1. Meta/Facebook has a horrific track record on human rights:
- https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ethiopia-facebook-algorithms-contributed-human-rights-abuses-against-tigrayans
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-so...
Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you're a server admin, please defederate Meta's domain "threads.net"
If you don't run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate "threads.net".
Yeah, close that protocol! Build the walls around our garden higher! No need to wait for them to actually do something worth defederating over, we just don't like them!
This is silly. A major social media network is trying to join the Fediverse and everyone's keen on stopping it. If Meta does something dirty or damaging, sure, defederate them then. But I was kind of hoping that open protocols would flourish, not just end up as another bunch of balkanized forums and Reddit-likes.
How are we supposed to do that when people like you are encouraging admins to defederate which removes any semblance of freedom of choice that you are fucking trying to imply we act upon?
βWe need to defederate from themβ is not a petitionβ¦
Also, you could just choose not to subscribe to them, go to a place where they are defederated, or even just block them yourself with the right apps.
Thatβs a whole lot of choice for you in a platform based around decentralization and user choice.
But on the flip side if you just make everyone defederate them, then youβre removing user choice completely just based on your personal feelings on the matter.
That doesnβt seem fair to me just because you personally hate something that I donβt.
We're not making anyone do anything. This is a pledge for admins to volunteer for, to send a message that this instance won't be welcome. There are going to be pariah instances, that's the nature of federation. If you can't find an instance to follow that federates with them, then that just means the thing you want is deeply, deeply unpopular.
If you care enough, you could join their instance. You could start your own instance and federate with them. Go for it. If and when your own instance becomes a pariah I'm sure you'll whine about people taking away your freedom to be an asshole at them online, because nobody can make you learn a lessom you're clearly set on not learning.
Then feel free to go to threads or somewhere that does federate with them. You don't have to stay on a particular instance if they don't federate with something you want to engage with.
Makes sense, Kbin is one of the most lax instances when it comes to moderation and defederation, and that's why they're considered so bad when it comes to spam and illegal content.
I like the freedom of kbin but also maintain an account on Beehaw because they are the complete opposite with frustratingly strict moderation to the point of moderators telling people to check their naughty language at the door (which is totally understandable).
However the serious problem with Kbin's very lax approach is that it invites some really nasty people who will exploit it. I heard an admin say that a majority of the spam and CSAM attacks have come either from kbin.social or other kbin instances, and at the time it was made worse by a bug that prevented mod actions from federating from kbin, meaning the content stays up even after moderated on its home server. It wasn't great.
Meta are largely responsible for the current state of affairs right now. Nearly every current war, genocide, fake news, and more can be tied back to Meta.
Are you seriously simplifying all current conflicts caused down to simply social media? So if we completely remove all social media, humanity instantly becomes the utopian society from science fiction. STFU with this stupidity you ignorant child.
Go ahead, be evil. It is certainly your prerogative.
Edit: just look at how many votes "But what if some of us don't care if they're evil?" got. Like, what a wild-ass bullshit thing to say. This thread is definitely being astroturfed.
I've noticed a lot of turfing on all of these threadsfed posts. It's becoming more and more. People just need to get a threads account if it's so important to them.
Well they're clearly aware of us, we can't pretend we're just a bunch of silly little beans doing our own thing anymore. Of course they're going to do this. There is literally not a single reason for them not to.
Yeah, but the reason we need federation in the first place is because of the relentless onslaught of monopoly.
I think this is a good prpblem to have. The fediverse gets to test itself against the largest established social media network, and honestly I don't see a way for them to win. You can ses it in these replies - they are scared of this boycott. Even more exciting now that I think of if - this isn't a consumer boycott like we're used to. This is a boycott by the producers. The instances create the network, so their voices are much more important.
I'm old enough to know better than be excited. I haven't seen a single good community have staying power in the time of the entire internet. And it's only getting worse. Especially when a billion dollar tumor takes interest in where you're at.
What I do find interesting and alarming is how aggressive Meta is in seeking out the small inconsequential pockets of the Internet and crushing them. They're so deadset on fuxing any collective not being monitored by their government backed all seeing eye. It will be interesting to see how a federated social network holds up but I wouldn't assume they don't already have at least five game plans to crush it.
We should have rules against turfing like this in the community, and remove or ban people suspected of it. I get the benefits of having a neutral place but at the same time we don't allow advertising here so why should suspected astroturfing be any different.
This is the point of the freedom of federated communities: we can read whatever the fuck we want from wherever the fuck we want without having authoritarian censor-heavy limp-wrist adult-baby moderators and corporate fascists determining what we are allowed to read or affiliate with.
The freedom to read both sides and control what I want to interact with on my own will, and make my own decisions is why I'm fucking here. I don't want people like you making decisions for me, go fuck yourself.
Thanks for noticing I'm evil. I'll go make a nice blood sacrifice to my effigy of Satan by eating another baby.
The corporate internet is adopting an open protocol. I find that to be exciting. It's not us "going back" to the corporate internet, it's the corporate internet coming to us.
All of the corporate internet adopted open protocols in the first place. Expand your limited view and increase your awareness of the history of the networks as they evolved before Google, Microsoft, and Apple were beginning and end of tech. We got to now with open protocols. Now everything is being walled up by DRM since theyve managed to preintegrate it in all of the hardware across the board before the open protocols even come into play.
When you fuck over people with their freedoms, you don't deserve the freedom to be extended to you.
It's the same as paradox of tolerance. You shouldn't be tolerant to intolerance, and you shouldn't give freedom to those who want to strip it away from you.
That's the beauty of the fediverse, if the instance you're on isn't doing what you want, you can move to another one. Or create your own.
I'd say that's a pretty clear indicator of the popularity of decisions. Saying "No, you can't do that, cause I don't want that" is putting your desires above the desires of others.
Most of these instances are hosted by amateurs doing it for fun and often at their own cost. Users can leave if they want different policies. If you want a right to dictate policy, do the work yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
You can spin up your own server... That's what the fediverse is.
The freedom to do whatever you want as an admin, and the freedom of choosing another server where you'll still be part of the network
Meta/Facebook threatens this, because their user base dwarfs the rest of the fediverse. They're also running their own closed source server code... They can gatekeep their own federation
I would love it if companies joined the fediverse, but like, by making instances. Maybe even use it for their internal Intranet. Maybe they could add federation compatible APIs to their existing software
I don't want a massive social network company to use their position to make a new social network...
Federation is like Bitcoin or Tor - it's decentralized, until one org becomes too large... At that point, they can control the network in countless ways
Ever play Plague Inc? The secret to winning is to not become deadly until you've already become engrained and established throughout society. Then you add the deadly features once you're too deep in.
Don't let the cancer establish itself as something innocent. The owner of the platform WILL take any opportunity to seize control of the media so it can seize control of the message.
I honestly don't understand how some of you have this point of view. This isn't a they've been evil once or twice thing. This is a they've been evil at every single opportunity and actively seek out more opportunities to be evil for well over a decade and you're a fucking moron for trusting them thing.
Defederating after this happens will cause a giant strain on the Fediverse and will simply accelerate the problems for which we don't want Meta here in the first place.
Federation means you can defederate for any reason. It's not a set of principles, it is an ontological arrangement whereby power is distributed. Plenty of users will look for defederated instances to join because keeping facebook out of our shit is what we want. You are free to find instances that are federated. Nobody will stop you.
Theres a reason nobody uses it anymore. Google extended the crap out of it, effectively took over the protocol and then retired it. It bears the same echoes of what's happening here.
This didn't happen. In fact Google was the one who fell behind development when the protocol moved on and deprecated unencrypted connections for example. People just don't make it a priority to use XMPP instead of the walled gardens they are using now.
I don't like Meta. Why do you assume everyone has to be on one "team" or the other? I'm in favor of open protocols and open protocols can be used by anyone. Even if you don't like them.
As I just said, I don't like Meta. And keep your homophobic slurs out of civil discussion.
But they are not yet a bad actor on the Fediverse because they haven't actually joined the Fediverse yet. If you're so convinced that they're going to do something awful, why the big deal about defederating preemptively?
You don't like Meta. You're just arguing vociferously for inviting Meta, a company with nearly two decades of documented abuse of everything they touch, into another space for them to fuck over.
Pull the other one, Sparky. It plays Jingle Bells.
There's no need to invite Meta, the invitation has already been given by the fact that ActivityPub is an open protocol. I'm just very annoyed by the cavalcade of people who were so quick to tout that benefit over Reddit's walled garden now turning on their heel and reacting "but not like that!" When that openness is made use of.
You are either innocently unaware of how it works or just dissassociating from reality. Meta has to compete with Fediverse if it can't directly harvest user activity for marketing and advertising systems. They quite obviously will (have to?) do everything they can to influence technical decisions that allow them to steer the protocols in a way that is profitable rather than for the good of the end users and communities.
They ultimately will seek to build walls around their development and services on their terms and leave others not part of their profitable ecology of development outside of those walls. They are a publicly traded corporation, this is just a normal evolution in for-profit corps, even if current employees do act as positive curators of community engagement.
The microbloggers are a bit different than us, in that they actually try to create a "social circle." Threaded discussions with random assholes like we enjoy tend to be more focused on giving us someone to reply to.
They're confused and likely think that federation means no rules and unconditional access to any server from your account, when it couldn't be further from the truth. I've said it elsewhere but people craving that don't want the fediverse, they want Nostr.
This place is the way it is, why it's enjoyable to be on, because we can and do defederate servers run by bots, trolls, or any other malicious actors, otherwise they run wild.