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?
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.
Thruth.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.
There’s building on what’s already there, then there’s hitting copy and paste…
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Off topic joke: As a JS dev, I wish it were extinguished 😂
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.
Thank you for understanding.
undefined> does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
Not to be a contrarian, but I feel this is a false claim here. After some time we will lose the mind share that gets people to switch over. People won’t switch from Messenger and WhatsApp to Telegram or Signal. At one point people are just too situated.
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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.
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.
I hope this is the case and they don’t try to federate
Now that I think about it, Zuck does seem to have that effect on people. Does he actually have a mind-washing beam?
It‘s called money.
Couldn’t agree more!
Fuckerberg
To have a name so stupid, that changing it to Fuckerberg doesn’t really make it much worse. LOL
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.
I’m all for anything that will provide an avenue for people to move off of corporate platforms. The average user doesn’t care, but for some of the more tech-savvy FB/Insta/WhatsApp users who join it could be an interesting way to get their feet wet and maybe look to move to alternate platforms without leaving their contact behind completely.
Yeah. I have some concerns about moderation, but, like, it’s 3 or 4 clicks to just silence the whole domain and pick and choose who I want to follow by hand.
I’ve heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.
And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We’ve had enough of corporate socials lately.
The shocking news this week was that a couple of admins of large Mastodon instances were talking with Meta (under NDA’s!), so it seems your hope (and mine) will be in vain.
It’s really going to be up to the users to push back should the admins get a payout to do something not in the communities interest.
Everyone is going to have to remain nimble and not rely on finding a permanent server until corporations get the message that this is a space that cannot be monetized in a capitalist way.
There is a risk that they start going the path of Microsoft’s “Embrace, extend, extinguish”. Although they probably wouldn’t call an isolated instance “Lemmy”, they could start as being federated. It might not even be obvious that it’s run by Facebook.
But once they have a stranglehold on users/communities, they can pitch themselves as the “most complete” portal to Lemmy. Even if they completely defederate, they would have the instance people want to be on
People are wayyyyy underestimating what a market cap the size of meta can buy you. Mainly, it can buy any feasible competitor or threat to your perpetual domination. Then you simply eat them.
It’s not that much different than how meta et al were trying to get tiktok banned on the guise of “security” when really they just didn’t want to have to compete with them. The arguments will look a little different, but the strategy is the same
Ughh that’s so disheatening. It’s like this place is the answer to so many problems and FB can just come in and destroy it? I hope smarter people than me are working to keep that from happening.
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.
Admin decided defederation is the reason I left beehaw (and by extension didn’t go to lemmy.world/shitjustworks.) I get why they did it, but it was alienating in that it took away my choice to interact in communities on both sides so I had to choose a neutral instance (and eventually ended up on kbin anyway.)
Having said that, I’ve seen references to a mass defederation of Gab which I am less upset about.
The difference with Facebook though is they will likely bring a ton of users and having your instance defederate by default doesn’t really impact a massive company coming in like it did with Gab.
I’ll be interested to see what, of anything, shakes out from this.
I think comparing it with E-Mail is a bit naive. It a different history. Accepting Meta basically means making it the main instance of the fediverse. The main content and users will be over there. There will be policies what is allowed and not allowed on the main instance and who can federate with it. With new additions of features and policies the federation of will slowly become meaningless. In the end it will be a similar situation like with Reddit. Where Meta is Reddit in this scenario and the other instances are the third party clients. Yes they will still be able to communicate with each other. But in the grand scheme of things the rest of the network will be irrelevant.
There already is a tendency to flock to the largest instances. Meta can provide a larger instance than all current instances combined and will have better UX.
This is a social / business problem. Not a technical one about open protocols. Meta has shown in the past that they might have good developers and open source a ton of stuff. But their business side of things is borderline evil.
Strongly agreed. Federation becoming mainstream accessible is a good thing IMO. Content is what made reddit good and let’s face it: we don’t have that much of it. Eg, my local city sub used to be fairly active. I don’t have anything like that here. I even tried to make it myself, posted a bit, and tried to promote in relevant places, and last I checked it’s population: me, myself, and I. We clearly need far more people to be able to have many of the smaller, niche communities that I love.
I agree, I think we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by immediately defederating. This is an opportunity for a lot of people to get their feet wet with the Fediverse, and potentially bring them to more open parts of the platform. I don’t think a lot of people understand that Meta is free to set-up their own dystopian corpo-instance without that carrying over to affect the independent ones.
I don’t think a lot of people understand that Meta is free to set-up their own dystopian corpo-instance without that carrying over to affect the independent ones.
Absolute darkest timeline, they wave enough money to buy out their competitor platforms or the owner of Activitypub itself, open source is closed now, and the concept of federation becomes corporate like everything else already is and apparently always will be. Not entirely likely and not to that extent, but it’s technically possible. While they aren’t guaranteed to take the world’s biggest shit in the pool, it would be naive to suggest they’re going to play nice with everything forever, given who they are and how much control they could have if they just put enough time into strong-arming it.
You and the comment you were replying to make really solid points and I enjoyed the expanded perspective. It’s these longer, actually nuanced comments that are beginning to really make me feel how ridiculously people treat the downvote button. And I think overall I’ve been swayed to support meta being blocked by individuals rather than defederated by whole instances. But I’m still not going to pretend this is all they’re going to do if they can possibly do more. It was inevitable, but I don’t have to trust facebook over it
I would think a company wouldn’t want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
As if Facebook does actual moderation.
They’ll build bots and ban users algorithmically, as usual.
And use the fediverse to spread metric shit tons of misinformation, lies, and garbage, all while scooping up Fediverse user data to sell.
There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing either of those things right now though.
Of course that’s true, but we already know Meta to be a bad actor… remember Cambridge Analytica? Why would anyone trust them to do the right thing in entering the fediverse in a desperate search for more users to abuse? They’ve fucked over society so many times that they dont even have real sections on their Wikipedia pages for it, instead there are whole other Wikipedia pages just devoted to Meta criticism, controversies, and lawsuits. At what point are people justified in noping out? I dont blame anyone for wanting to shut the front door before their shitty neighbor starts knocking.
Sidenote: I sound way more triggered than I am, I’m currently bored out of gourd due to circumstances beyond my control and just have a lot of time on my hands for ranting, lol. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. 🤪
undefined> As if Facebook does actual moderation.
Post boobs and find out how fast they moderate.
Facebook is just looking for more content on the cheap and more corners of the internet to spread their tendrils into.
That’s what’s got me curious. I suppose they could just not provide an option to turn off their nsfw filter, but wishing everyone would appropriately tag their damn porn still doesn’t ensure a family-friendly environment. The best practice would be for platforms to rework their communities/magazines to add specific auto-tags to every submitted post. Technically even then, all posts in m/ boob being auto # boob-ed doesn’t stop anyone posting boobs to m/kittens. In fact, it would probably encourage it a little.
If they want zero porn anywhere ever, their best step would be to not even federate with anyone but themselves. So I wanna know if they’re just…gonna embrace the boobs out of necessity.
Since Musk is doing such a good job of ruining Twitter, Zuckerberg might be exploring the idea of a Twitter-like Meta product.
He sees this Meta Threads project as a Twitter killer. He’s not exploring… He’s taking aim right now and in a couple of months, he’s going to pull the trigger.
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.
Even in here some are like “but we need the corporations”.
I certainly don‘t and I‘m fully prepared to go to an instance which stands with me on this. Defederation from all big corporations (small ones are probably impossible to weed out and hopefully less dangerous but should be kept an eye on). If that makes my version of the fediverse smaller, so be it, I like small communities anyway.
They infiltrate these spaces, they take over and “make it better” to lure people, then they centralise and then when people become dependent they enshittify it to sell us, sell our data, sell anything we say and also sell shit to us which we don’t need. All the while condescendingly applying their “codes of conduct” on us to be allowed the privilege to make them money.
I repeat: I don‘t need them. I don‘t want them.
If the majority accept this and even those small communities fold and die too, this will be the last time for me. I‘m just gonna live like a monk in some Austrian forest without internet. All I ever wanted is to talk to some cool people around the world about life and stuff I like.
I feel you completely. I spend most of my free time with my family, hiking or paddling, or reading books. It’s nice to have places online to burn some time, but I’d sooner give it up than be forced into some corporate playground. The past 15-20 years have shown that it just doesn’t work.
Well said! I’m in complete agreement.
There’s money involved and it could end up lucrative for the devs themselves either having the project bought out or getting very well paid jobs with Meta.
Any sane person puts their career and family first in such a situation and gets that potential bag of money. The people who don’t are admirable but rare. The owners of just about every Lemmy instance would do the same too.
💀
probably an unpopular opinion but facebook does also have a sort of track record of contributing to open source projects in ways that benefit everyone. facebook wanted to use subversion (or some other non-git source control) and contributed significantly so that it would work great for huge repositories like theirs. and facebook use memcached for their caches and contribute heavily so that they can use it more efficiently.
i’m also skeptical about end motivations, but in terms of being able to lend engineering effort to open source projects and helping to create a better product for all, it’s not such a bad idea.
They’re behind React which has become pretty ubiquitous in the frontend dev space too.
creating react isnt a positive impact on the world lets be honest
i would say it was quite negative even
Google has a similar reputation and yet XMPPs half rotten corpse is still floating down the river
oh yeah, “killed by google” is definitely a thing. a real big thing.
Google has a reputation of creating Google versions of popular open source projects. Then, they abandon it when some corporate hack decides they’re bored with it. I’m amazed that Angular has lasted so long, but it does have some deep Googlification. Just recently, they’ve been moving off of the well supported bundler, webpack (which they didn’t give you any access to the configuration of), and onto their own custom made bundler just for Angular. It’ll probably result in faster, better builds but it’s unlikely to be useful for anything but Angular.
So while it’s nice that Google has made their internal tooling available, it’s still at the mercy of Google getting bored and moving on. I like the cohesiveness of it compared to React because it does come fully loaded, no configuration needed, but it’s also not as bullet proof from corporate meddling as React is. Fortunately, coin counters don’t seem to pay attention to build tools, otherwise I’m sure there’d be some PRO version for a major payment.
At least it’s not a bad idea until they leverage those tools they helped develop to takeover or dissolve services. I think it’s about time we start learning our lesson with these big corps rather than trying to give them a chance.
I hear you. I could imagine that the biggest “threat” is that facebook comes out with some incredible contributions and features, but it requires modifying activitypub or in some way restricts instances that want those tools from collaborating with the rest of the fediverse. Causing a fediverse split between those who want meta’s features, and are willing to fall under meta’s control, and those who would rather not have them could be bad.
For the source control system you’re thinking of Mercurial, and yep indeed that’s accurate.
They also notoriously open-sourced Hack and HHVM, their monolith’s language compiler and runtime. It’s a pretty narrow use case (having a PHP monolith and wanting it to scale), but they didn’t have to do it.
Anyway yeah, they indeed have pretty good genuine history with their open source efforts.
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.
My problem is that they will have their own mods, their own communities and their own content. They will flood the federated space with their content and ban people and servers they don’t like. It could easily centralise due to the sheer amount of users they bring and you will find it hard to find non Facebook based communities.
While that is true, I anticipate that as a user you can choose to block all of that, just like I could have a reddit experience without r/conservative and without ads. We will always be able to find our niches, the size of which is determined by how many people share your values.
That being said, it’s indeed up to us to make sure the largest communities don’t end up on some weird fork that has ads.
They certainly want to compete with the fediverse with their own fediverse product, and are just approaching ActivityPub to learn as much about their open standard as possible, so that they can adapt it to be proprietary. But even that could work for me if it was still compatible with the fediverse, although they might be defederated from. It could actually be cool if it was defederated like on a protocol level, so that users from all lemmy instances could interact together on meta posts separately from users on meta instances
If ActivityPub can’t survive a Facebook venture, then it was never going to succeed in the first place.
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, 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 just truly don’t give a shit about Twitter and Twitter-like sites.
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.Yea, Facebook, twitter and mastodon are different from reddit and Kbin/Lemmy so why would meta try to get reddit users to switch to a completely different kind of service that’s nothing like reddit
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
It’s a sexy iOS client for Mastodon. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ice-cubes-for-mastodon/id6444915884
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.
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 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 haave their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems a little starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
