Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
Eh, I use Mastodon and had no idea. I think it only matters to fediverse supporters who care about how it works. Not dismissing their concerns, Facebook is verifiably harmful to society and democracy, but for the average user this is not even on their radar.
I just opened Icecubes and scrolled the Federated timeline for a while. Not a mention of Facebook or Meta so far as this is concerned.
What is “Icecubes?” I’m new to the fediverse
I think meta is deliberately trying to fly under the radar until it too late. Several fedi communities have signed a ‘pledge’ saying they will actively block meta fedi content from their servers. (Similar to what most are already doing with Truth Social which is just another mastodon instance).
Very interesting. I had no idea truth social used ActivityPub.
Truth.social was actually never part of the Fediverse. It does use AcitivtyPub, but it doesn’t federate with other instances: https://pocketnow.com/trump-truth-social-network-removes-most-freedom-friendly-features-fediverse/
I’ll be honest, part of the reason I didn’t come to the Fediverse earlier was I knew that Truth Social was “on” Mastodon. That discouraged me from investigating anything about it. When Reddit forced my hand and I looked into it further, I realized that avoiding the whole space because Truth Social ran on it was as absurd as avoiding the Internet because Fox News has a website.
If I’m not mistaken, I think Gab and Parler were also just re-branded ActivityPub Free Software (which sucks, but changing the license to prevent bad actors from using it would make it un-Free and therefore the cure would be worse than the disease). It just goes to show how those hypocrites are happy to claim to be superior in their rugged individualism, but actually just take from others instead of accomplishing anything themselves.
undefined> hypocrites are happy to claim to be superior in their rugged individualism
Few Libertarians would be able to live, let along enjoy living, in Latin America outside of the rich neighborhoods and resorts.
Removed by mod
The thing is because it doesn’t federate, for all intents and purposes it’s simply a Twitter clone that just happens to be based on mastodon
Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.
As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.
There’s also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they…Don’t really need their own public app to do that), and so on.
Upvoted for mentioning EEE. Meta has been really active in facilitating progress in the opensource community lately with their work on LLAMA, so I’m not surprised to hear they are involved elsewhere.
Like much of big tech, they’ve been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it’s a nice sounding alliteration, but it’s a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
sorry to be so direct, but if anyone is parroting anything, it’s you with the “they would never do that thing they always do, i’m super reasonable” position. EEE is literally covered in the first leaked Halloween document as a strategy to displace open standards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II
this is a strategy microsoft has consistently used for years and continues to use to this day. hell, they are embracing and extending javascript right now with typescript.
Once again, you’re referencing documents from the 90s and typescript continues to be open source. Are you expecting javascript to be extinguished?
Off topic joke: As a JS dev, I wish it were extinguished 😂
“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” might be difficult to make work with Free Software because it can be forked, but that doesn’t categorically exclude it from being a strategy companies can try. It’s still relevant to warn the community about.
Oh it’s past warning at this point, it’s irrational paranoia led by people who haven’t the slightest idea how any of this works. Users are up in arms because Mastadon admins had a meeting, Lemmy users are demanding their instances sign petitions to defederate Meta instances immediately, all citing an outdated business strategy from the 90s that doesn’t even apply to this situation. This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source, nobody can take this away from you, and I’m pretty sure Meta has other things in mind other than absorbing the existing 1M fediverse users into their 4B userbase.
My point is, everyone needs to calm down, watching and waiting is absolutely the correct move here. There is no operating in the shadows when contributing to open source software, so let them contribute. Honestly they probably just want to hit market faster and it’s easier to build on top of open source software than to build it all from scratch.
This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source
I didn’t say “free software;” I said Free Software. Quit being a condescending jackass who assumes anybody that disagrees with you must be ignorant, because that isn’t true.
Sorry for misunderstanding your use of “free software”, but is the direction you’re taking in this discussion really just going to be calling me a condensing jackass? Guess we won’t be escaping Reddit culture here after all.
Sorry for misunderstanding your use of “free software”
Apology accepted, and thank you for tacitly acknowledging that other people might have a better understanding than you initially assumed.
but is the direction you’re taking in this discussion really just going to be calling me a condensing jackass? Guess we won’t be escaping Reddit culture here after all.
Condescension is no less uncivil than vulgar language. In fact, I’d assert that politely arguing in bad faith (including the tone policing itself, by the way) is much more toxic than impolitely calling it out is. (I would even go so far as to argue that rules enforcing superficial “civility” instead of good faith were one of the largest problems with Reddit).
If you’re truly concerned about not perpetuating Reddit culture, examine your own actions first.
As far as I’m concerned, you were the one that brought reddit’s argumentive, pedantic culture here. And now you’re doing it again by attempting to project that on to others.
Thank you for understanding.
Google successfully EEE the internet. They embraced chromium, extended such that they were the main (only) force that determines internet standads, now they extinguish all competition or obstacles in the ad space by setting the rules. This was done through free open source software.
Would love to see Mozilla come up with a few new standards
They created Chromium, which means it isn’t EEE - it just means they created a successful product.
Your three statements are not related logically. They creating Chromium as open software doesn’t precludes an EEE strategy. A successful product says nothing about whether that product was part of an EEE strategy. MSN Messenger was a successful product. Both by being universally adopted on the internet and fulfilling its meta purpose. It was intentionally created for (and features were chosen and developed) to displace and kill AOL’s IM. And it was later revealed to be 100% part of an EEE ploy. Just to bring the point home, Chromium is intentionally kneecapped and devs fight all the time about feature development because Google keeps it below-parity with Chrome, because Chrome’s purpose is to create a de-facto control over browsers, Chromium’s purpose is to wash Chrome’s face. It already succeeded partially by displacing the competence. Now Google’s implement features on Chrome first, even if those features were innovated or implemented before by other browsers, then makes the W3C board change the standards to create the illusion that Chromes was first and manufacturing the facade that it’s the best browser. Thus ensuring their domination of the space. It’s just basic corporate manipulation.
I just truly don’t give a shit about Twitter and Twitter-like sites.
I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it’s shady that there’s Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it’s even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and have their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems bizarrely starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
To give them the benefit of the doubt, having to sign an NDA doesn’t mean they actually get into bed with Meta.
If you catch me completely off-guard, or for example 10 minutes ago when I started reading the thread, I definitely would give a hot-headed “hell no, fuck you Fuckerberg” response to any approach from Meta, but now that I’ve had the time to calmly think and see other people’s responses I have a better idea (which follows the benefit of the doubt train of though I mentioned).
Sure, the NDA ties your hands, but only until Meta makes the stuff they are scheming public. If federation is part of it, once they federate it would become public knowledge anyway. I’ll admit it’s not a large group of people who would be signing the NDA and sitting down with Meta, but that group of people now has advanced warning of anything Meta is planning and they can begin to counter plan, which is better than being caught totally off guard when Fuckerberg exposes himself.
If they do lie in bed (and federate) with Meta rather than use it as an opportunity to gain Intel on Meta’s horrid schemes, then sure, they will have chosen that side. If they just take Meta’s money and ultimately it helps the fediverse, or just use it to gain Intel, then no harm, no foul?
I think there’s probably a reasonable explanation for this. The entire idea of Mastodon was built around getting away from companies like Meta. The admins arent going to just do a 180 on that.
It’s more likely that Meta wants to do a similar thing as Truth Social and they are doing some consultation work. It would be good money and I don’t blame them for taking it.
On the one hand, embrace-extend-extinguish is a classic playbook for big evil companies.
- Facebook runs a version of mastodon or lemmy or whatever that is actually good
- People get on board because it’s usable and ostensibly open
- Facebook invents features that, sadly, are not possible with ActivityPub (actual private messages come to mind)
On the other hand, it remains to be seen if anyone takes Meta up on a new offering. I’d have complete faith in the future of the open Internet if it was Google trying this.
I’ve heard some rumours but I’m not worried.They can create an instance if they want, by fediverse nature if they do something nasty others would be able to defederste from them.
I haven’t really heard that much about this. But I am very skeptical of any claims that Facebook is actually going to fedderate in good faith.
Obviously, it’ll be up to the administrators of the different instances whether to federate or not. So we’ll see
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
With that said, I’ll never say never, but I find the likelihood of this taking off to be slim to none
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
It doesn’t have to overlap if they bake it into their existing website. A huge portion of humanity has a Facebook account, even if they don’t use it. They’re baking in as much as they can with Marketplace taking over Craigslist’s former space, trying to capture VR with your Facebook account, and now they want to take over Twitter’s space. And I’m not saying the backend work wouldn’t be huge, but their whole “posting stuff to people who follow you” schtick fits perfectly with the Fediverse. There’s nothing stopping them from just federating everything.
Fair, however I’m still VERY skeptical of them federating in good faith
A reasonable stance, but as has been covered elsewhere in the thread, Facebook has a pretty good track record with open source software so far. They don’t really EEE like Microsoft, they buy other private sector companies to quash torture competitors. Kind of a different evil
It’s amazing seeing people who, after everything destructive action taken by these large corporations in these settings, still think maybe this time will magically be different and look to a corporation like it’s their potential dad who they can’t possibly survive let alone thrive without.
💀
Given the “anyone can join in” nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.
There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there’s a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But… there’s definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.
If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they’ll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it’s just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.
It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.
Honestly, a lot of people might disagree but, corporate involvement is essential to FOSS projects surviving. The biggest FOSS project on the planet, Linux, is literally propped up by the biggest corporations on the planet.
The only potential issue I see here is maybe Meta forks ActivityPub and it becomes a “Meta Project” or some other fuckery. Outside of that I don’t see any major issues with it. If we want ActivityPub to become something greater, we’re going to need corporations on board. We have strong protections in place right now with a lot of the stuff that’s being used being under strong copyleft licenses, and decentralization by nature is going to allow us to opt out of a lot of the ads and tracking that takes place by being forced to use an official app.
Linux is propped up by the corps that would lose if Linux went away. Not by Zuckerberg.
Here are the Linux foundation members.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
Meta and Microsoft are among the Platinum members in the Linux foundation. Basically a lot of international mega corporations are sponsors of Linux.
Because they depend on it. The whole internet runs almost exclusively on Linux. To replace it would cost so much more money than just paying to the foundation to sit at the table and at least get a word in decisions. Trust me, Microsoft tried very hard, and burned billions of dollars, never got anywhere near to threatening Linux’s supremacy.
because they depend on it
They are also the biggest contributors to linux projects such as io-uring, btrfs, rpm’s, and more. They don’t depend on it, they are part of it.
Both things are true at the same time. GNU/Linux existed for decades before Fuckerberg squirted Facebook out of his rear end. They’re a part of it, because they depend on it. There’s no alternative.
Agreed.
I heard Facebook was going to make something “built on Mastodon,” but I didn’t think federation was on the table too. I would think a company wouldn’t want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
Likewise, if I ran a Mastodon server, I’d block them immediately. I don’t use Facebook for a reason, and anyone who would just blindly let Facebook scoop up their community data is part of the problem.
I posted this on Mastodon, but I completely disagree with the idea of defederating from Meta instances on principal for the same reason I don’t want my Fastmail account to stop interacting with Gmail accounts just because I feel Google is too corporate. That defeats the entire purpose of open standards and federated content. I should be able to choose to personally block content from Meta instances if I want to, but it’s to the detriment of the community to fracture the Fediverse just because it’s starting to grow large enough to attract attention from one of the big tech companies.
The reality is, a federated Meta service would at least initially grow the idea of federated social media as a whole, and likely drive traffic to Kbin/Lemmy/Mastodon from people who want to get off of the Meta platforms, but don’t want to cut contact with their friends/coworkers/enemies entirely. While I probably wouldn’t make an account, I’d be interested in at least being able to follow a few of my friends who I actually have interest in seeing updates from via my Masto/Kbin accounts.
And I’m aware of the embrace/extend/extinguish paradigm, but premature defederation isn’t the answer there either.
I’m an advocate for federated content for convenience, not on principal alone.
is there an ability to block your content from being submitted to a specific instance (like a user side defederation?)
Not yet, but I do think that is something that should be implemented by Kbin/Masto/Lemmy etc regardless of what Meta does. There will always end up being instances that cater to niches that specific users won’t want to see/interact with. Again, personally I think that should be a user level decision, not a instance level one.
My [paranoid] take: its vaporware designed to distract from the reddit fiasco, with plans fo mr meta to later absorb reddit instead of a reddit IPO. Reddit users are very different than Twitter users; the mass exodus didn’t happfrom Twitter to Mastodon, but looks very promising from reddit to lemmy/kbin. And it takes only one social media giant to crumble for the rest to follow. Once people are on Fediverse there is no going back
I think it has absolutely nothing to do with Reddit and everything to do with Twitter.
I think they scrambled to get something up and running quickly so they could get the wave of disgruntled Twitter users and jumpstart a new social media for them, and the only feasible option in 5 months was to use Mastodon/Activitypub to get there.
It will be interesting to see how much they give back to the community and if they federate.
