Why Defederating from Facebook/Meta is So Important
Why Defederating from Facebook/Meta is So Important
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren't some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They're a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make "facebook" most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren't able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they're on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they're not worried. Frankly, I think they're being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram's CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it's difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren't just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I've seen plenty of arguments claiming that it's "anti-open-source" to defederate, or that it means we aren't "resilient", which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn't about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn't mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I've seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn't stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it's a federation clear to the users, and doesn't end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can't host your own "Threads Server" instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user's primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create "better" front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the "slickness" of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren't yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won't manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won't engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of "better clients" is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
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Defed every corporation. McDonald's starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.
Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
Yes, reputation is very important. The cluster of people known as Meta has proven it is nefarious at best.
It's good to consider the case-by-case basis instead of just making general rules.
Like if Lowes wanted to make an instance I wouldn't worry much about its corporate influence. But Meta is actually an evil organization.
(Though their React docs are some of the best docs I've ever read)
It's strange how Mastodon is so willingly letting them in. Fishy... Fishy and hairy. Like a fish with some nice bangs. Maybe a mullet. A little mustache too, recently brushed with a little mustache brush.
No Gabe, go make half life 3.
This make me chuckle.
I mean, they aren’t fucking wrong. Half life 3 has a federated communication system built into multiplayer? Go do it Gabe.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
I'm right there with you. I can already foresee that their apps will be prioritizing monetized users like content creators and everything in there will be a transaction of some sort. Who cares, you just have to block their instances and go about your merry way.
I've never had any problems at McDonald's with their ice cream / milkshake machines in Europe. Maybe the US simply gets the faulty machines?
It’s a pretty well established anecdote that most of the time a McDonalds tells you the ice cream machine is broken, it’s because they’ve already cleaned it for the night and if they use it again they’ll need to reclean it. It’s easier to say it’s broken rather than make one dessert and then have to reclean it all over again.
Bullshit. I know everybody loves a good "lazy employees" story, but American machines are designed to break down constantly so Taylor gets repair revenue from McDonald's franchise owners.
I used to work at McDonald's and got tired of the constant accusations from customers. Johnny Harris made an excellent video on this topic.
I know a good number of McDonald's employees are lazy, but that damn machine was the bane of my existence when I was a manager. It would just randomly decide not to work for the day and we had to call Taylor.
To be fair, I did say “well established anecdote” and not “well established fact”.
I was a manager at a McDonald's In the UK for five years. Can honestly say our shake/I've cream machine never once broke down.
We never took it off early for the nightly clean though, that only took a matter of minutes.
But the regular deap clean, we took it off for that, usually a Monday or Tuesday night as they were quiet, and we were straight up with customers and said it was being cleaned
Most McDonald's in the UK are corporate owned, not franchised, so I wouldn't be surprised if they ordered more reliable machines there. The corporate owned locations here in the States always seem to have ice cream as well.
I worked for a privately-owned location and that damn machine would randomly say "FREEZER LOCK" and refuse to work until Taylor could come to reset it, and of course the owner didn't want us to rack up the repair bills. Johnny Harris and Louis Rossmann covered this on their channels, which I appreciate because it did feel like the machines were intended to break down all the time.
That's not why at all. Watch the video @danielton posted below.
You're not getting the real McDonalds experience
There’s heaps of vids on yt about the MacDonald’s ice cream machine racket.
The company that maintains the machines has a contractually enforced monopoly over the franchisee's. This means it's impossible to get parts or fix the machines outside of them doing it.
Whats wrong with steam?
It's a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Isnt that based on the assumption that Valves public comment about removing the drm in the case they go under is a lie. It becomes a trust issue then, and to the public view, many put trust in them.
They have no reason to honor that, and are a corporation. I don't consider that binding or realistic.
There are many things that happen for "no reason". Its fully a trust issue if you dont think it would happen.
OK. You're welcome to trust in anything you like. I believe contracts, not promises.
Yeah -- it should be in writing with the customers (ToS?) and every contract Valve signs with game developers for it to be something that can actually be performed.
We will need the judicial system to force Valve to remove the DRM.
Wait, do you need Internet access to play your offline games? If so, moving to itch.io
Depends on the game. These ones for example don't even require you to launch them through Steam.
Cool, thanks for the resource
Should Note that if a game isn't on that list, that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't DRM free. For example "Rain world" is not on that list and it is not required to launch it through Steam. So this list is by no means exhaustive.
No, not in my experience. Some games do exist that do that, but that's the choice of the developer.
I like itch, but it's no steam killer. We need a way to somehow own our digital games in a way that is not centralized to one marketplace.
What benefits could give to the user and the producer the descentralization?
Disintermediation would be nice; More of my money going directly into the hands of game developers instead of executives. Also, people who own games should be able to resell them. Can't do that with centralized platforms. A benefit of decentralized game ownership would be that the developer could be cut into the resale of their games, which shifts the incentive to a more long-term view. A game could be something that is supported by the "used" market, and therefore has a reason to invest in long-term value. No more drive to keep on reinventing the wheel and releasing new games every year, just keep on making the existing game better.
Oh, nice response, I want to be optimistic and see in the future more and more descentralization
Samesies. I came to these conclusions while researching what GameStop's up to with its token marketplace. I hope they are planning something along the lines of what I'm talking about, but if they're not then I hope someone else does. It's an idea whose time has come I think.
Oh cool, do you have a video or something explaining it? It looks interesting
Robbie Ferguson is deep in this stuff as one of the development partners (IMX provides key technologies that makes the marketplace green and cheap trade on). Here's one of his interviews to start. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAjYtL6SkiU
However it's an unrealized technology, and kind of a moonshot admittedly. If anyone can pull it off it's GameStop IMO. There's not another global video game sales company with a vested interest in reselling digital games - the others like steam are happy to keep things the way they are, naturally (basically, DRM and no resale).
i think nothing beats literally getting the zip file with all the contents of the game with no middleware like GOG employs. to decentralize the store further requires the devs to at least manage their own website hosting, domains, ownership status accounts for updates. the only step available beyond that is the payment methods, and i don't think there's any viable solution to be done in that case besides having more companies like Stripe and Paypal.
in that sense, Itch is handling things pretty good for devs so far,
The main thing I'm for is improved ownership rights, and currently GOG is the best of them. The only downside with it is that you can't sell it on when you're done, like old games in physical media. When digital media has none of digital media's drawbacks, then I'll leave off about the potential of NFTs.
problem there is that anti-drm and ownership of a license to download and run software don't combine while financially viable to the stores. aside from the additional problem of having to manage inventories, trades and everything that happens to break those systems, "owning" the license and allowing to sell to someone else doesn't do much if you don't employ a DRM to enforce the make-believe of you pretending you're monetarily compensating a physical larbor of transferring a given copy of a media, people will share things with each other before you can blink and not care where it comes from so long as it runs and it's clean, specially in places where people won't pay for games instead of food. only reason CSGO skins works on Steam as the original NFT system is because there's servers to enforce what people get to see you holding and what you don't own. and allowing for transferring games between accounts without a DRM is not something you'll ever see any big company doing under the liability of being accused of promoting "piracy".
I think under gay space communism we're gonna have every game from history totally cracked. Imagine the low latency you could get in a space station cluster 1/100th the diameter of earth.
We'll just have super AIs refactor whatever so we can run 50,000 vs 50,000 games in Battlefield 4 on enormous AI-generated maps. And even if we don't have ansibles we'll get that zero latency from gaming in the space cluster.
Like, if you feel like it. You don't have to live in the gaming cluster you can go skydiving on Jupiter or whatever if you're into that physical crap.
Right now we're losing tons of information after snapchat bought and deleted the gyffcaf website.
Now imagine losing all games when Gabe dies and the new patron loses the company to a newfound addiction to whatever
I dont think mastodon would, but i think lemmy kbin would. The target audience is different, one is twitter and the other is reddit like. I dont think twitter user hate fb as much as we do.
They always did strike me as idiots
Idiots maybe but probably wealthy idiots once Meta is done with them.
Being stupid always costs more than being lucky makes.
This is an extremely weird ass take to have. Why would the average user give a shit?
Compared to most problems people have, the intricacies of social media platforms is not high on a lot of people’s list. They just go where the content is.
What a very insufferable opinion to have lol.
Like god damn, I knew that the early adopters will have the hardcore with em, but some of you guys need to relax.
I've been radicalized by corporate social media's deliberate harm, what can I say.
Agree.
But isn't half life alyx basically hl3?
Nah, that's a prequel. What everyone wants is a conclusion to the cliffhanger that the current Half-Life story ended on. Good game though!
We need Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and then Half-Life 3.
At this point I'm half-expecting Half-Life 4 to shadow-drop some day before 3 ever does.
This
VR will remain a gimmick until it isn't a whole-ass lifestyle.
But...it doesn't have to be a whole-ass lifestyle, even right now with the current state of VR. Even with an Oculus Quest 2, you just put on the headset, play an hour or so, and then put the headset down like a normal person.
The marketing teams at Meta and Apple want to market it as a lifestyle because that's the only way they know how to promote it without going into the nerdy weeds of VR game design, etc., but from a consumer perspective, it's only a lifestyle if you choose to make it your lifestyle.
“Vr is a gimmick” -people who haven’t owned a proper vr headset
I do games research for a living and have access to pretty much every relevant VR headset made since the first Oculus.
VR is very much a gimmick. There is no killer app or feature, and the closest thing we get to one are exergames like Beat Saber. Games like HL: Alyx don't really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars. Similarly, virtual desktops are neat but really don't offer any tangible benefits compared to a large monitor to make up for the added discomfort of having to wear a VR headset. The Snow Crash-style metaverse is and always has been absolute bullshit. It's just a less convenient version of the metaverse we already have.
VR has some potential to create cool embodied experiences, but the benefits so far are so slight that the technology is looking a lot like 3D TV and HD-DVD: technically impressive, no meaningful improvement in the holistic user experience. Hence, it remains a gimmick.
There are multiple games that wouldn’t be the same without VR. A Township Tale, Gorilla Tag, Echo VR. None of these would be nearly as fun without VR. The biggest issue with VR is probably the lack of some more linear story driven AAA games that many people are used to. And you don’t need to invest several thousand dollars for VR. Stand-alone VR with the quest has been a thing for years
You're kind of making my point for me here. The games that exist for VR don't really add anything that didn't already exist but with less convenient controls. A Township Tale is fundamentally just an MMO in VR, and we have already have dozens of MMOs that are easier to play. Similarly, we have a ton of story-based games on other platforms that work perfectly well. VR as a medium doesn't really do anything for the gaming experience in those cases.
Games that make use of the inherently different interaction modalities of VR, like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag, show some promise in terms of new ways of playing games. That kind of interaction is really interesting and brings something new to the table. Unfortunately, they're also effortful to play and as such are generally difficult to play for extended periods of time. To some extent they all become exergames. Since they also need a fair amount of space to play there's a certain barrier to entry for playing them.
I think the the standalone headsets are the future of VR, mostly due to the lower instep to get started. I even own a Quest 2 that I play sometimes (admittedly mostly Beat Saber and Ragnarock). However, the standalone VR headsets are also kind of limited in terms of computational power, so there's some competition from the casual and mobile market. The mobile (and console, and PC) platforms also don't have the added baggage of physical excersion that comes with VR, which makes them more accessible than VR.
Again, there really isn't much of a case for VR beyond exergames. Games being VR can be a selling point for the true believers in VR, but for most people it's kind of a fun experience that isn't very meaningful.
A township tale is fun because of the fact that you use your hands for everything. Putting tools together, hammering nails in, fighting monsters, that’s what differentiates it from other MMOs. I don’t see a problem with VR games being physically exerting, less people sitting in a chair playing games is a good thing. In fact the physical nature of it is what makes it fun. I don’t see VR as the future of gaming or anything, I see it as another way to play. Just like I prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters and controller for platformers. The games I play in VR are games I wouldn’t like in a traditional format. The interactivity and immersion of VR is impossible to replicate in a normal game. That doesn’t mean normal games don’t have their place, they obviously do and I don’t think VR should replace them.
Yes, people should generally get more exercise. However, you're very much missing the point here: every game requiring physical excertion is not necessarily a selling point. Simply put, sometimes people just want to be couch potatoes and we have very well developed forms of interaction to support that. We've already seen the whole embodied interaction thing happen when the Nintendo Wii platform, and their interaction technology changed for the Switch for a reason. Basically, people don't seem to want to be waving their arms around unless they explicitly choose to play an exergame.
This is the entire reason why I'm calling VR a gimmick. It is trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist, and isn't really bringing enough to the table in terms of gaming experiences to warrant the high cost of entry to the medium for the vast majority of gamers.
Yeah I really wish PCVR was still alive and well instead of the stagnant industry that it currently is. I bought both a Rift S and a Quest 2 thinking that full-length story driven games were going to become a thing, but then the hardware limitations of standalone kinda killed that. Now I don't really have any interest in buying a Quest 3 or a Vision Pro because I don't have any faith that there's going to be developers making those kinds of experiences anymore.
I don’t get why games can optimize for mobile hardware but can’t just give lower graphics settings on PC for some reason. Maybe stand-alone wouldn’t have been such a big thing if they had done that
Development for VR is an absolute pain. Until relatively recently there was very little coherence between development frameworks. That made supporting different platforms really difficult, especially when it comes to PCVR vs standalone. The development toolchains have gotten a lot better in the last few years, but there's still a significant amount of jank that you have to resolve.
This is to say nothing of testing against different headsets and platforms with very different capabilities. It just takes up a lot of development time, which is usually in very very short supply for games companies. Hence, development tends to target the least capable platform (usually the Quest) and let the other platforms use less than their full capabilities.
Yeah, and then there wouldn't be as much of a requirement for high-spec PCs, making PCVR more accessible. I don't get it either tbh. Now that we have pretty decent VR streaming solutions, I really hope PCVR makes a comeback.
At this point, I just want a dumb AF headset whose sole job is to stream from a PC. Forget putting in a crazy custom Snapdragon SoC, just literally make it act as if it was normal peripheral like a monitor, mouse, and keyboard would be.
Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars.
I have to disagree with this statement. Having played through that game multiple times, it just provides a level of immersion that no other VR game has touched yet. Heck, from an immersion perspective, it pretty much beats every game I've ever played in my life.
The problem with the VR industry is that so few games approach HL: Alyx's level of immersion. Of course, it'd be hard to justify the $300-$400 asking price. VR devs are all content on making these simple arcade style games with simple graphics that can run on the Quest 2.
The problem is the size of the potential player base. A VR headset for $300-500 (and that's on the low end) is already a big ask for one game, but then you also need a gaming PC. To get the full fat immersive experience you'll need a fairly beefy PC (3070 or better, 11th gen Intel or 3000 series AMD CPU etc) and a Valve Index ($1000 iirc). The costs add up very quickly, and that's a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people. That's also why the Quest 2 is such a common target for development: it's relatively more affordable and as a result has a much bigger install base.
There's also a whole slew of physical space issues with being tied to a computer that the standalone headsets solves, but that's a broader argument beyond the cost of the headset itself.
A lot of these issues can be solved by remote streaming. The full fat immersive experience becomes far more manageable if instead of trying to cram a beefy Snapdragon SoC into a complicated headset, you just make the headset be a dedicated streaming device and then focus on bringing the price down to $200. Think Quest 2 but all it needs have is enough logic to do tracking and video decoders to process video streams.
a big ask for one game
That's just a chicken and egg problem though. We don't have a good library of PCVR titles so people find it hard to justify buying a PCVR headset. Nobody makes PCVR titles because they think no one's buying the headset, etc. I feel like a lot of people think PCVR won't work because the overall setup is too expensive. However, I think there's enough PC players who already have a gaming PC who would gladly drop an extra $200 on another peripheral if the game library was there.
What a bitchy little comeback lol
Not for owners, for sure - but for prospective ones? The catalogue of possible games/uses is a bit thin for a 1k+ piece of kit... I think it would be incredible to own a HOTAS warthog but I'm not playing flying games very often right now, you know?
If I did, I probably would because at that point I want to enjoy the kit I have. Imo, that means right now, a flight sim controller set up due my use case is a bit of a gimmick - but if I already owned it I'd seek out things to utilise it, reducing its gimmicky position in 'the roster'.
Gimmicky is kind of a subjective term in that way, it's all about the individual utility offered.
But yeah - that comment was a bit snarky, I get that too.
I have no love for corporations but they’re a fact of life by this point on the internet. They drive a significant about of marketing and users and they’re what make a social media platform take off (which is why Parler and Gab fell apart).
Fediverse SHOULD be an ethical platform, but you have server admins defederating any instance that even has paid subscribers. Isn’t that going too far? Are we trying to force everyone on here into a kibbutz?
I believe the only instances that should be defederated are corporate, self-harm, profanely illegal, and political extremist instances.
Anything further than that and the whole network is going to devolve into a series of micro echo chambers.
Or maybe it won't, maybe the vast and free instances will flourish while the restrictive instances die out.
Either way, trying to control a community based on wishy washy ideology is not a good look.
I think in these early days we'll see a lot of power drunk admins who are too eager to push the button, just because they can.
Political extremism is part of how Lemmy got its start! The political center is crony capitalism, basically Facebook.
To add to that maybe a general rule of thumb would be to defederate with any instances that go against the sustainability and self interest of the whole fediverse.
Absolutely, and the actions that "go against the sustainability and self-interest of the fediverse" will need to be analyzed and codified into fediverse "law."
If we make specific and firm rules about what is disallowed on an instance, it makes enforcing those rules simple.