The free fediverses should emphasize networked communities
The free fediverses should emphasize networked communities
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7193618
The "free fediverses" are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism. This post is part of a series looking at strategies to position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and "Meta's fediverses".
Are there any instances that aren’t free? Instances which run ads and tracking?
Today almost no instances run ads (misskey is as far as I know the only platform that's got support for ads) and Threads is the only one that does tracking. I'm using "free fediverses" the way https://freefediverse.org/index.php/Main_Page does -- instances that reject federation with Meta.
You do realize that federating with meta doesn’t mean that the instances which allow federation with meta will be tracked more, right? Meta users are going to be tracked as much as meta users are going to be tracked. The old tricks that facebook used to do to track everyone with a facebook account everywhere on the net don’t really work any more in modern browsers and won’t ever work on an instance that doesn’t have a facebook “share this link” or “like button” integration.
Technically, if an instance did have those buttons and facebook users in older browsers used those instances, that would be tracked by meta, even if the instance itself didn’t federate with meta.
There are pay to join instances. Not many, but they exist.
There's also at least one add supported Misskey instance
And of those pay to join instances, do we know they are tracking their users without their consent? That would be the only real issue here (tracking without consent)
Are there cross instances communities in Lemmy? How does that work?
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Yes, I'd say Lemmy communities are cross-instance communities - people can join communities on a different instance than their account.
Oh, I understand. That's not what I was thinking tho, I misinterpreted the "cross-instances" thing, I thought it meant supercommuties taht includes communities from various instaces
Meta's fediverses probably also won't be able to compete with Threads on this. Threads plan to make federation opt-in is the right thing to do from a privacy and safety perspective, but also means that people in Meta's fediverses won't be able to communiate with most of the people on Threads. And Meta has the option of adding communication between Threads and the billions of people on other networks like Instagram (which already shares the same infrastructure), Facebook, and WhatsApp. Longer-term, it seems to me that this is likely to be a huge challenge for Meta's fediverses, but fediverse influencers supporting federating with Meta have various arguments why it doesn't matter.
Is it really Meta's fediverses, when communication between them and their alleged owner is fairly little and actively gatekept by their alleged owner?
no just like federating with mastodon.social doesn't make your instance a part of the Gargron fediverse. Meta can't control non-Meta instances that federate with them
Here's the definition I gave for term in the first article i the series:
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
...ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta’s behalf
That is already possible regardless of federation status.
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If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?
Joining the fediverse is just a matter of using a platform that implements ActivityPub (the protocol that lets servers communicate with each other. If Threads implements ActivityPub, it's part of the fediverse, and the people on Threads can interact without any instance that chooses to federate.
However, instances don't have to federate with Threads. That's part of the freedom of the fediverse. If an instance admin decides that they don't want to deal with an influx of hate, don't want most of the content their uses see to be from Meta, or just don't want to federate with a for-profit company that has an awful track record, they should be able to defederate. If a user of that instance really wants to see Threads content, they should be able to move to an instance that lets them, but defederation doesn't make the fediverse or ActivityPub less free.
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