I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don’t have the power you think we do.
What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They’ll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn’t even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it’s Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It’s like an absolute wet dream for them. They don’t even have to coax people to use their own platform!
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you’ve ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
Edit: And it’s even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.
I’m confused about what kind of data you want to protect. If you mean your posts and comments, they are already publicly availible on the Internet. Meta doesn’t need to make a activitypub app that gets federated with Lemmy (or kbin) to aggregate and sell this data.
Is there an other kind of data that is visible only to server administrators?
I guess the fear is that they’ll monetize others’ content without giving anything back. Like imagine if there was Reddit2 that just took all the content from Reddit but didn’t add their oc back to Reddit. Basically just leeching off and your average user would be incentivized to join “Reddit2” since it had all the content that Reddit has and more. They’d slowly drain users from Reddit to Reddit2 and THEN monetized turning everything to shit (you can use your imagination how’d that look).
Nothing stopping them, except, you know, the law… They can certainly display content that was not marked for public display. They will then proceed to get sued out of existence… If they do this automatically I’ll just privately post a music file with copyright protected music. Which is perfectly fine to do if it is indeed hidden from everyone. If they then publicly post it that’s on them and now I get to see the Music Industry fight the Zuck :D
Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
Someone correct me if I’m getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.
If that’s true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.
So, even if you’re not signed up for Facebook’s version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.
Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.
What I’m taking issue with is essentially the same thing that is getting Reddit into hot water. Spez is acting like all the content on Reddit is exclusively his. And legally, it probably is, since it exists on his servers. Now if you extrapolate that out to Meta on ActivityHub, any instance that federates with them immediately puts all of your content directly onto Meta’s servers. Once it’s in their possession, it’s legally theirs to do with as they please. If they want to pull a Facebook or Reddit, using your data, they can with no way for you to opt-out. Sure, nothing is stopping people from doing it already, but Meta does not have your best interest in mind. Ever. They’ve shown it again and again. So I think people are preemptively wanting to cut off this spigot of user data to Meta because their abuse of it is a matter of when, not if. Any other company might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Meta? We know who they are already.
Also, as I said elsewhere, Meta could already use a bot to scrape Lemmy instances, but you can’t sell a bot to investors. But you can sell a platform. Meta will build a slick platform to sell to investors and sit back while federation fills up their instance with data which they’ll turn around and sell the same way they do on Facebook. To me this is very different than setting up an RSS feed.
You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn’t count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don’t process the data and simply present it, as is - they don’t break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don’t ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.
Yes, this is exactly the sticky issue we get into. And I’m wondering if lawyers would be able to make a case that using ActivityPub alone automatically gives your consent to have your data exist on an instance outside your own. Once they have data you’ve consented to give they can do with it as they please, essentially arguing you’ve become a consenting party when you consented to federation. I don’t know the GDPR well enough to have any answers, but you can bet Meta lawyers do.
I don’t think Facebook would be having high level NDA-protected talks with Mastodon people if they weren’t trying to work all this out. And by work out, I mean how to monetize/data mine. I’ve been talking about this with people all day, many of whom didn’t see a problem with this, but eventually all of them have had the lightbulb turn on when they realize the potential abuse Meta could do with/to ActivityPub.
If, by some miracle, Meta wants to be the good guy for a change, let them prove it. I would love to see defederation by default, and let Meta prove they’re trustworthy to federate to. And even then, have a really itchy defederate trigger finger if they even hint at pulling another Cambridge Analytica fiasco. But getting everyone on-board with that is probably impossible, especially if Meta starts throwing money around.
Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether “normal” users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.
Thank you for the clarification there. I hope you don’t mind having this conversation with me, I’m learning a lot by interacting with people on this topic. I don’t want you to feel like I’m arguing with you though. So the GDPR seems fairly bullet proof, but it only applies within the EU. So how about a scenario like this:
Your instance is hosted in the EU and has the full protection of the GDPR. My instance is hosted in the US where the GDRP does not apply. Your instance federates with mine. I federate with Meta. Meta now has your data but they didn’t get it from a GDPR protected source. You consented to give it to me, and I consented to give it to them. They have no obligation to uphold the GDPR because they’ve had no interaction with your instance whatsoever, they’ve simply accepted what I gave them and that transaction occurred within the jurisdiction of the US.
Maybe the GDPR still works here, I don’t know. But I guess my point is that if I can come up with endless scenarios like this, lawyers can too, and they know infinitely more about the law than I do. Hell, they can even come up with their own interpretations of law and act on them for years, only changing their practices when they’re forced to by someone actually suing them. Which by then they’ve already collected and sold millions worth of data.
I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.
Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.
Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.
If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.
So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.
Thank you for your clarification! I don’t know any of the legal specifics of this stuff and I very much appreciate you taking the time to help educate me and anyone else who needs it. I can only give a conceptual argument based on the history I’ve seen with these companies, but not any sort of specific knowledge of law.
The gist of what you’re saying, and what we’ve actually seen play out recently, is technically they shouldn’t be able to do this, but they’re going to lawyer it in such a way that they’ll get away with it unless/until someone actually sues them which is prohibitively expensive. We have recently seen class action suits against Meta, but realistically the damage has already been done, the money has already been made, and they go on with finding the next cash cow. Even a multimillion dollar settlement is a drop in the bucket, simply the cost of doing business for these people.
Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.
I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.
I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth
Isn’t that exactly how “embrace, extend, extinguish” works? Meta’s huge numbers and publicity means that once it joins the Fediverse it will become the Fediverse, by sheer mass. Every other instance will be not even be a blip on the radar compared to theirs.
We get exactly one chance to refuse and it’s here, at the start.
What is even their saving grace? Publicity? People will only see “Meta” and “Facebook” plastered everywhere. And you know they’ll use their instance to archive and analyze everything, and build fake profiles, and cross-match them to Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram, and push their algorithms to generate the top posts they want, and so on and so forth.
Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg have done some of the most vile stuff to privacy. They’ve preyed on the personal data of billions of people. If there was such a thing as privacy genocide they’d be guilty of it.
This is like getting into the pool with a big hungry shark with syphilis. For goodness’s sake, stop to think about it for a second.
The whole point of the Fediverse is to add a human-based trust component. Why would a company that has repeatedly shown itself to not be trustworthy get the benefit of the doubt?
IMO, Meta can start their own instance and ask to be invited to the larger system, assuming they first prove to be worth taking that risk.
If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people.
I don’t think so. The most probable result is Meta (and maybe Google, Amazon, etc) running the mainstream instances, and sn alt-fediverse of smaller, tech-savy instances that defederate them. Most people will have only an account in the Meta-fediverse, and only a minority in the alt-fediverse or in both. Similar to most people now having a WhatsApp account, and only a few using Telegram or Signal.
The largest instances have either already announced their intent to block Facebook or stated that they are monitoring the situation and will react quickly and decisively should anything untoward happen. There is no Fediverse without federated third parties. All Facebook could show in that case was… Literally their own walled garden. How is that different to them not even implenting activitypub in the first place? It isn’t. Their only power is to ask if they can participate. Literally no one is going to waste a minute on any efforts of theirs that could even remotely be perceived as taking control.
Do you think that Facebook is going to have only one instance? What I expect is that they will have a “main” instance for regular users, and then they will offer instance-as-a-service (infrastructure, hosting, customization and even admins) for corporations: a Boston Celtics instance, a McDonald’s instance, etc., all federated with the main Facebook instance. I guess you can describe them as a walled garden, but once the Facebook-verse becomes mainstream, it will be a much larger garden that the few of us who decide to defederate them.
And then there is the issue of Chromium-ification. Once Facebook reaches a dominant position in (their walled garden portion of) the fediverse, they will implement their own features on top of ActivityPub, leaving us with an inferior version.
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Hey man, not cool with the dialog. That’s not the kind of place Beehaw is. This is an important discussion and you have an important voice that deserves to be heard, but that’s not the way to go about doing it. I encourage you to next time choose grace.
Meta will try to have good content. Then they’ll add features rapidly calling them “standards”. The open source community won’t be able to keep up. Meta content will not work fully on Lemmy and other clients. People will migrate to meta controlled instances to keep the good content. The open source and community versions will end up being a pain and only for the true believers like Linux desktop.
I doubt they would be willing to let people host and control their own versions of federated facebook, and I’m wondering then what would make it “decentralized” exactly. Are they just using decentralized as a buzz word because they are using ActivityPub?
Yeah I’d love to see some more concrete info on what they mean by decentralized.
A bunch of people paying their own server costs to host their own mini facebook servers that they have to moderate and that show them ads? Lol. Horrifying.
But it seems like they just mean that it will be able to communicate with other decentralized networks, not that it is decentralized itself.
Yeah Meta are a scourge. If I had a friend who worked for them I’d look down on them the same if they worked for Big Tobacco or lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.
My question is : how do we keep our block list up to date to stop every new data crawler from Meta ?
And also, they could gather what is posted on public…
Yeah I really don’t want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we’ve built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭
The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
There has been some good commentary about this on Mastodon, but the long and short of it seems to be that federation is actually a pretty terrible way to harvest data.
The entire fediverse is based heavily on openly accessible APIs - Meta doesn’t need to federate with your instance to scrape your data, there’s really not much that can be done about it.
The real solution to Meta’s unethical behaviour is unfortunately going to be legislation, not technical.
Meta has access to my data anyway. Everything I post here is public, and there’s nothing stopping them from scraping it. That’s not the problem. The problem is Meta controlling the Fediverse, not merely observing it.
This is a point I’ve not seen brought up. Anyone who wants to is already able to (and maybe are) using my data for all sorts of things, including training LLMs.
What iffing a possible scenario: Meta positions itself as an instance host, like how WordPress hosts blogs. “We’ll take the headache out of setting up an instance, but you control everything else!” Free? Low cost? Removing the technical hurdles of hosting your own instance could entice a lot of would be admins to go this route.
It gives the illusion of control, but Meta still back channel collects all data.
good theory, I’m sure they will offer custom domain names as well to sweeten the deal since I doubt most people want to be stuck with a .meta handle or something
…and then a couple years down the line when people have come to depend on it and the code base has become simpler due to the platform capabilities that their hosting provides (nobody is self-hosting anymore anyway, because Meta hosting is so simple, easy, and cheap/free), they’ll start exercising more control anyway. “Come into compliance with our corporate terms of service and Community Server Guidelines™ or you’ll lose our hosting. Oh shit, there’s nowhere else for you to go for hosting anymore? Gosh, gee, shucks! What a shame.”
But in your scenario, how could there be nowhere else to host? In theory, I can spin up an instance on my own physical server, obtain space on AWS, or install my own hardware in a CoLo IX. Your scenario assumes Meta owns all of the hardware on the net, or somehow acquires sole rights to the ActivityPub codebase.
What I’m saying is that Meta will create a platform on which Fediverse instances can be hosted. They’ll add features to that platform that make it easier and easier to host such an instance. They’ll offer APIs or whatever that’ll support instances in ways that other hosting environments won’t. And then when the code base has changed to depend on their particular hosting environment, they’ll use the power that gives them over us.
Glad you brought up AWS. Amazon and other tech companies have created kubernetes platforms (Amazon’s is EKS, which runs on top of AWS and its services like EC2) that make it really easy to spin up clusters, auto-scale them, use custom objects that are specific to their platforms, control external access to them, monitor them, etc. While “bare metal” kubernetes implementations exist, they are a royal pain in the ass to setup and run, and they support a fraction of those bells and whistles. And as time goes on, the difference between one of these “native cloud environments” and anything anyone would (try to) setup themselves gets greater and greater. And systems that are developed for kubernetes rely more and more on those bells and whistles (e.g. despite kubernetes being allegedly agnostic to what it is running on underneath, companies choose to support “just EKS” or “EKS and GKS” and no other environments). Perhaps a particular software suite depends on PersistentVolumes that can be moved between nodes, or mounted on multiple nodes simultaneously, or whatever. EKS might support this when other environments don’t. Or a custom AWS annotation on a LoadBalancer Service might provide some kind of control that the software depends on to function properly and be externally accessible in a way that the software depends on. So this is a nice corollary to how things might go with the Fediverse.
Ah I see what you’re saying, thank you for clarifying. It seems then that a primary goal should be to ensure a form of feature parity that rivals anything Meta delivers, but within the open source realm. Considering the existing codebase (for Lemmy at least) is licensed AGPL3, wouldn’t any derivative works be required to be released under the same license? Forgive me, I’m still getting up to speed on all this, and I’m quite far removed from FOSS these days.
It’s not necessarily so much the license, but resisting the temptation of taking advantage of things special to the hosting environment, and staying as cross-platform as possible, supporting a range of accessible environments no matter how tempting it is to take advantage of the benefits of one (or some) over others.
They will drown us out even if they don’t want in that case. Them just using the service normally will flood all our feeds with posts from their service based on the sheer number of them.
switch to white list mode after certain point I guess. Or introduce some protocol level cooldown thresholds where if you are an instance with 1m users or just 3 bots, then you auto block those.
I’m glad to see my server doesn’t plan on federating with anything Meta hosts. I really don’t like the ‘wait and see’ approach; Meta has shown its true colors time and time before, they have not earned their trust.
What I don’t understand with the “wait and see” people is the presupposition that it means to federate day 1 and see if they fuck things up to decide if defederation is needed. Their reasoning often includes “two clicks” as if the amount of effort defederation takes was the concern people had.
“Let’s wait and see how they behave first, and then decide if we can federate safely” is just as much a “wait and see” stance, and it should take two clicks as well.
Why do we have to get exposed first and react later when we can observe first and then decide if we want it or not?
Mine seems to be defending the idea, so I’m looking to move soon just not sure where anymore or when. It’s frustrating because it’s hard to find any actual positions he actually has on this topic when his timeline is just endless boosts giving people props for defending this. indieweb.social if anyone is curious.
Communities: Basically impossible, unless Meta/Facebook has a public list somewhere.
Instances: That will be public, because they have to register the domain somewhere and I’ll also assume that they will actually want people to know which ones are theirs, so their users join those.
Oh there’s a list of all their known domains and a mastodon bot that keeps track of new ones. I run my own mastodon instance and I have everything preemptively blocked.
To me this sounds like us de-federating them early on to avoid them de-federating us. It’s an open framework enabling multi domain interoperability. As long as fediverse rules aren’t violated no one should get defederated imo
Again tbh, I don’t really think Meta needs Fediverse. They already have Facebook and Instagram. All they need is add one link and they’ll have way more users than the Fediverse has in a matter of hours
I’m not against corporations wanting to set up their own instance for their own employees for them to interact with the Fediverse. I’m against data-collection, targeted advertisements, and corporate control.
One issue with emails is that it’s actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam
Pretty much the entire bdsm community everywhere was outed on Facebook because folks carried cellphones to events and Facebook started suggesting friends to one another. Fifteen years ago privacy was sacrosanct and no one shared real life names unless they were very close. Now there is no point to trying to keep your identity secret and it sounds silly to introduce yourself as “Master Darkness” or whatever. I mean it sounded silly then, too, but everyone understood the necessity and it was situationally appropriate.
That is the danger of these large corporations. They aren’t looking to serve the broad community - they are looking to exploit our social graph for profit regardless of the destruction in their wake.
What license is it open sourced under? I think AGPL (or one of the GPLs) would be the only one that could sorta force that issue.
The community would have to enforce the rules of the license. It wouldn’t stop them from attempting to commercialize but the code would all have to be 100% free and public. All of it. Free to review, change, copy, etc.
I still see three possible ways for Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
The first is the Android way: while Android is FLOSS on paper, Google makes sure to cram as much important functionality as possible into their proprietary and closed Play Services blob. I have no intimate knowledge of ActivityPub, but I reckon it would be relatively easy to contribute a tailored modules wrapper under any required GPL licence, and then use that wrapper as a gateway to closed-source extensions.
The second is the Gmail way as described by Emi here: build a portal based on established standards that becomes hugely popular because of its ease of use and feature set, then start sneaking in cool non-standard features that only work inside your walled garden.
The third is the Microsoft Java way: build your closed-source clone from scratch and make it just incompatible enough for non-technical users to think that the original implementation is broken.
There’s also nothing stopping Facebook or anybody else from just making their own clone of the software without copyright issues. If it talks the protocol the same way it will work.
That makes zero sense, that’s not how the fediverse works. Explain how they would take over completely independent and unconnected instances that are defederated from them.
By having “the masses”, they can simply force things by not federating themselves. Email was already brought up and still federates but xmpp is a prime example where Facebook and google acquired a bunch of users and then walled off their access to federation. It all but killed xmpp as a tool in regular use outside of technically inclined circles.
Meta already has the masses right now and is currently defederated from us as we speak, them making an instance and not federating would change literally nothing for us from our current structure.
Besides, it would be a benefit if they defederated themselves voluntarily. They’ve already shown their moderation to be shit and no telling what they’ll try to do with our data, I wouldn’t want to be on any instance that federates with the Meta instance(s).
Implement new features that only work when you integrate with Meta, then cut them out of the picture if they don’t do what Meta says. The majority of users will stick with the instances that have the stickers and emojis that their friends have.
Similar to what Google is doing with it’s browser and the Internet.
So we’d have the exact structure we have now. A centralized platform, or instance, for the people that don’t care and our current federated instances for the people that do care.
This is all a big nothing burger. We’ll just continue to not use meta instances and platforms like we’re literally doing right now.
Agreed. Truth be told, should the fediverse become mainstream, the masses will want the shiny bells and whistles and stick to the instances that support them. Those of us that could care less aren’t going to be swayed by them, and steer clear. Unless FB somehow manages to take over the codebase and force everyone into their shit, I think we’ll be fine.
Good luck running your own mail server these days, and getting your messages actually delivered to Gmail and Outlook/O365 mailboxes. It’s possible, but a hassle, and the rug can get pulled at any moment.
Just configure your SPF record properly and you should be fine having emails delivered to gmail. I work in tech support for a small software company and every single time a customer is having issues with our email server not delivering to GMail, it’s due to their SPF record being borked (which is on the customer’s IT department, not us)
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
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I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don’t have the power you think we do.
What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They’ll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn’t even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it’s Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It’s like an absolute wet dream for them. They don’t even have to coax people to use their own platform!
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you’ve ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
Edit: And it’s even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.
I’m confused about what kind of data you want to protect. If you mean your posts and comments, they are already publicly availible on the Internet. Meta doesn’t need to make a activitypub app that gets federated with Lemmy (or kbin) to aggregate and sell this data.
Is there an other kind of data that is visible only to server administrators?
I guess the fear is that they’ll monetize others’ content without giving anything back. Like imagine if there was Reddit2 that just took all the content from Reddit but didn’t add their oc back to Reddit. Basically just leeching off and your average user would be incentivized to join “Reddit2” since it had all the content that Reddit has and more. They’d slowly drain users from Reddit to Reddit2 and THEN monetized turning everything to shit (you can use your imagination how’d that look).
Well, they could do that regardless of whether they’re running a federated server. Nothing’s stopping them from a technical viewpoint
Nothing stopping them, except, you know, the law… They can certainly display content that was not marked for public display. They will then proceed to get sued out of existence… If they do this automatically I’ll just privately post a music file with copyright protected music. Which is perfectly fine to do if it is indeed hidden from everyone. If they then publicly post it that’s on them and now I get to see the Music Industry fight the Zuck :D
Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
Someone correct me if I’m getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.
If that’s true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.
So, even if you’re not signed up for Facebook’s version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.
Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.
What I’m taking issue with is essentially the same thing that is getting Reddit into hot water. Spez is acting like all the content on Reddit is exclusively his. And legally, it probably is, since it exists on his servers. Now if you extrapolate that out to Meta on ActivityHub, any instance that federates with them immediately puts all of your content directly onto Meta’s servers. Once it’s in their possession, it’s legally theirs to do with as they please. If they want to pull a Facebook or Reddit, using your data, they can with no way for you to opt-out. Sure, nothing is stopping people from doing it already, but Meta does not have your best interest in mind. Ever. They’ve shown it again and again. So I think people are preemptively wanting to cut off this spigot of user data to Meta because their abuse of it is a matter of when, not if. Any other company might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Meta? We know who they are already.
Also, as I said elsewhere, Meta could already use a bot to scrape Lemmy instances, but you can’t sell a bot to investors. But you can sell a platform. Meta will build a slick platform to sell to investors and sit back while federation fills up their instance with data which they’ll turn around and sell the same way they do on Facebook. To me this is very different than setting up an RSS feed.
You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn’t count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don’t process the data and simply present it, as is - they don’t break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don’t ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.
Yes, this is exactly the sticky issue we get into. And I’m wondering if lawyers would be able to make a case that using ActivityPub alone automatically gives your consent to have your data exist on an instance outside your own. Once they have data you’ve consented to give they can do with it as they please, essentially arguing you’ve become a consenting party when you consented to federation. I don’t know the GDPR well enough to have any answers, but you can bet Meta lawyers do.
I don’t think Facebook would be having high level NDA-protected talks with Mastodon people if they weren’t trying to work all this out. And by work out, I mean how to monetize/data mine. I’ve been talking about this with people all day, many of whom didn’t see a problem with this, but eventually all of them have had the lightbulb turn on when they realize the potential abuse Meta could do with/to ActivityPub.
If, by some miracle, Meta wants to be the good guy for a change, let them prove it. I would love to see defederation by default, and let Meta prove they’re trustworthy to federate to. And even then, have a really itchy defederate trigger finger if they even hint at pulling another Cambridge Analytica fiasco. But getting everyone on-board with that is probably impossible, especially if Meta starts throwing money around.
Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether “normal” users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.
Thank you for the clarification there. I hope you don’t mind having this conversation with me, I’m learning a lot by interacting with people on this topic. I don’t want you to feel like I’m arguing with you though. So the GDPR seems fairly bullet proof, but it only applies within the EU. So how about a scenario like this:
Your instance is hosted in the EU and has the full protection of the GDPR. My instance is hosted in the US where the GDRP does not apply. Your instance federates with mine. I federate with Meta. Meta now has your data but they didn’t get it from a GDPR protected source. You consented to give it to me, and I consented to give it to them. They have no obligation to uphold the GDPR because they’ve had no interaction with your instance whatsoever, they’ve simply accepted what I gave them and that transaction occurred within the jurisdiction of the US.
Maybe the GDPR still works here, I don’t know. But I guess my point is that if I can come up with endless scenarios like this, lawyers can too, and they know infinitely more about the law than I do. Hell, they can even come up with their own interpretations of law and act on them for years, only changing their practices when they’re forced to by someone actually suing them. Which by then they’ve already collected and sold millions worth of data.
I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.
Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.
Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.
If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.
So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.
Thank you for your clarification! I don’t know any of the legal specifics of this stuff and I very much appreciate you taking the time to help educate me and anyone else who needs it. I can only give a conceptual argument based on the history I’ve seen with these companies, but not any sort of specific knowledge of law.
The gist of what you’re saying, and what we’ve actually seen play out recently, is technically they shouldn’t be able to do this, but they’re going to lawyer it in such a way that they’ll get away with it unless/until someone actually sues them which is prohibitively expensive. We have recently seen class action suits against Meta, but realistically the damage has already been done, the money has already been made, and they go on with finding the next cash cow. Even a multimillion dollar settlement is a drop in the bucket, simply the cost of doing business for these people.
Exactly so! 🙂😭
Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.
I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.
Isn’t that exactly how “embrace, extend, extinguish” works? Meta’s huge numbers and publicity means that once it joins the Fediverse it will become the Fediverse, by sheer mass. Every other instance will be not even be a blip on the radar compared to theirs.
We get exactly one chance to refuse and it’s here, at the start.
What is even their saving grace? Publicity? People will only see “Meta” and “Facebook” plastered everywhere. And you know they’ll use their instance to archive and analyze everything, and build fake profiles, and cross-match them to Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram, and push their algorithms to generate the top posts they want, and so on and so forth.
Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg have done some of the most vile stuff to privacy. They’ve preyed on the personal data of billions of people. If there was such a thing as privacy genocide they’d be guilty of it.
This is like getting into the pool with a big hungry shark with syphilis. For goodness’s sake, stop to think about it for a second.
The whole point of the Fediverse is to add a human-based trust component. Why would a company that has repeatedly shown itself to not be trustworthy get the benefit of the doubt?
IMO, Meta can start their own instance and ask to be invited to the larger system, assuming they first prove to be worth taking that risk.
I don’t think so. The most probable result is Meta (and maybe Google, Amazon, etc) running the mainstream instances, and sn alt-fediverse of smaller, tech-savy instances that defederate them. Most people will have only an account in the Meta-fediverse, and only a minority in the alt-fediverse or in both. Similar to most people now having a WhatsApp account, and only a few using Telegram or Signal.
The largest instances have either already announced their intent to block Facebook or stated that they are monitoring the situation and will react quickly and decisively should anything untoward happen. There is no Fediverse without federated third parties. All Facebook could show in that case was… Literally their own walled garden. How is that different to them not even implenting activitypub in the first place? It isn’t. Their only power is to ask if they can participate. Literally no one is going to waste a minute on any efforts of theirs that could even remotely be perceived as taking control.
Do you think that Facebook is going to have only one instance? What I expect is that they will have a “main” instance for regular users, and then they will offer instance-as-a-service (infrastructure, hosting, customization and even admins) for corporations: a Boston Celtics instance, a McDonald’s instance, etc., all federated with the main Facebook instance. I guess you can describe them as a walled garden, but once the Facebook-verse becomes mainstream, it will be a much larger garden that the few of us who decide to defederate them.
And then there is the issue of Chromium-ification. Once Facebook reaches a dominant position in (their walled garden portion of) the fediverse, they will implement their own features on top of ActivityPub, leaving us with an inferior version.
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Irrelevant. See above.
Hey man, not cool with the dialog. That’s not the kind of place Beehaw is. This is an important discussion and you have an important voice that deserves to be heard, but that’s not the way to go about doing it. I encourage you to next time choose grace.
Meta will try to have good content. Then they’ll add features rapidly calling them “standards”. The open source community won’t be able to keep up. Meta content will not work fully on Lemmy and other clients. People will migrate to meta controlled instances to keep the good content. The open source and community versions will end up being a pain and only for the true believers like Linux desktop.
“Good content”? You mean like the stuff that’s on Facebook now?
Which may not end up being a bad thing to a certain extent
Meta can never be trusted for anything. This could very easily be them trying to make tools to snuff out our “rebellion”.
I will remove myself from any servers that federate with Meta.
I doubt they would be willing to let people host and control their own versions of federated facebook, and I’m wondering then what would make it “decentralized” exactly. Are they just using decentralized as a buzz word because they are using ActivityPub?
aa
They’d probably appreciate to have control of instances they don’t have to pay for.
Yeah I’d love to see some more concrete info on what they mean by decentralized.
A bunch of people paying their own server costs to host their own mini facebook servers that they have to moderate and that show them ads? Lol. Horrifying.
But it seems like they just mean that it will be able to communicate with other decentralized networks, not that it is decentralized itself.
Everyone who cares about their instance and the fediverse as a whole needs to defederate and block their instances as soon as they pop up.
Yeah Meta are a scourge. If I had a friend who worked for them I’d look down on them the same if they worked for Big Tobacco or lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.
tbh, I doubt they would federate with anyone they don’t have at least some control over. Like a contract or terms agreement or something.
My question is : how do we keep our block list up to date to stop every new data crawler from Meta ? And also, they could gather what is posted on public…
They can already gather what’s posted publicly 🤷♀️
Yeah I really don’t want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we’ve built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭
aa
The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
There has been some good commentary about this on Mastodon, but the long and short of it seems to be that federation is actually a pretty terrible way to harvest data.
The entire fediverse is based heavily on openly accessible APIs - Meta doesn’t need to federate with your instance to scrape your data, there’s really not much that can be done about it.
The real solution to Meta’s unethical behaviour is unfortunately going to be legislation, not technical.
aa
Meta has access to my data anyway. Everything I post here is public, and there’s nothing stopping them from scraping it. That’s not the problem. The problem is Meta controlling the Fediverse, not merely observing it.
This is a point I’ve not seen brought up. Anyone who wants to is already able to (and maybe are) using my data for all sorts of things, including training LLMs.
Someone had to be the first that I de-federate with and I’m glad it was facebook.
I don’t trust Meta with anything, no way they will do this well
What iffing a possible scenario: Meta positions itself as an instance host, like how WordPress hosts blogs. “We’ll take the headache out of setting up an instance, but you control everything else!” Free? Low cost? Removing the technical hurdles of hosting your own instance could entice a lot of would be admins to go this route.
It gives the illusion of control, but Meta still back channel collects all data.
good theory, I’m sure they will offer custom domain names as well to sweeten the deal since I doubt most people want to be stuck with a .meta handle or something
…and then a couple years down the line when people have come to depend on it and the code base has become simpler due to the platform capabilities that their hosting provides (nobody is self-hosting anymore anyway, because Meta hosting is so simple, easy, and cheap/free), they’ll start exercising more control anyway. “Come into compliance with our corporate terms of service and Community Server Guidelines™ or you’ll lose our hosting. Oh shit, there’s nowhere else for you to go for hosting anymore? Gosh, gee, shucks! What a shame.”
But in your scenario, how could there be nowhere else to host? In theory, I can spin up an instance on my own physical server, obtain space on AWS, or install my own hardware in a CoLo IX. Your scenario assumes Meta owns all of the hardware on the net, or somehow acquires sole rights to the ActivityPub codebase.
What I’m saying is that Meta will create a platform on which Fediverse instances can be hosted. They’ll add features to that platform that make it easier and easier to host such an instance. They’ll offer APIs or whatever that’ll support instances in ways that other hosting environments won’t. And then when the code base has changed to depend on their particular hosting environment, they’ll use the power that gives them over us.
Glad you brought up AWS. Amazon and other tech companies have created kubernetes platforms (Amazon’s is EKS, which runs on top of AWS and its services like EC2) that make it really easy to spin up clusters, auto-scale them, use custom objects that are specific to their platforms, control external access to them, monitor them, etc. While “bare metal” kubernetes implementations exist, they are a royal pain in the ass to setup and run, and they support a fraction of those bells and whistles. And as time goes on, the difference between one of these “native cloud environments” and anything anyone would (try to) setup themselves gets greater and greater. And systems that are developed for kubernetes rely more and more on those bells and whistles (e.g. despite kubernetes being allegedly agnostic to what it is running on underneath, companies choose to support “just EKS” or “EKS and GKS” and no other environments). Perhaps a particular software suite depends on PersistentVolumes that can be moved between nodes, or mounted on multiple nodes simultaneously, or whatever. EKS might support this when other environments don’t. Or a custom AWS annotation on a LoadBalancer Service might provide some kind of control that the software depends on to function properly and be externally accessible in a way that the software depends on. So this is a nice corollary to how things might go with the Fediverse.
Ah I see what you’re saying, thank you for clarifying. It seems then that a primary goal should be to ensure a form of feature parity that rivals anything Meta delivers, but within the open source realm. Considering the existing codebase (for Lemmy at least) is licensed AGPL3, wouldn’t any derivative works be required to be released under the same license? Forgive me, I’m still getting up to speed on all this, and I’m quite far removed from FOSS these days.
It’s not necessarily so much the license, but resisting the temptation of taking advantage of things special to the hosting environment, and staying as cross-platform as possible, supporting a range of accessible environments no matter how tempting it is to take advantage of the benefits of one (or some) over others.
Gotcha, makes sense. Thanks for the replies!
My money says you’re right.
Time to learn how to host your own instance everybody.
Absolutely! And given that they have a gazillion users they can willingly move around they can drown us out in a day if they want
They will drown us out even if they don’t want in that case. Them just using the service normally will flood all our feeds with posts from their service based on the sheer number of them.
switch to white list mode after certain point I guess. Or introduce some protocol level cooldown thresholds where if you are an instance with 1m users or just 3 bots, then you auto block those.
That’s why every instance worth its salt will defederate from day one
I expect to see zero posts from Facebook on my feed
I think (and hope) so too. Some pro leniency stances from mastodon bigwigs got me a little worried, that’s all.
I don’t really care about Gargron and the other growth-focused admins, I literally use an instance that hides stuff from mastodon.social lol
I know you’re not but who am I
If it begins looking that way, the (m/f)etaverse could always be defederated. There’s no reason we need to connect with them.
What about the nb verse though?
…fetaverse? :)
Mmmmmm feta
Where do I join?
Fetaverse 😂
@Helix Meta is like less then 1% if their userbase, why would they do that?
I’m glad to see my server doesn’t plan on federating with anything Meta hosts. I really don’t like the ‘wait and see’ approach; Meta has shown its true colors time and time before, they have not earned their trust.
What I don’t understand with the “wait and see” people is the presupposition that it means to federate day 1 and see if they fuck things up to decide if defederation is needed. Their reasoning often includes “two clicks” as if the amount of effort defederation takes was the concern people had.
“Let’s wait and see how they behave first, and then decide if we can federate safely” is just as much a “wait and see” stance, and it should take two clicks as well.
Why do we have to get exposed first and react later when we can observe first and then decide if we want it or not?
Mine seems to be defending the idea, so I’m looking to move soon just not sure where anymore or when. It’s frustrating because it’s hard to find any actual positions he actually has on this topic when his timeline is just endless boosts giving people props for defending this. indieweb.social if anyone is curious.
Defederate-Block-Ban
deleted by creator
Communities: Basically impossible, unless Meta/Facebook has a public list somewhere.
Instances: That will be public, because they have to register the domain somewhere and I’ll also assume that they will actually want people to know which ones are theirs, so their users join those.
I truly can’t imagine a world where they do it in secret. They’ll advertise it and slap their branding all over it.
I mean, it’ll probably be obvious, however they end up doing it. Just look for all the trackers and cookies 😂
Oh there’s a list of all their known domains and a mastodon bot that keeps track of new ones. I run my own mastodon instance and I have everything preemptively blocked.
Why is this a bad thing? With all the email analogies, it’s a good thing to have bigger corporations involved
I’ll answer with a blog post by a dissatisfied sysadmin: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
To me this sounds like us de-federating them early on to avoid them de-federating us. It’s an open framework enabling multi domain interoperability. As long as fediverse rules aren’t violated no one should get defederated imo
Again tbh, I don’t really think Meta needs Fediverse. They already have Facebook and Instagram. All they need is add one link and they’ll have way more users than the Fediverse has in a matter of hours
I’m not against corporations wanting to set up their own instance for their own employees for them to interact with the Fediverse. I’m against data-collection, targeted advertisements, and corporate control.
One issue with emails is that it’s actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam
Exactly, I have given up on hosting my own. I now just pay for a decent email provider.
And some clients only support gmail, outlook, and a couple other big ones.
Pretty much the entire bdsm community everywhere was outed on Facebook because folks carried cellphones to events and Facebook started suggesting friends to one another. Fifteen years ago privacy was sacrosanct and no one shared real life names unless they were very close. Now there is no point to trying to keep your identity secret and it sounds silly to introduce yourself as “Master Darkness” or whatever. I mean it sounded silly then, too, but everyone understood the necessity and it was situationally appropriate.
That is the danger of these large corporations. They aren’t looking to serve the broad community - they are looking to exploit our social graph for profit regardless of the destruction in their wake.
The federation Software could implement a rule that its only allowed for non Comercial servers…
What license is it open sourced under? I think AGPL (or one of the GPLs) would be the only one that could sorta force that issue.
The community would have to enforce the rules of the license. It wouldn’t stop them from attempting to commercialize but the code would all have to be 100% free and public. All of it. Free to review, change, copy, etc.
I still see three possible ways for Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
The first is the Android way: while Android is FLOSS on paper, Google makes sure to cram as much important functionality as possible into their proprietary and closed Play Services blob. I have no intimate knowledge of ActivityPub, but I reckon it would be relatively easy to contribute a tailored modules wrapper under any required GPL licence, and then use that wrapper as a gateway to closed-source extensions.
The second is the Gmail way as described by Emi here: build a portal based on established standards that becomes hugely popular because of its ease of use and feature set, then start sneaking in cool non-standard features that only work inside your walled garden.
The third is the Microsoft Java way: build your closed-source clone from scratch and make it just incompatible enough for non-technical users to think that the original implementation is broken.
There’s also nothing stopping Facebook or anybody else from just making their own clone of the software without copyright issues. If it talks the protocol the same way it will work.
I hate how it seems like anytime there’s an alternative to big tech, it gets immediately co-opted. Either by the far right or by corporations.
Capitalism only functions when it can absorb the things that can be an alternative to it.
At least with this structure we can still defederate from them and go on about our merry way.
Until they take over and force a change that renders things back centralized into their hands.
That makes zero sense, that’s not how the fediverse works. Explain how they would take over completely independent and unconnected instances that are defederated from them.
By having “the masses”, they can simply force things by not federating themselves. Email was already brought up and still federates but xmpp is a prime example where Facebook and google acquired a bunch of users and then walled off their access to federation. It all but killed xmpp as a tool in regular use outside of technically inclined circles.
Meta already has the masses right now and is currently defederated from us as we speak, them making an instance and not federating would change literally nothing for us from our current structure.
Besides, it would be a benefit if they defederated themselves voluntarily. They’ve already shown their moderation to be shit and no telling what they’ll try to do with our data, I wouldn’t want to be on any instance that federates with the Meta instance(s).
Implement new features that only work when you integrate with Meta, then cut them out of the picture if they don’t do what Meta says. The majority of users will stick with the instances that have the stickers and emojis that their friends have. Similar to what Google is doing with it’s browser and the Internet.
So we’d have the exact structure we have now. A centralized platform, or instance, for the people that don’t care and our current federated instances for the people that do care.
This is all a big nothing burger. We’ll just continue to not use meta instances and platforms like we’re literally doing right now.
Agreed. Truth be told, should the fediverse become mainstream, the masses will want the shiny bells and whistles and stick to the instances that support them. Those of us that could care less aren’t going to be swayed by them, and steer clear. Unless FB somehow manages to take over the codebase and force everyone into their shit, I think we’ll be fine.
See also: Google with Gmail.
Good luck running your own mail server these days, and getting your messages actually delivered to Gmail and Outlook/O365 mailboxes. It’s possible, but a hassle, and the rug can get pulled at any moment.
Just configure your SPF record properly and you should be fine having emails delivered to gmail. I work in tech support for a small software company and every single time a customer is having issues with our email server not delivering to GMail, it’s due to their SPF record being borked (which is on the customer’s IT department, not us)
Capitalism gonna capitalise
Aren’t those the same group?
No, but they both work for the same people.
List of Fediverse admins pledging to pre-block Meta instances: https://fedipact.online
It will be possible to have accounts on multiple instances, those that block Meta or federate with Meta. Then see what happens.
Not seeing a lot of Lemmy instances on there yet. Hopefully more will follow as it gets closer