Federation decision regarding Facebook and "Project 92"

Over the past 48 hours, we've received a lot of discourse regarding the upcoming "Project 92" platform created by Facebook and the anti-meta fedi pact.

While we're still in early days of the request for comments, a clear pattern has emerged that users of Pawb.Social services unequivocally do not want their data to be abused by corporate interests, such as those of Facebook.

Over and above the corporate interests, Facebook has also demonstrated a repeated failure to enact meaningful moderation changes to avoid abusive content on their platform, especially misinformation.^[¹^][²^][³^]

"I do wonder if this discussion is a little academic, because I feel like Meta instances are very likely to get defederated for some reason under the current rules, like poor moderation, spam, or generic abuse." ^[⁴^]

As pointed out above, excluding the corporate interests, the discussion is somewhat moot due to the concerns regarding moderation which would lead to a Facebook operated instance being inevitably suspended.

For these reasons, Pawb.Social (including furry.engineer and pawb.fun) will suspend any and all Facebook owned, operated, or affiliated instances in the interests of protecting our users and communities.

24 comments

Thank you for taking user input and taking action based on it! It gives me confidence this instance is in good pawbs!

Thank you for caring about our data privacy!

I am relieved, thank you folks.

Man, Zuckerberg must really be scraping rock bottom if he's coming crawling to us. I was hoping he'd keep wasting billions on his metaverse project. Don't federate with those guys. They're addicted to data and just need their fix.

Thank you!

nice

I'm on a fence for this one. I don't exactly want big tech sticking their nose here, but tbh, if they really wanted, they could spin an instance that poses as normal one, and use that to scrub user data and not tell anyone.
On the other hand, it promotes fediverse, and that might lead to two things: ruining fediverse, or hopefully internet deshittification if it is more widely adopted.
Meta offers many users joining fediverse, but also meta is rather low on my trust list, so I don't know. I will definitely watch this with interest, but also mistrust. They'll probably reveal their cards soon enough.

Glad to hear it! Let's keep furry weird.

I won't say I approve, but that choice is up to the instances to decide. I'm hardly a fan of Meta and don't use their services, so it ultimately impacts me very little, if at all. Just don't tend to be a fan of pre-emptive judgment on such things.
- It's not really preemptive - Facebook is a massive company. The way they're built is just like we worry with AI - they have a fundamental misalignment with the needs and wants of humanity
  Facebook will try to control and extract wealth from the fediverse. Even if their intentions were entirely pure (and I'm pretty sure their goal is right just data harvesting and hedging their bets), it can't help it - it's what a company is
  It doesn't matter if no one at Facebook wants this to happen, it's inevitable. Once a company grows to the point you have people making decisions who barely know each other, the system starts to show emergent behaviors.
  As revenue is the most important and most easily tracked metric, there's a selection pressure to get promoted up the ladder for people who push just a little further past the average to squeeze out more money. Competitors need to do the same, and so the system shifts towards slowly pushing the boundaries - not fast enough to get backlash, but there's a constant incentive to go the furthest without crossing the line
  There's only so much opportunity for growth after all, and there's always people climbing the ladder. And even as opportunities for big wins become more rare, the numbers competing for them increases
  And that's why you can't trust a corporation. It's like trusting a river not to wear away the rock. It's not a matter of good or evil, that's just the nature of what it is - it doesn't matter what the water wants, so long as it's part of the river it'll be pushed and pulled along

Thank you Pawb.Social team!

I really would prefer all blocking and trust and such to be at the individual level. I want to curate to what I think it is good not what other folks do.
- You have that power. Just spin up your own instance. I think you can run lemmy on a raspberry pi.

@crashdoom Really not a fan of preemptive decisions like this. Can we at least wait and see rather than make decisions with literally zero information? The "data privacy" aspect is kinda silly because all our data here is effectively public anyway.
- Given the consensus trends towards blocking right now, if the community does change its mind down the line and Facebook demonstrates a level of change that trends towards improved moderation and moral business practices, we would be open to reconsidering this decision.
  
  The day my trust in zucc/fb goes up is the day they chunk my dead body out.
  
  Does anything prevent unblocking them if they do in the end turn up to be good actors? The thing is, they've got a history of real bad behavior, so blocking first with an option to unblock later is both protection for the open Fedi, while incentivizing Meta to make amends and improve... assuming they even want to. And if they don't, we're better off with them blocked in the first place.
  So, I find it hard not to firmly back the decision to preemptively block here.
  
  @crashdoom Honestly not defending FB/Meta to be clear, I don't particularly care if they are blocked.
  My concern is that moderation decisions are being made by only polling the loudest voices in the community and the polling is happening before there's enough information to form a useful opinion.
- I’d hope our hosts aren’t selling our data to targeted ad companies building profiles on us with 650k lines of categorization.

24 comments