encounter content outside Barcelona.
Perhaps there needs to be "lobby" servers that help Barcelona users enter the greater Fediverse -- helping them make the switch beyond Meta.
@atomicpoet Continue to see Facebook as a unique challenge for federated alternatives because most relationships on it are bidirectional and correspond to people you know in the real world. Something like Twitter, you can just come here and follow a new set of interesting people. On Facebook it's much harder to recreate the value you get there if your friends won't come with you. Curious what ideas people have for getting around this problem.
I and most of my communities have just given it up for now. But I'm sure we would gladly re-engage if the protocol and privacy policies were right. It's really about transparency to rebuild trust, at this point. Considering that #Meta is a big contributor in #OpenSource there's reason to think they might swing it.
Interesting. I don't mind interacting with private for-profit organizations using open protocols.
#GitHub is an example - I'm glad to ask my employer to pay for the additional tools, and nice user experiences; but if we need to migrate away, I can make it happen with a short shell script.
I may re-engage with #Meta on the same terms if the day comes that their privacy policies pass muster and their software interacts over open protocols.
@atomicpoet oh boy I have an enormous list of counterpoints. Hope you don't mind this getting split over multiple messages, I'm on Mastodon. So, anyway:
the point of blocking #P92 isn't to make it fail, it's to prevent its usage as an #EEE torpedo against the #Fediverse
Newspaper headlines will not speak positively of the #Fediverse either way. In fact, if it's let in, there's a high chance of it eating all the mindspace, because that's the objective:
2 (cont.) I can bet now on a number of “tech” article pushing the angle that “the Fediverse is Barcelona”. You think the Fediverse = Mastodon equation is bad? That's going to be a million time worse. And it's what Meta will strive for.
I agree that people need to migrate off Meta services. Federating with P92 will not help achieve that. P92 is neither FB nor IG, it's a new thing, and when (not if, but when) it will defederate, it'll push a lot of people to move
3 (cont.) FROM the Fediverse to P92 to remain in contact with the people there. I predict that federating will not “buy” the Fediverse any new user migrating off the Meta platforms.
Interaction with users from other platforms does NOT raise awareness of the existence of other platforms. We see this with Mastodon now: a lot of people interact with users on other platforms and remain blissfully unaware, because Mastodon hides this information.
4 (cont) Unless you actively bombard them with the information, the fact that other platforms exist and interoperate remains a “behind the scene” detail for most, and often a source of issues due to subtle differences and incompatibilities between these platforms and Mastodon. If we can't fix this for Mastodon, we have no hope of making it work against P92, that will go to extra lengths to hid this information from the users.
as others have pointed out, Fediverse platforms competing with Meta's FB and IG, even when reasonably mature, are still far from giving potential migrators all that they would expect. Think of how much people have complained about Twitter feature missing from Mastodon, despite Mastodon largely offering a better feature set than Twitter. It's even worse with FB/IG vs Friendica/PixelFed.
Even if these competing platforms worked as drop-in replacement, there still aren't enough servers out there to absorb a potential mass migration, and especially for media-heavy platforms, this is unlikely to change any time soon.
Even if there were enough hosts, people still wouldn't migrate. Meta is not going to federate FB and IG. P92 is entirely separate platform.
P92 users will not wonder why PixelFed users have reels. Meta will make sure that incoming posts will be crippled enough to NOT show anything that may make them wonder. Again, even Mastodon often fails a lot in managing correctly inbound content —and that's not out of malice. Now image the same, but with the express intent of making the Fediverse experience as crippled as possible.
1/ The point of EEE is to grow from the fediverse by siphoning it. But how is that going to work? WHO would ever drop mastodon to join Meta?? Meta doesn’t even need to siphon anything, they have 1 Billion users already. The 1.2M of monthly-active fediverse users mean nothing to them. There is nothing to siphon.
This is what’s going to happen: They give us access to the ActivityPub API, cool. They drop the access, ow too bad, guess we’ll continue without Meta. They cannot absorb 1.2M users when those 1.2M users care more about their values than about growth.
Meta isn’t going to absorb the fediverse, there is nothing they can do to convince us to join. EEE cannot work here. It won’t work.
2/ No, the journalists already know matodon. I don’t know if they’ell understand the fediverse, but "barcelona ≠ mastodon" and "barcelona is compatible with mastodon" isn’t hard to understand.
3/ P92 is literally IG. Advertized as such, same accounts, same follower/following list, same blocklist/blocked keywords, same everything. Mastodon users will not migrate back to Meta. They can defederate it won’t change a thing. They don’t even need our userbase, we’re a dwarf next to Meta.
The reverse is not true, we can drain a lot of users from Meta to mastodon/pixelfeed. Not all 1 Billion, but a decent amount and more than they can drain from us.
4/ This is not true. A lot of people migrate out of mastodon. Alternatives are growing and draining users from mastodon to those alternatives.
5/ This is a good reason to work even harder and make the fediverse an even better place. But when I see that bluesky is considered a good alternative, the number of features required to gain users’ interest might be actually pretty low.
6/ This is an issue. I do not envy fediverse admins.
7/ P92 is IG
8/ Speculation. And even if broken, seeing a lot (even 1% is enough) of @ user@ not-instagram is going to get them curious. People complaining about broken posts will make them curious. People complaining about Meta banning nudity will makee them curious. etc. If we don’t federate, we don’t exist, if we federate we have visibility they can see us, our messages, our complains our struggles, our values, etc.
No, the point of EEE is to kill the competition. If this gives you a viable product and additional market share, good. If it doesn't, that's still good enough as long as the competition dies. They are not after those 1.2M users for growth, they're aiming at destroying the mindset of the Fediverse as a viable alternative to centralized silos. Also, a sizeable number of those 1.2M don't give a rat's ass about the Fediverse per se, they're only here provisionally,
1 (cont.) waiting for a “less Nazified, but similar to the old Twitter I remember” platform to come around —and that's exactly what Meta is going to give them. So what will happen when they drop access is a lot of people (who already have an IG account anyway) will drop the Fediverse altogether and stick to P92 to stay with their friends. And the idea of the Fediverse being a viable alternative will die out in the process, going back to an obscure thing nerds do.
Most of the journalists have no idea what the Fediverse is, and even if they would know better, they will write what brings them money. And pushing the angle “this is an excellent opportunity to move away from Meta” isn't going to be an angle that brings most of them any money —in fact, more the reverse.
and 7. P92 is not IG. It only shares the account information, to start with 1B accounts instead of a few nerds.
Your idea of “a lot” is very different from mine. Mastodon as 25× the accounts of the next most popular microblogging platform (CalcKey). As bad as that is for the health of the ecosystem, the fact remains that the vast majority of Fediverse users identify it with Mastodon and are scarcely aware of the existence of other platforms, especially other microblogging platforms. Collectively, we're FAR from having broken out of this misconception. The point holds.
I absolutely agree that we need to strive the Fediverse a better place. But the point is, it won't be by the time P92 joins. BS is seen as a good alternative mostly by the people I mentioned above. The actual features are only marginally relevant excuses. The actual benefit of BS is that it's a VC-funded techbro platforms, and that has more appeal than what is perceived riff-raff of amateurish code.
5 (cont.) Mastodon could look & feel exactly like BS and people would still find excuses to prefer the latter, because ultimately who's behind matters more than anything else.
Seriously. I have the utmost admiration for them, and am never surprised when they decide they've had enough.
we'll see whose right. As @atomicpoet said elsewhere, regardless of what any of us thinks would be better, it's likely most instances will federate. My only consolation will be to be able to say “I told you so” ;-)
"Why does this post show reels? And why can't I do the same?"
THIS, but also don’t just focus on features, focus on content moderation too. On pixelfeeds photographs don’t have to cover the tits of their nude models. But also disinformation and nazi shit don’t stay online.
Actually a MUCH MUCH better headline wouldn’t be "open-source zealots banned Meta", but instead "Meta blocked a bunch of mastodon instances because of nudity" or "Meta put a filter to hide all NSFW content from the fediverse"
In the view of the public, the one doing the censoring is the bad guy, let Meta be the bad guy, as they try to fight against all forms of artistic nudity.
@atomicpoet
"The most critical problem is that Meta users need to migrate away from Meta-owned social networks"
Disagree. No one appointed us to be the saviors of the lost souls of Meta. The fediverse should collectively be concerned with its own survival. And individually, many of us are concerned with the integrity of our own communications, which we refuse to allow Zuckerberg to assimilate for surveillance and AI ingestion.
@ophiocephalic If the Fediverse is not meant to replace Big Social, what's the point? You can always return to Diaspora where interoperability doesn't matter, and everyone is cocooned from anything that diverges from Diaspora.
@atomicpoet
Respectfully, I don't think this is a clear view of the situation. The power dynamic is much, much more asymmetrical than this would suggest. Unless we stand together in opposition, ActivityPub is about to become Zuckerberg's private property
@ophiocephalic
No one appointed us to be their saviors, that's true. But I'd argue it's in everyone's interest for Meta users to migrate off Meta products. To the extent we can help them do that while fostering healthy growth in the Fediverse, I think we should. @atomicpoet
@FeralRobots@atomicpoet
Except that I have yet to see any tangible explanation of how exactly it would happen that assimilation into the Zuckerberg surveillance system will somehow result in people migrating to the fediverse
@atomicpoet@FeralRobots
We agree on this principle - which is why it will be a disaster if Zuckerberg is allowed to take over this protocol and its network. But we can route around this damage by blocking him
@atomicpoet@FeralRobots
I know I don't have to remind you of embrace-extend-extinguish. In other news, I'm losing the ability to communicate with clients because emails from my own domain are being rejected by Gmail servers. Monopolists turn open protocols into closed ones
@ophiocephalic@FeralRobots There’s thousands of email providers, and nothing is preventing you from using them. Right now, I use 5 of them: Zoho, Outlook, Bluehost, Proton, and Mailgun. No problems sending and receiving with Gmail.
@atomicpoet@ophiocephalic@FeralRobots the problem I've ran into personally as someone who self-hosts a SMTP server is Google/Gmail blocking emails from domains they don't recognize. For the first 6 months or so (now 3+ years into it), I'd get constant rejections from Google for having an "untrusted domain".
@atomicpoet@ophiocephalic@FeralRobots also, all major orgs use Google or Microsoft. My university, my high school, every company I've ever worked for (or even applied to!) all use Gmail/Google's email services, and my dad's company and the companies they work with use Outlook/Exchange
@kainoa@atomicpoet@ophiocephalic@FeralRobots I actually almost never have issues with delivering to Google from my self-hosted mail server. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to simply drop every single mail I send silently.
@atomicpoet@kainoa@PeterCxy@FeralRobots
The gmail issue with custom domains is well-known and getting worse. They are bouncing emails from "small" domains. @pluralistic has written on this. Emails from big providers like yahoo work fine. That's enclosure and monopolization
@atomicpoet@ophiocephalic@FeralRobots I'm gonna have to disagree with this one, Apple and Google have an 86.7% market share on emails, making it practically a duopoly. Add in Microsoft to make it 90.9%.
@kainoa@atomicpoet@FeralRobots
Sad but true. Also, love what you're doing with Calckey, definitely the new vanguard of fediverse development. Was thinking of switching over
The top 3 providers (Google, Microsoft, and Newfold (who own a ton of sub-brands)) cover 34.9% market share, and the top 10 cover 47.5%. Definitely not as bad as clients, but still not great for decentralization.
Friendica is OK, but the best Facebook alternative is streams. Feel free to disagree; but if you're discussing Facebook alternatives, you would be foolish to ignore this very capable but also very different way of looking at decentralised communications and the fediverse. If the fediverse goes down the tubes after Barcelona becomes a thing, no worries. First of all it's unlikely it will even affect us, and second, if it does -- we've got options you aren't even aware of. We've been living under the threat of EEE for years and our defenses have evolved accordingly.
Why should my opinion matter? I created Friendica.
@atomicpoet@gruber I'll be honest, I consider myself a relatively clued-in citizen of the internet, and I run my own Mastodon instance, and I'm still baffled about about what "ActivityPub" actually is, or how Misskey, Calckey, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and Peertube interact with each other, or even if they do or not, or how you would go about interacting with somebody on Calckey, from an account on a Mastodon instance.
@atomicpoet@gruber
On whether fediverse offerings are ready for anything like a Facebook mass migration, I'd say they aren't.
I have used friendica.(libranet.de) for a while. TBH it is a bit utilitarian and lacking in many of the features that people will expect.
While calckey is a lot slicker, it is still no replacement for Facebook. Getting at and using groups is clunky. Finding groups is a pain - yuu can only find some if you know the name as listing is limited,.and there's nothing like events.
I like calckey, but most people would not use it in preference to Facebook.
@Daily_Twerk#Calckey is not ready because it's a work in progress. When it comes to development, we're sprinting. In fact, we've added more features and UI improvements over the past 2 weeks than some Fediverse projects have over the past year.
But we will get there. And I believe community feedback will be key.
@atomicpoet@gruber
So bend the knee to try and save people who, so far, have not seen enough wrong with the platform they are using to be motivated to leave it? No. That is a bad idea on several levels and does not take into account exposure to the very same people that we all left behind to come to the fediverse. Forget the numbers. The only people that care about numbers are those looking to profit. I as an individual on the fediverse have every intention of blocking anything Meta related.
@atomicpoet
Barcelona will be federated packaged facebook. Those who are on facebook and using it as their primary social media are not going to spread out into the fediverse. Meta won't allow the dollar signs to go wandering away. This is why the technical community needs to understand the societal implications. This is why twitter will retain the majority of its users. It is about the culture not the technology or federation.
But okay, let me rephrase the question in your terms. What are the other examples where #Meta has "conceded" like this and it's worked out well for the communities they've "conceded" to?
So, part of the standards process is that we work in the open with lots of different parties.
Meta is a member of the W3C and has participated in other standards. I and other members want to make sure they have the information necessary to implement the standard well.
If Meta is implementing ActivityPub, I'd like to make sure they do it in the most interoperable way possible, so all our Free and Open Source software stays compatible with it.
@evan Thanks for the response. What examples would you point to where communities have worked with Facebook on open standards in the way you're advocating and you see it as working out well for the communities involved?
I should also say that this isn't how open standards organisations usually work. You don't have to provide your open standards resume to participate in a standard. We don't look into your heart to divine the purity of your intentions before letting you come to a meeting.
Most commercial software vendors and service providers implement standards for commercial advantage - either to keep up with competitors, or to provide more features to their customers, or to undercut a competitor's advantage.
If you've never read @spolsky 's great blog post about commoditizing the complement, I highly recommend it. It gives a great explanation of why commercial orgs participate in open standards and open source.
I seem to remember it was able to use my jabber account to IM Facebook and Google?
then they siloed from each other and the rest of the xmpp connected servers?
I seem to recall some ISP gave xmpp and email accounts, then only email. Now they don't even give out email or they depend on Google or outlook. And then small and independent email services get blocked as spam?
@oblomov@evan@jdp23@atomicpoet@fediversenews
Whether FB adheres to standards or corrupts them, they only do it for one set of purposes - to enclose, surveil and data-mine. Every standards-compliant FB pixel embed and OID login on the open web is there to enclose, surveil and data-mine. And similarly, if FB is adopting ActivityPub, they're doing it to enclose, surveil and data-mine
@ophiocephalic 💯 ... and this is what I'm trying to get at with my (poorly-worded) questions.
@evan you listed some standards and open-source projects that you think working with Facebook has worked out well for, but I had asked for examples of it working out well for the broader communities. I agree that Meta's participation in the #ActivityPub standards process (if it happens) could well lead to improvements and broader adoption of the standard. If that happens, I can certainly see why that's a good thing for Meta, site admins who are willing to share their users' data with Meta, and #ActivityPub developers who want jobs at (or research funding from) Meta.
To me that's less interesting than what the benefits are for the subset of the fediverse community I see myself as part of -- the people who are here in opposition to fascism and #SurveillanceCapitalism?
We don't know yet -- and we are not without agency here! So one way to have it work out better is to learn from and build on what's worked well in the past. On the other hand, if there aren't any examples of people successfully engaging with Meta to help build alternatives to surveillance capitalism (or if the examples that are cited worked out well from a protocol and software availability perspective but still had the effect of reinforcing Meta and/or undercutting non-surveillance-capitalism alternatives) ... that'd be interesting too.
@atomicpoet
Also, you aren't taking into consideration the extraordinary amount of moderation that existing admins are going to have to deal with. The amount of toxicity that will be coming over from Facebook is going to be overwhelming. this would be a deterrent to running a server, thus reducing options in the Fediverse.
@Homebrewandhacking Again, I maintain that freedom of association is important and block as you see fit.
But the majority of people who use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are not Nazis. In fact, many are from marginalized communities.
My very Asian wife uses Facebook every day. She is not a Nazi. I know this because she's married me.
I would like her to move from Facebook but so far, this has proved challenging because the value of Facebook is her social graph. So far, the only one she knows who uses the Fediverse is me.
But this brings up another important value regarding the Fediverse. Moving here would, in theory, provide her with a safer community.
@ncrav
Bingo. I do not see people making this point often enough.
That said, as @atomicpoet pointed out, even a relatively small Meta failure could still be disruptively massive compared to the fediverse.
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