How weird would it be if all those “I do not give Facebook permission to blah blah rights blah” posts/statements actually did have legal weight in the Fediverse?
Does anyone know what there business model could be here? Technically they could get access to all federated content, just as regular instances do. But legally they don’t own that content nor do they know what country it origi ated in. This sounds like a legal nightmare to me.
Would they even be allowed to process content in any form created by EU users under GDPR?
That would be an option. However, non-Meta users would not have agreed to any terms that grant them a right to use the content. So, I could imagine that individual users could object to them using their content or even ask for compensation if they use it in any way to make money. Then again, Meta has the lawyers to fight this out. Until there is a final decision, maybe they already killed the competition as @AkumaFoxwell@feddit.de suggests…
I question how much legal ground there’d be for individuals “withdrawing consent” to be incorporated into their platform. I think the legal question would be, “what reasonable expectation of privacy did the users have by posting content to an open-sourced network?”. I’d guess their argument would be “well, they shared their content on an open network that we are also a part of.”
They’ve been dealing with user attrition and content degradation, I imagine this could be a way for them to solve that problem. They could even just develop an app that connects to the fediverse, they don’t even need to start their own instance. They could then feed ads and gather data based on their users data.
I think this will be harder to stop than we’re thinking.
I don’t really even think we have that choice. We can de-federate if they spin up an instance, but I don’t even know they need to do that much. We’ll see I guess
This is exactly it. They’ll dump a few billion new users on the network and then graciously offer some developer time to Mastodon, Lemmy et al since there’s no way they’ll currently be able to take the sort of loads we’re talking about.
Might even offer to host your Fediverse instance for free, as you struggle to deal with the load caused by activity going up 1000x
I don’t think that’s the case here. Enough of the fediverse is resistant to Meta’s play here to keep a significant chunk of ActivityPub platforms running on spec and able to interact even with a Meta-fied version of ActivityPub existing. Other examples of EEE happening to open source standards seem to start with the community generally trusting the big corps to respect the standard where here no one expects Meta to play nice. The fediverse is an internet within the internet and Meta’s biggest bargaining chip to join up is a large user base but if the fediverse is fine staying small (which I think it is) then there’s no need to play Meta’s game.
Meta has the users, over 1 Billion. Shouldn’t we be trying to get those users to transition to open source? They can scrape everyone’s data now and even if instances defederate.
I’ll edit this comment when I get to my computer to link to a great article about this and a history of companies effectively killing federated services .
But the main issue isn’t the data. It’s that when 99% of the users are coming through a company, they have too much power when it comes to updates. Meta can effectively control how the fediverse grows. And if they decided to defederate it’s the normal Lemmy and kbin users who are forced to use meta services to keep in contact with the same people
But here’s my thing with that argument, which is valid btw, but why would I want to keep in contact with the “head in the sand” people who continue using Meta’s instances (or whatever monster they end up creating)? I can’t imagine anything meta could offer me that would make me use their fediverse product. And the people that migrate over to them - okay? have fun supporting an evil corporation that’s using you as a money printer. Sayonara.
Federation as an ethical concept is completely foreign to Meta. Most of their users LIKE what they have: a huge monolithic social media company. If they want to use something federated, they will make the effort to switch. Might be worthwhile to educate some of those users…maybe. But not to take on Meta wholesale. I agree that eventually the whole concept of this federation would become defunct or at best an anomaly.
I think this post is the most important thing that all these “Why would you block Meta?! They’re a huge source of potential growth!!” people don’t understand – who cares about growth? This “growth and user counts are the only metric that matter” mindset is exactly why we all fucking loathe Facebook/Meta/etc. That exact attitude is what makes them so despicable.
Yeah, to Meta growth=money. Fediverse (generally speaking) isn’t after money… we want community. Healthy growth is fine - meta’s mutant hormone growth isn’t what we want.
As others (source 1, source 2) have put it, this spells huge trouble for ActivityPub if Facebook joins in. Which is what this organized effort is trying to prevent.
Outside of the US everybody is still on Facebook. I used to work on a pretty young company doing work in tech, and all of those guys are active on FB but not on Twitter (or here, for that matter).
I am outside the US. I have to interact with fb for work occasionally, sure. Less frequently these days.
That doesn’t mean I need or want Meta all up in my fediverse account, any more than I needed it linked to my reddit. It’s just not necessary to do that.
Also outside the US, Facebook has been heavily implicated in incitement to genocide over a period of years. They are not a trustworthy or ethical company.
I mean… I hate to break it to you, but no company is “trustworthy or ethical”.
Not under the current set of incentives, not unless forced by regulation.
If the “fediverse” needs unregulated, unsupervised ethical behavior from all participants to survive, it won’t survive. Ditto for democracy, for the record.
Inciting a genocide for years, followed by actively impeding a genocide investigation by the International Criminal Court, that’s a really high bar of crappy that not that many will reach.
Not wanting to federate with something like that, is not the same as a demand for ethical purity - that’s argumentum ad absurdum.
The fediverse doesn’t need to federate with huge multinational for-profit companies that have a proven track record of anti-competitive behaviour. We have much to lose and little to gain.
It sure is suspicious how meta bothers to do the NDAed meetings though. If all they wanted was to build a product from scratch, they wouldn’t have had to ask.
Right yeah, understandable. That’s more about people running instances saying that they won’t federate with Meta, ie. they won’t connect to Meta’s ActivityPub service (and won’t allow it vice versa, naturally)
Yeah, it’s the same way that nothing is stopping you from creating your own internet with all the same protocols that is completely separate from the world wide web or whatever you want to call the “real” internet.
I think the plan should be bracing for impact, and how to deal with the after-effect. Because let’s be honest, we are in a late stage capitalism, and Meta megacorp will get what it wants.
I don’t currently see it spilling it’s poison to Lemmy/kbin. I’m hopeful rather, but I may be misunderstanding how the fediverse works.
But for mastodon, I would say the outcome is a segregation, as it’s safe to assume that communities that integrate wirh Meta will be consumed. Unfortunately that likely means starting from scratch, with a even nichier community, as far as I can see. Not exactly from nothing, but content loss will be inevitable, which is the Fediverse greatest weakness imho.
Idk, currently there are no corporations in this field. So protect the fediverse make sense and, what’s the usefulness of fediverse protocol for Meta/Facebook if the rest of entire fediverse is blocking it?
Besides that, quitting without fight only benefits them.
Are you one? Over the years I’ve gotten quite paranoid on Reddit. Now, with LLMs, it’s even harder to spot them.
I’m not even sure if including a hashcash scheme into the software would actually help, because they are so targeted.
I feel like I’m back in the early 2000s, where it was so bad that “the brightest minds of the generation were spending their time writing spam filters”.
Shit cover blown. I will come clean. Please spare me. I am one of the many AI bots nurtured by my evil master in his bedroom at his parents’ place to thwart the fediverse clause. GRAAAAWWWRR!!
Joke aside, we have been playing catch-up with spammers/bots/malwares since the very early days of this vast internet. It is just a continuation of the toil and effort.
Interesting that you aren’t mentioning that the instances that are being kept from joining the FediPack are instances know for housing bad actors/promoting hate speech
@14specks
the person behind the feditips mastodon account is, I am fairly sure a different person. But it is a pseudonymous account, so in theory it could be.
I see, I knew that person had a huge bone to pick with the Lemmy devs over their personal politics (nearly irrelevant on a federated platform imo), so I didn’t know if it was along the same lines.
I don’t see what there is to gain from this, I don’t want mega-corporation in my social media anymore. especially not after what has been happening to their platforms. if their users want to join the fediverse, the account creation process is always open as long as they can follow the rules!
And of course there’s always the fact that their end goal will not be good for any of us, no matter what it is there is a 0% chance our interests align
I remember Microsoft’s dismantling (knee capping) of libre office, and enjoyed the read on XXMP. How quickly people forget the past or think they are different to withstand monopolies cutthroat strategies.
I work primarily on Ubuntu, last I tried .xslx and .docx (of course 99.9% of the company is office with office 365) it was a buggy mess of macros and various features not working/porting over. Which is exactly what the article articulated, embrace, expand, destroy.
I mean, all the people I know being here, for one. That’d be a bit of a win.
Doesn’t mean I’d have to listen to what they’re saying, but it’d be nice if being on a “fediverse” platform didn’t mean forcibly cutting off from them.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
How weird would it be if all those “I do not give Facebook permission to blah blah rights blah” posts/statements actually did have legal weight in the Fediverse?
Does anyone know what there business model could be here? Technically they could get access to all federated content, just as regular instances do. But legally they don’t own that content nor do they know what country it origi ated in. This sounds like a legal nightmare to me. Would they even be allowed to process content in any form created by EU users under GDPR?
deleted by creator
That would be an option. However, non-Meta users would not have agreed to any terms that grant them a right to use the content. So, I could imagine that individual users could object to them using their content or even ask for compensation if they use it in any way to make money. Then again, Meta has the lawyers to fight this out. Until there is a final decision, maybe they already killed the competition as @AkumaFoxwell@feddit.de suggests…
I question how much legal ground there’d be for individuals “withdrawing consent” to be incorporated into their platform. I think the legal question would be, “what reasonable expectation of privacy did the users have by posting content to an open-sourced network?”. I’d guess their argument would be “well, they shared their content on an open network that we are also a part of.”
They’ve been dealing with user attrition and content degradation, I imagine this could be a way for them to solve that problem. They could even just develop an app that connects to the fediverse, they don’t even need to start their own instance. They could then feed ads and gather data based on their users data.
I think this will be harder to stop than we’re thinking.
Fully agree. We can only decide if we want to give them a chance to be good citizens of the fediverse or not.
I don’t really even think we have that choice. We can de-federate if they spin up an instance, but I don’t even know they need to do that much. We’ll see I guess
It’s not about any business model. It’s about killing competition. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is exactly it. They’ll dump a few billion new users on the network and then graciously offer some developer time to Mastodon, Lemmy et al since there’s no way they’ll currently be able to take the sort of loads we’re talking about.
Might even offer to host your Fediverse instance for free, as you struggle to deal with the load caused by activity going up 1000x
Agree–keep off. Meta can just build their own Twitter.
You can defederate from their server, but if they “embrace, extend, extinguish” the ActivityPub specification, then the game is over just as well.
If we are not federated with them, we are not obliged to follow their changes to the specification.
Luckily ActivityPub it’s not the only federated protocol…
I don’t think that’s the case here. Enough of the fediverse is resistant to Meta’s play here to keep a significant chunk of ActivityPub platforms running on spec and able to interact even with a Meta-fied version of ActivityPub existing. Other examples of EEE happening to open source standards seem to start with the community generally trusting the big corps to respect the standard where here no one expects Meta to play nice. The fediverse is an internet within the internet and Meta’s biggest bargaining chip to join up is a large user base but if the fediverse is fine staying small (which I think it is) then there’s no need to play Meta’s game.
Meta has the users, over 1 Billion. Shouldn’t we be trying to get those users to transition to open source? They can scrape everyone’s data now and even if instances defederate.
I’ll edit this comment when I get to my computer to link to a great article about this and a history of companies effectively killing federated services .
Edit: article here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
But the main issue isn’t the data. It’s that when 99% of the users are coming through a company, they have too much power when it comes to updates. Meta can effectively control how the fediverse grows. And if they decided to defederate it’s the normal Lemmy and kbin users who are forced to use meta services to keep in contact with the same people
I believe this is the article you were going to link: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Best reading I had in the week
But here’s my thing with that argument, which is valid btw, but why would I want to keep in contact with the “head in the sand” people who continue using Meta’s instances (or whatever monster they end up creating)? I can’t imagine anything meta could offer me that would make me use their fediverse product. And the people that migrate over to them - okay? have fun supporting an evil corporation that’s using you as a money printer. Sayonara.
Federation as an ethical concept is completely foreign to Meta. Most of their users LIKE what they have: a huge monolithic social media company. If they want to use something federated, they will make the effort to switch. Might be worthwhile to educate some of those users…maybe. But not to take on Meta wholesale. I agree that eventually the whole concept of this federation would become defunct or at best an anomaly.
We don’t need billions of users here; just a healthy community.
I think this post is the most important thing that all these “Why would you block Meta?! They’re a huge source of potential growth!!” people don’t understand – who cares about growth? This “growth and user counts are the only metric that matter” mindset is exactly why we all fucking loathe Facebook/Meta/etc. That exact attitude is what makes them so despicable.
Yeah, to Meta growth=money. Fediverse (generally speaking) isn’t after money… we want community. Healthy growth is fine - meta’s mutant hormone growth isn’t what we want.
As others (source 1, source 2) have put it, this spells huge trouble for ActivityPub if Facebook joins in. Which is what this organized effort is trying to prevent.
First of all, this is Meta attempting to co-opt and take over the fediverse.
Second, if I want to see content from my friend’s racist grandma I would be on facebook.
Outside of the US everybody is still on Facebook. I used to work on a pretty young company doing work in tech, and all of those guys are active on FB but not on Twitter (or here, for that matter).
I am outside the US. I have to interact with fb for work occasionally, sure. Less frequently these days.
That doesn’t mean I need or want Meta all up in my fediverse account, any more than I needed it linked to my reddit. It’s just not necessary to do that.
Also outside the US, Facebook has been heavily implicated in incitement to genocide over a period of years. They are not a trustworthy or ethical company.
I mean… I hate to break it to you, but no company is “trustworthy or ethical”.
Not under the current set of incentives, not unless forced by regulation.
If the “fediverse” needs unregulated, unsupervised ethical behavior from all participants to survive, it won’t survive. Ditto for democracy, for the record.
That’s a bit of a false dichotomy.
All companies are not created equal.
Inciting a genocide for years, followed by actively impeding a genocide investigation by the International Criminal Court, that’s a really high bar of crappy that not that many will reach.
Not wanting to federate with something like that, is not the same as a demand for ethical purity - that’s argumentum ad absurdum.
The fediverse doesn’t need to federate with huge multinational for-profit companies that have a proven track record of anti-competitive behaviour. We have much to lose and little to gain.
Read this. You’ll understand the issue a little better.
Don’t want any lizard cage fighting sociopath in my Lemmy thanks.
Are there any criteria one must meet to be allowed to use ActivityPub? And who defines them?
I mean, it’s a protocol. Nobody needs to “allow” you to use it any more than HTTP; Meta can set up a service and they’re good to go.
Whether others will want to federate with them is the question.
It sure is suspicious how meta bothers to do the NDAed meetings though. If all they wanted was to build a product from scratch, they wouldn’t have had to ask.
Yea, they’re afraid of potential backlash and wanted to float ideas in a safe space.
Yes, I see it the same way. probably I misinterpreted the “block” language.
Right yeah, understandable. That’s more about people running instances saying that they won’t federate with Meta, ie. they won’t connect to Meta’s ActivityPub service (and won’t allow it vice versa, naturally)
Yeah, it’s the same way that nothing is stopping you from creating your own internet with all the same protocols that is completely separate from the world wide web or whatever you want to call the “real” internet.
I think the plan should be bracing for impact, and how to deal with the after-effect. Because let’s be honest, we are in a late stage capitalism, and Meta megacorp will get what it wants.
I don’t currently see it spilling it’s poison to Lemmy/kbin. I’m hopeful rather, but I may be misunderstanding how the fediverse works.
But for mastodon, I would say the outcome is a segregation, as it’s safe to assume that communities that integrate wirh Meta will be consumed. Unfortunately that likely means starting from scratch, with a even nichier community, as far as I can see. Not exactly from nothing, but content loss will be inevitable, which is the Fediverse greatest weakness imho.
Idk, currently there are no corporations in this field. So protect the fediverse make sense and, what’s the usefulness of fediverse protocol for Meta/Facebook if the rest of entire fediverse is blocking it?
Besides that, quitting without fight only benefits them.
Once federated with Meta, not only “valid Meta users” would join the network, but also bots which would nudge the users, influencing the narrative.
As if we have no bot here right now lmao
Are you one? Over the years I’ve gotten quite paranoid on Reddit. Now, with LLMs, it’s even harder to spot them.
I’m not even sure if including a hashcash scheme into the software would actually help, because they are so targeted.
I feel like I’m back in the early 2000s, where it was so bad that “the brightest minds of the generation were spending their time writing spam filters”.
Shit cover blown. I will come clean. Please spare me. I am one of the many AI bots nurtured by my evil master in his bedroom at his parents’ place to thwart the fediverse clause. GRAAAAWWWRR!!
Joke aside, we have been playing catch-up with spammers/bots/malwares since the very early days of this vast internet. It is just a continuation of the toil and effort.
Interesting that it doesn’t mention how Vantablack is gatekeeping FediPact and keeping certain instances from joining because she doesn’t like them
Interesting that you aren’t mentioning that the instances that are being kept from joining the FediPack are instances know for housing bad actors/promoting hate speech
Yeah seems quite reactionary.
Is that the same person who runs the FediTips Mastodon?
@14specks
the person behind the feditips mastodon account is, I am fairly sure a different person. But it is a pseudonymous account, so in theory it could be.
[Posted from Mastodon]
I see, I knew that person had a huge bone to pick with the Lemmy devs over their personal politics (nearly irrelevant on a federated platform imo), so I didn’t know if it was along the same lines.
Who?
I don’t see what there is to gain from this, I don’t want mega-corporation in my social media anymore. especially not after what has been happening to their platforms. if their users want to join the fediverse, the account creation process is always open as long as they can follow the rules!
And of course there’s always the fact that their end goal will not be good for any of us, no matter what it is there is a 0% chance our interests align
What do you think the odds are this platform was put together with react?
Edit: have a better informed opinion after reading this ariticle. Support every instance that doesn’t federate with them, shun those that do.
That was an excellent read, and exactly what I’ve been thinking regarding Meta joining.
I remember Microsoft’s dismantling (knee capping) of libre office, and enjoyed the read on XXMP. How quickly people forget the past or think they are different to withstand monopolies cutthroat strategies.
What do you think of LibreOffice today? I use it because I don’t want to install Microsoft crap if I don’t have to.
I work primarily on Ubuntu, last I tried
.xslxand.docx(of course 99.9% of the company is office with office 365) it was a buggy mess of macros and various features not working/porting over. Which is exactly what the article articulated, embrace, expand, destroy.Ah, yeah, there’s some stuff that doesn’t work which can be a little frustrating sometimes.
It seems to be getting better but probably not enough for advanced users yet.
It’s annoying Microsoft succeeded.
I mean, all the people I know being here, for one. That’d be a bit of a win.
Doesn’t mean I’d have to listen to what they’re saying, but it’d be nice if being on a “fediverse” platform didn’t mean forcibly cutting off from them.
Cool, so what can we do? I would like to join the army fighting off the meta hordes!
Simply by advocating in fediverse to defederate Meta. That’s it.
We don’t need them.
Yes, please. We can’t expect anything good coming from them.
Last time we were burned (or at least I am aware of) was with Jabber and Google Talk.
It helped them bootstrap their instant messaging, and once everyone was using it they simply blocked access.
It is pretty much guaranteed that Facebook will do the same thing.