Before everyone freaks out, this has zero impact on our communities. Chill.
They can already do this by bringing content from Mastodon to Meta platforms via links and screen grabs, this only speeds up the process.
Personally, I love that they’re not federating day one. Because I don’t want any instances I use to federate with them, I don’t want to be connected to a Meta platform unless I deliberately go to a Meta platform to use it.
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don’t let them access that data through ActivityPub. They can build their own platform on the Fediverse and we can have our network of smaller connected instances.
Them doing this does not affect our communities unless we let it. Defederate from them and we can go on our merry way and they can have their own ad laden instance that’s not connected.
Everyone, relax. Continue building your communities here and ignore Meta in their unconnected instances.
To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don’t let them access that data through ActivityPub.
When Twitter had an exodus to Mastodon and a lot of new instances popped up, several were quickly defederated because they were scraping data from other instances, which made a lot of people uncomfortable.
There were also a few far right instances that spun up that were also defederated and blocked within 24 hours so the communities ability to respond to situations like this is very much there and I’m sure that the vast majority will not want to have a single thing to do with meta
@Dee_Imaginarium @giallo I wish most Mastodon instances were planning to defederate from Meta by default but sadly that’s not the case. Meta reached out to the admins of some of the big instances and a whole bunch of them don’t plan to. One of the admins shared this — https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836
Some admins are going for a “trust but verify” approach. These are the only instances which have agreed to defederate from the start —https://fedipact.online/
Ok I can get behind the “fedipact” as an idea but who the hell designed that website, nobody is gonna take it seriously if you’re greeted with bright pink background and floating hearts. Who’s leading the fedipact project anyway?
I haven’t seen a website that looks like that since 1996.
It just needs a spinning “Under Construction” sign and it could go on Geocities.
@Kaldo it was put together by VantaBlack. I’m fairly sure most of the people who signed up to it do take it seriously.
It looks like a student/chatgpt created website. Not sortable in any way, no links to the source of the declaration, just a list of names and no proof anyone signed anything.
The extremely small “why” contains an explanation of what the pact is, but it’s kinda cringe being written in lowercase and every second sentence having “lol” or “lmao” at the end of it. And then her personal donation links at the end? I thought this was supposed to be a community effort against meta, not a place for her to promote herself and herself only, at the very least put links to donation sites of the admins that sign the pact or the opencollective thing
Like the idea is fine but ugh, seeing this just made me extremely pessimistic about how is this gonna end.
‘no proof anyone signed anything’
I don’t know exactly what kind of proof you expect.I agree that it could be more clearly explained. There was a fair bit of discussion on ‘Mastodon’ about it so some of that context might not be clear.
Re the donation links. It is quite common for people who show up on the fediverse and put in some work to ask for donations.
I mean it is a attempt to rally community to a cause but it was put together by one person off their own bat.
I don’t know exactly what kind of proof you expect.
How about a link to a public toot of the administrator where they actually agree to this?
It is quite common for people who show up on the fediverse and put in some work to ask for donations.
On their personal site of course, I am not arguing that, but if this is supposed to a community effort and an “official document/rallying point” then it has no place here, it comes off as desperate and unprofessional. You don’t make an appeal to ethics and for everyone to come together and then use that space and community to ask for money just for yourself.
I mean I hate it that I’m being so negative, I know it doesn’t matter in the large scale of things but I’m just shocked that this is how the fedipact is being organized. It comes off as extremely amateurish and unprofessional.
There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’ve seen that article and no, we still don’t need to be worried. Just defederate and that’s all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we’re golden.
The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to “destroy” the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that “everyone” will be here, and it’ll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don’t think they’re actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don’t even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: “It feels like what X used to feel like”. And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren’t pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
Yeah, it is very possible for us to not let Meta win. Acting like the Fediverse is doomed isn’t productive at all.
I’d say it’s exactly as productive as saying “It’s no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It’ll be fiiiiiine”.
We should watch everything very carefully.
Explain how they would impact our communities if we defederate their instances from ours.
Spoiler: They can’t.
There is zero reason to freak out. If you don’t want to be affected by Meta then don’t join an instance that federates with them. Boom. You’re done. Problem solved. That’s the beauty of the fediverse choose your flavor.
They are going to have more users, that’s just a fact. They already have more users than us, but we still have these healthy and active communities. They could have 30 billion more users and we still don’t lose as long as we have the communities we’ve built on our own instances.
Edit: Why are all these doomer accounts from kbin.social? Open registration is a mistake.
I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!
This tactic even has a Wikipedia page: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
From the Wiki (quite enlightening):
The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
Remember when Microsoft tried to take over the web standards? Remember how that turned out for them? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concern but the take over and extinguish takes a true majority adoption and in this age we get more fragmentation than we really see true consolidation. Not that it can’t happen. But possible vs probable and all that.
Anyone operating an instance should defederate from this shit immediately. This is exactly the kind of corporate overreach that isn’t welcome here. This will end very poorly for the fediverse I think.
Every instance and user should block meta’s shit ASAP!
I’m confused by this - there are various things Meta might want from the Fediverse (free content, more data, more people to serve ads to), but new users can’t be one of them. No one from Mastodon is likeky to migrate to Meta’s platform; the people who want to use Meta are already there.
Why is noone talking about GDPR data deletion request and copyright striking them into oblivion?
Last I checked noone gave them permission to grab any of our data, much less profit off it. Let them pay fines to the grave.
By that logic though all of Fediverse is illegal and should be shut down. There is significant work to be done there, not just by Facebook but by the Fediverse community on the whole.
“Illegal” is a harsh term, I’d rather say “legally naive”. There’s no TOS anywhere saying things like “you give us the right to publish the comments you enter” which would clarify things but if you were to take an ordinary instance to court, you’d probably be thrown out with reference to you implicitly agreeing to have your comments published by, well, writing and submitting them. Licenses are ruled by contracts and contracts don’t necessarily need written form.
Meta is a whole another thing, though, because now we’re not only talking publishing, but straight commercial exploitation of your content. There’s no equability to be seen anywhere, meta doesn’t contribute to the maintenance of your home instance, it straight-up leeches your content to put it next to ads. An implicit license doesn’t suffice for that, a written one might not even (because no equability), that’s why all the corps have TOS.
If you post a comment on a publicly accessable page, there is an expectation that what you’ve posted will also be public. That’s implied consent and doesn’t require signing a contract.
In fact, the EU generally takes the position that a Terms of Service agreement is pretty much worthless. Nobody actually reads those documents, so the terms in them cannot be enforced. A TOS clarifies what a company/organisation will do with user entered content, but in terms of what can legally be done with the data the TOS doesn’t apply.
It is absolutely not illegal. But it is subject to GDPR, so I could send a deletion request to the admin of an instance, and they would have to delete my content on their instance.
GDPR covers “Personally Identifying Information”. If you sign up with an annoymous username I wonder if GDPR even applies.
In general, any data that can be used to tack you, such as IP number that is sent with the request, is identifiable information so an anonymous username is not enough in itself
Importantly, posts hosted and visible on Meta’s server will be subject to Facebook’s content moderation rules, which means those policies will likely have a sweeping impact across the Fediverse.
Is it just me or does that sound like anything on instances hosted outside of meta’s own that can be merely seen from theirs? I’m all for moderation, the stricter moderation against hate-speech is part of why I joined Beehaw. But if I’m reading that right (I hope I’m not), then it seems like they plan to call the shots on other instances as if they have any say in what everyone else does right out of the gate.
Maybe what’s meant here is simply defederation of entire instances and banning of problematic users like any other instance does, ok. But it could also mean pressuring admins to enforce Meta’s TOS on a case-by-case basis which feels like the start of EEE tactics.
How would they pressure admins? Threaten not to take their instances data and put ads on it? What leverage has Meta here?
