How does this instance feel about this growing pact against federating with Meta?

I strongly support basically firewalling the fediverse from anything Meta/Twitter/MS/Google/<insert Big Tech here> as a default behavior. They will 100%, without question make some sort of attempt to co-opt, corrupt, and monetize this ecosystem unless their interference is actively mitigated and corralled.

And sure, maybe there can be a collection of instances that do federate with Big Tech… but to be blunt, I’d look at those mostly as canaries in the coal mine.

Defederate and preferably also defenestrate.

In the 1990s, Microsoft had an internal strategy called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft saw the emerging Internet as a threat to their business, so they wanted to kill it. The basic idea was:

• Embrace: Develop software compatible with an existing standard
• Extend: Add features that are not part of the standard, creating interoperability issues
• Extinguish: Using their dominant market share, snuff out competitors who don't or can't support the non-standard protocol

It was working for Microsoft, and was a contributing factor in their killing off Netscape. For those too young to remember, Mozilla is the open-source "liferaft" that Netscape created before their business was destroyed by Microsoft. But, these days it's effectively controlled by Google, who provides 85% of their funding, as long as they keep Google as the default Firefox search engine and don't rock the boat.

The only thing that stopped Microsoft from destroying the open Internet was the antitrust case brought against them by the US Department of Justice. Antitrust action is the only thing that has kept innovation happening in tech. The antitrust case against IBM from 1969 to 1982 allowed for the rise of Microsoft. The antitrust case against Microsoft allowed for the rise of Google. Many people think we're overdue for strong antitrust actions against Google and Facebook/Meta.

Facebook bought out every social competitor they could: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They can't buy out the Fediverse, but they have to see it as an existential threat. Because of that, they're undoubtedly going to try to use their near-monopoly status to kill off the Fediverse.

The "Embrace" stage will likely be just implementing ActivityPub. That will convince a lot of people that Meta is really on their side, and are working hard to be a good Fediverse citizen. They'll probably even hire people who are current developers working on the ActivityPub standard, or who have developed key ActivityPub apps.

The "Extend" stage will probably involve adding features to "ActivityPub Alpha" which Threads uses but nothing else uses. It might involve some Meta-specific things, like embedding Instagram in an unusual way. It might involve something that is really expensive for an independent server, but affordable if you're a multi-billion dollar company, like some kind of copyright check, or flagging if something is AI-generated. The features they're likely to add won't be offensive, they'll probably be good ideas. It's just that they'll add them before going through the standards process, and so standards-compliant ActivityPub implementations will seem old and outdated. That will convince many people to move their accounts to Threads, or will at the least reduce the growth for non-Threads ActivityPub.

The "Extinguish" phase will be like when Google shut down Google Reader. Why bother having a standards-compliant way of doing things when usage is so low?

So... yeah, block Meta.

Please for the love of Internet connectivity as a whole: block anything remotely attached to Facebook, not just the instance, but in general Internet daily life.

Zuck should die forgotten.

It does not go against the point of the fediverse to do so, either. Why would the ability to do this be baked into the code if it was not the intent to use it in certain situations? This would be a perfect use.

I can see maybe certain instances wanting it for whatever reason, but I'll be packing up and moving to one that blocks it if this one allows it.

I use Facebook and Instagram to post pictures and to stay in contact with friends and family. That being said, I don’t trust Zuck and I believe his intentions will always be to take-over and monetize. When I come to the Fediverse, I expect to see fresh, new, progressive, interesting ideas from the communities I join. And although I am older age-wise, I can see that Meta is tired and out of the loop. I would vote for not federating with Meta.

Meta has repeatedly introduced features intended to scrape larger amounts of data about our lives and tie it all into one big profile that they can sell. This area of the internet feels like one of the few remaining areas that they haven't reached, and I'd bet everything I have that's why they're introducing this. I couldn't be more strongly against allowing them a way to link my data here with the data they have from my usage of their existing products. While I understand the idea of open federation to allow disparate communities to interact, one of the lines I'll draw is letting a massive corporation in like that.

The day this instance federates with Meta is the day I leave. They, and any other big corporations, can fuck all the way off. We have seen where that path leads time and time again.

I dont think anyone should be federating with threads.meta. They dont have good intentions and are either just using the activitypub protocol because it was there and they needed something fast to take advantage of twitter quickly or because they actively are trying to take over and destroy the activitypub protocol. Either way the fediverse gains nothing from federating with them.

A good read about that with an historical perpective : https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

I seriously doubt meta is going to have an open federation policy anyway. It's definitely going to be a tiered white list of Meta-approved Activitypub apps and instances. With built-in monetization for devs in the Activitypub "market."

Honestly it's what reddit should have done if they were smart. Figure out a way to monetize through the API by pulling third party apps into a walled garden.

I'll put it this way:

• on the one hand, there's React.
• on the other hand, there's React.

Or, to translate for those of us who don't speak "asshole":

• Facebook has contributed to open source, they've created one of the most popular javascript frameworks around: React, or ReactJS. This is software made by Facebook, possibly even still maintained by Facebook, which you can use in your site today for free (and no, it doesn't make your site look like facebook).
• On the other hand, React became its own monster, with some people misunderstanding it as the end-all-be-all framework. Also, it's nice but it's a lot and arguably better frameworks now exist. My point was that the company carried more weight on this project than maybe it should have.

There are good arguments for blocking Facebook as a whole on the web, such as cookie tracking. I don't like Facebook, but I guess I would consider any people who have made the jump to federated platforms as potentially missing out on interacting with their forever-facebooked-friends. Seriously, why can't people just try another thing alongside Facebook? Why do they have to be ride or die facebook-fiends? I digress..

I won't maintain a membership on any platform that is federated with Meta in any way. That's an absolute, 100% dealbreaker. Same with Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Apple. Anything they touch turns to assgarbage.

I would prefer Facebook/Instagram/Meta to stay far away from the fediverse that I use. I do not like anything about the online communities they develop.

The zucc better keep his sticky fingers away

We should only federate with entities acting in good faith, and we cannot trust an entity such as facebook to act in good faith.

Defederate unequivocally.

I vote to defederate. If I want to see meta shit I can sign up there but I'd delete this account and go find some other instance that chose not to federate with them. I want to choose when/if I interact with meta, not end up in yet another place where they dominate everything else

(Realized I posted from the wrong account. My opinion stays the same for both my accounts on sh.itjust works and reddthat and any others I may join)

I just joined this place this week, fleeing reddit of course. So my vote may not be worth much. But if this place becomes meta-adjacent then I'll see myself out. I have no desire to interact with Mark "move fast and break adolescent girls' self esteem" Zuckerberg.

the whole reason im on fedi is to get away from megacorp social media and seeing them starting to creep into the space is kinda sad. I will drop any server that would federate with them, but hoping that is still a viable option and not just me turning off my router forever.

Isn't one of the points of fediverse is to get away from big tech shit?

I feel like this question might be missing a bigger picture: What's going on with the Internet?

Facebook/Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are all owned by people in the US. We've seen in tbr past few election cycles that Twitter and Reddit in particular were vitally important to progressive movements in the US, while Facebook largely sat by unperturbed as their platform was used to plaster right-wing disinformation in every corner of the internet they could reach. Now, as another election cycle is gearing up, we see Twitter and Reddit doing things that make NO SENSE for a business, but make PERFECT SENSE if you were a MAGA nut trying to take over or dismantle a successful progressive platform, at the same time as you have Meta moving to infect and corrupt the one significant platform that offers a great alternative to both Twitter and Reddit.

I'm not usually a conspiracy minded person, but the more I think about it, the more I conclude that this is the only explanation that can make any sense of Elon and (fuck)u/Spez deliberately imploding their platforms. When you factor in that both of them seem to also be encouraging right-wing provocateurs to return to their platforms while wholesale silencing any progressive dissent... this is a coordinated assault meant explicitly to tamper with the US political system while also driving right-wing fascism abroad.

Do NOT allow Meta access. At this point, I'm not sure why the license doesn't explicitly blacklist specific bad actors like Meta from using the ActivityPub software in the first place.

I only use Facebook messenger and Instagram to keep in touch with family, otherwise I want nothing to do with them.

Do not federate with anything Meta

From a post on Mastodon comparing privacy policies. Meta gonna pillage the village.

https://mastodon.social/@llebrun/110664586216685040

I came to the fediverse to get away from Meta and Twitter and Google and the like.

So personally I'd prefer if they stayed out of here.

I know I’m late to the conversation, but I stopped using Facebook 10 years ago. I left Reddit after Apollo stopped working, and now that Twitter is heading the same way I would prefer to not associate with them. I agree it stinks that it’s yet another platform that splits people up deciding how and whom they interact with, but I do not want meta to mess with something that works the way it should without corporate’s fingers in the cookie jar.

I don't get how this is even a question. Most people are here because they want to get away from corporate social media. It's like asking a person who managed to leave a cult if it was okay for them if they build a church on their plot.

I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but I think this whole defederation business just stinks. I left Reddit because they were forcing me to use their app, but now I'm in a community that chooses what I see?

I'm hoping lemmy sets up a way to ban instances because this should 100% be up to the user.

There's also the fact that this place is starving for content, this really feels like a shoot yourself in the foot kind of moment. The userbase is going to completely stall if there's an alternative with 100x more content that can't be accessed from our endpoint.

Its definitely a complicated situation, I know it's an unpopular opinion so I'll accept the downvotes.

No meta for me. They ruin everything that they touch. The Fediverse is the antithesis of all things meta; keep that shit outta here.

I am 100% OK with defederating everything run by Meta: They are a blight on the Internet.

I am reposting my answer from another thread : Nothing good will come from meta ( or any other Gafa Microsoft included), ever. They will alway look for a way to corrupt any social media to their favor in order try to dominate the Web. At this point of the internet history anyone giving a speck of trust to them is dream walking into a disaster waiting to happen. There are already trying to bring Insta and activityPub service lol , and they didn't haven't started yet.

Defederate with anything that remotely has to do with zuck

fuck the zuck and all his instances. block the fecesbook and its nine other names

Remember when Facebook and Google both were using XMPP protocol? They just need fediverse users for now to get free content. They will always delink when they can. That's profit logic for you.

Excuse me for being crass, I sincerely apologize, but fuck Threads.

While I'm generally opposed to defederation as a general rule, I'm also old enough to have suffered through Microsoft's Embrace Extend Extinguish paradigm. Never again. Absolutely no federation with megacorp instances.

Don't federate, they are a terrible company.

"I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place…"

Federating with Meta is different from federating with individuals. It's like letting corporations be treated the same as natural persons for the purposes of voting in political elections and exercising other civic participation rights.

Natural persons may have a variety of motivations for federating. Corporations have only one: to increase profit.

And please don't say "federate now, revisit later if needed." Recall the fable about the scorpion and the rabbit facing a raging flood. Said the scorpion, "oh please, rabbit, let me ride on your back as you swim across." Rabbit said "no, you'll sting me and I'll die." Scorpion said "no I won't; we're both in danger; I have children at home; we both want to live." Rabbit said "okay, if you promise not to sting me." So scorpion climbed onto rabbit's back, and halfway across the flood, scorpion gave rabbit a lethal sting. Rabbit asked why, and scorpion shrugged; "you knew what I was when you let me onto your back."

If any community of the fediverse willing accepts getting into bed with a major, for-profit corporation, then it does not deserve to be a part of the fediverse. There is zero chance that Facebook (they don't get to simply rebrand) is doing this to be a supportive part of the fediverse. They are doing this because we are a threat to their profits and the best way to kill us is from the inside.

I'm all for it. Ive heard arguments for and against interacting with meta instances in this way, and I won't pretend to fully understand all the details.

Still, Meta has proven that they aren't trustworthy time and time again. I'd really just prefer to remove myself from them as much as possible.

I have a lot of feelings about this matter. But my main concern is that I value the idea of privacy, anonimity and the right to reveal as much of yourself online as you are willing to do so. And Meta has shown time and time again that they are actively against the very concept of letting people be.
Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but they will find a way to ruin this for everyone if it helps their bottom line.

On top of that, it's opening the floodgates to a stream of content that will most likely drown out the individuality of our communities. We're still growing and building, I would love for us to have our own place before the Meta masses join.

edited: spelling

For me, being on the fediverse is an escape from big social. That’s the whole reason I’m here. Conversations are more organic, less restrictive, and generally better. Plus, it has an awesome DIY feel to it.

I don’t want to lose that to Meta’s insatiable hunger for data.

Politics aside (I'm strongly against federating with corps for reasons already expressed here), can the instance even support federation with a multimillion user federation? Just look at the fedilags recently.

Meta's interests as a corporate entity are inherently incompatible with the goals behind the creation of a decentralized and federated service. I do not believe they are able or willing to act in good faith, and I don't think their presence should be tolerated. Personally, I did not jump ship from Reddit to be reconnected with the likes of Facebook or Instagram. The entire effort feels to me like a panic response to the notion that there are people like myself not being shown what Meta wants seen, and they can stay mad about it.

Addendum:

On the other hand, I think people should be the arbiters of the content they view. I don't get the notion of browsing /all and then being upset at what you find there, it's just a raw firehose of what people are up to on the internet. There is a value in letting people consume the content they want, where and how they want it. I'm sure someone would be happy to be linked in to this larger ecosystem. There's a lemmy instance dedicated to mirroring reddit content and I don't see the appeal of that, but more power to the people who get use from it.

The nature of the fediverse and activitypub is that we can't stop Meta from making use of this platform. We're going to have to handle this situation by proving that we have something different and perhaps better than anything Meta can offer. But I won't stay in a space where their size and influence is permitted to dominate all conversation, it's already slightly jarring to hear people talk as if lemmy.world were the de-facto center of the lemmyverse.

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I don't have any firm opinions yet. I definitely feel the knee-jerk temptation to not federate with them, but on the other hand I guess federated Facebook products is pretty much what I want from them.

I don't care about Threads very much (at least yet), but I know a lot of people where my only way to get in contact with them is Facebook Messenger. So if I could contact them without needing to have a facebook account myself, I'd be quite happy.

Personally I'll support instances that choose to tell Zuckybags to fuck right off, and I think the fediverse is pretty well set up to be able to do that.

But I guess the bigger question how is how we protect our information, since it seems like everything that happens here is pretty wide open.

The big companies will all come for places like this and trawl for "genuine human input" to feed their AI cashbabies, and what we create has value. Maybe even the shitposts. So how do we protect that?

To answer the question in post directly - I think it's a bit daft. I understand and support the intention. In fact, I've already blocked threads.net, assuming that's going to be the actual endpoint. But the pact itself I find useless and a tad childish.

The design on that "pact" is... wow. Really putting our best feet forward there. Just needs a geocities logo and a visitor counter.

If they cannot collect my personal info any more than any other Lemmy or KBin instance can, then honestly I don’t care. If they want to make it interoperable, ok good, I’m sure somebody will be happy. I will not be signing up for an account, and if I don’t go out looking for the content I may not ever even see it.

Honestly, this would be a non-issue if we could block instances at the user level. Since they’re not federated yet, and User-level instance blocking should be coming, I say we wait and see.

Companies invading the fediverse was always going to happen, it's not necessarily a bad thing. You get more users, a rock solid instance, possibly more support in coding, and maybe more. There's no reason to have bots essentially copying content from a place that offers federation

There's also definite downsides, federating could be expensive for smaller instances to handle all that content, potential pressure for more tracking/less porn/more ad friendly code built into the system, making communities better through proprietary extensions to slowly cannibalize the rest of the instances.

Blanket decisions to block corporate instances is probably a bad move, though keeping a short leash is wise.

If we could ensure 100% compliance with a meta-blockade then I'd be for it.

However, that isn't going to happen and any instances that do federate with Meta will be the part of the Fediverse that exists to billions of people. Those instances will become the dominate instances on the Fediverse for people who want to get away from Meta but still access the Fediverse services. Lemmy, as it stands now, is only a few million people at most. We simply do not have the weight to throw around on this issue.

It is inevitable that commercial interests join the Fediverse and the conversation should be around how we deal with that inevitability rather than attempting to use de-federation as a tool to 'fix' every issue.

I think we should preemptively add them to the defederated list at least until we get more info on what exactly they are doing. We are already having enough sync issues in the fedverse. We can come back to the subject in like a month with an agora vote on refederation.

I don't see why they would bother with the fediverse as it exists to be honest. To me it seems like a liability from their point of view. Not sure if they've spoken more about this but Facebook getting in more shit by having their users exposed to stuff that they don't explicitly control doesn't seem like something they'd want.

That being said, I feel like defederating with them if needed is a solid idea but their sheer size may make that decision difficult for instances that are looking to grow given that they've already amassed twice the accounts of the Lemmy fediverse in a few hours. Now not all growth is good growth like you've mentioned but there's no partial defederation so either you leech on some of their userbase or you don't.

I see some places going for growth if that's an option which may not necessarily be a bad choice (unless they impose strict rules to follow if you want to federate with them) given that facebook has the capital to bury us with if they choose to so our compliance probably won't have a very big impact on how things play out in the long run.

Don't like it personally you can't trust these companies to do anything but be malicious actors, it might drive more users to the rest of the fedverse but there are huge risks and these companies have already broken laws time and time again.

I think it's dumb to defederate just because there's a big company behind it. With something like Threads We've got a gateway for people to get into decentralisation and the fediverse.

I brought up threads to my significant other the other day and it's the first time she was like "oh that's neat" when trying to get her involved with such things. I really want this activitypub backed stuff to become the next internet and I think it's really dumb to gatekeep it by defederating.

I love Lemmy, but I'm more likely to get friends and family onto threads than I am this or mastadon so if we defederate I guess I'll have to find some place else or bite the bullet and host my own private server.

I think it's incredibly important to federate with Meta! If we want the benefits of this tech to increase we need larger platforms to join in on the action.

Meta is a garabge company in so many ways. But I think that we need to allow these giant companies experience full extent of the fediverse. That will hopefully bring more pople on the fediverse, populorize is and make it more widely known / used which is a good thing. But we need to be cautious.

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AOL is ruining the Internet!

I favor user choice. The more options people have, the better. If users want to use threads what do I care? That's their problem. It's not our job to police what other people want, nor to "punish" them for making decisions we don't like.

Federate with them so long as the service meets standards for quality (no spam, no bot farms, no harassment, etc.). Some of those users will switch to other fediverse servers once they learn more about it.

I am completely against defederating

I feel it is awesome,

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Facebook (meta) is going to try to buy market share into something that isn't monetizable. I don't see the point in defederating from them because they will just do it again and again secretly until one of their instances has some success. All you are really doing by defederating from them is setting up future scenarios where instances will start accusing each other of being meta shills, which would mostly just ruin the fediverse if everyone defederates from everyone. The existential threat to the fediverse is the fediverse itself. These companies are competing for eyeballs, and killing the fediverse would drive users to other monetized platforms. Sure you can defederate from the instances they admit they are running, but they and every other social media company are probably here already or will be soon. I wouldn't worry about it. Just keep meming and kicking out the Nazis.