If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end.
“Simply by joining it” is not an accurate representation of what will happen in the slightest. Meta is not some scrappy little Lemmy instance operator relying on donations to keep the lights on, they’re one of the biggest companies in the world who simply do not care about fair competition or open standards, and they have a proven track record of using that position to either buy out or destroy competition.
When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end? You can make a project as resistant to corporate overreach as you like, infrastructure to run it still costs money and there is no fediverse operator on the face of the earth that is going to be able to outspend Meta when it comes to infrastructure and R&D. How is defederation not an appropriate response when smaller instances are crippled under the inevitable load stemming from Metas users?
Corporations have been embracing, extending and extinguishing FOSS projects in the tech space for decades now, and their demise has rarely been because of a fatal flaw in the projects themselves. It’s been an intentional play by Microsoft, Google et al to ensure that there is no viable open alternative to their walled gardens. Trusting them in any capacity is naïve at best and catastrophic at worst.
Echoing this, please read the linked post. There is a big difference between technology and it's implementation vs the community of users of it and what they are using to do so.
When this was linked a previous time, I wrote up a reply to it which I think applies here as well, so I'm gonna shamelessly copy and paste myself 🙂
I think the big thing to take away from that article is... XMPP developers cared so much about retaining federation with Google Talk that they "became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers" as it is put there. Google came in and said "this is our house now, adapt or die."
For our current fediverse, it's important I think, as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say "no, this is our house. If you don't adapt to us, we don't federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that." We cannot become the Meta watchers.
ActivityPub is just a protocol and they can use it. It doesn't mean they have to be compatible with us. Let them have their Twitter/Instagram hybrid application. Do we care that much whether we can or cannot see their posts?
To your point, many of us will defederate, either out of politics or financial necessity. There's rumors milling around that Meta / Threads will only initially federate with a few trusted larger instances and be monetarily compensated for it (aka those who will make a deal with the devil to moderate - more on my thoughts on that here).
It may come to the point where a lot of us are running on our own smaller "Fediverse", intentionally divorced from Meta and those instances which have federated with Meta and taken their advertisements and paid posts. If this is the case, we must take the bad with the good - we will always be smaller and niche, and our less techno-idealistic friends will not join our tiny Fediverse because the barrier to entry will remain high.
It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.
Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.
It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.
Completely agreed on the concept of needing to federate out entire spaces (magazines / communities) - this is a huge gap currently, especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on kbin.social .
My thought is that Lemmy and kbin, after fixing and updating core functionality (easier said than done), need to jump on the idea of instances having magazines/communities that pull from multiple other sources, rather than federating each community independently - e.g. I could have an @android which is pulling from @android , @android , etc, and the experience is relatively seamless - if someone drops out, yes we lose a lot of content, but others pick up the slack.
This would require more overhead from admins and instance owners to manage which other communities their own communities are pulling from, but I think it would be worthwhile for a better overall user experience and to help decentralize these communities in general.
I can't edit and have my edits federated out (edits federate if someone is following you, not if you are following them) so I want to point out that those links are somehow pointing to users instead of communities, whoops. I was referring to e.g. https://the.coolest.zone/m/android being a collection including contents on that magazine, contents from https://kbin.social/m/android , contents from https://lemmy.world/c/android , etc.
... so I could host an instance with a magazine that is essentially a digest of federated instances, and I can add/remove based on whatever aligns with my principles?
I don't think I have that right, sorry but if you could explain it a little differently, I'm still trying to understand how the fediverse is.
So, as an example. I am on the.coolest.zone which is where my account is registered. I have a magazine on it called [email protected], which is where I am viewing this thread. In fact, you will be able to view it here: https://the.coolest.zone/m/[email protected]
I have only three actual magazines on my own instance - random (this is necessary for all kbin instances to collect uncategorized posts), BestOfBlind, and Android (which was my attempt to create a magazine that collects threads based on hashtag, but it's not working right). Everything else is a magazine which is actually a federated version of either a kbin magazine from another kbin community or a Lemmy community from a Lemmy instance.
The couple of things that seem to be missing or broken right now:
As stated, trying to get a magazine going based on hashtag does not seem to be working.
There's no way to collect up multiple communities into one, so I have separate magazines for android (kbin.social) and android (lemmy.world). That's a little annoying!
As far as I can tell, you can't delete a magazine yet. If I federate a magazine / community and decide I actually don't want it on my instance anymore (or I created m/android to test the hashtag and found it doesn't work right), tough luck it seems - I'm stuck with it.
Hosting costs - Of my 80GB VPS, I appear to have used about 60GB so far just in federating other content to me. This is going to become a problem within this week! I don't know what to do about that or whether there's a way to prune old content or what! (I don't want to re-host everyone's memes, as dank as they are!)
kbin and Lemmy are both very new applications, so these will likely shake themselves out over time, but it's a bit of a rough experience right now. 😅
especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on @kbin.social .
But kbin.social is fully compatible with Lemmy with almost the same number of users and many more communities (dozen of them has more subscribers than most-subscribed /kbin magazine). Maybe /kbin as a platform is much centralised. Threadiverse, not so much.
as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say “no, this is our house. If you don’t adapt to us, we don’t federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that.”
I'm afraid we will lose if we accept them until they do something bad. Given their track record, that's just a matter of time. If we let them become important to the fediverse as long as they play nice, the final decision could be disastrous for the fediverse when they stop playing nice.
So the right thing to say seems for me: "No, this is our house. We don’t federate with you."
That is a completely valid take here. My partner who runs our Mastodon instance will be preemptively defederating with Threads (on my suggestion), so I do agree with you, but I realize not everyone in the Fediverse may share that take - it's a weighted scale where one end is "mass adoption of a Web 3.0 decentralized Fediverse" and the other end is "but adoption in which most people are on Threads will be centralization anyway, so we will have already failed."
I think in any case it may not matter, as I believe Meta / Threads will only federate with instances that agree to follow their moderation standards - after all, Meta likely doesn't want porn and Nazis federated to their communities because then they can't run advertisements. As a Fediverse community, we're pretty good at taking care of the Nazi thing, but Mastodon's got an awful lot of porn on it.
It will really depend on which admins take that deal to be beholden to Meta's standards, potentially opening themselves up not only to huge moderation concerns but to a future requirement of taking advertisements. I hope large instances will not. I would prefer to see the Fediverse operate separate from Threads, who will be using the ActivityPub protocol but not part of the larger Fediverse. Similar to how the conservative "truth.social" uses the Mastodon application and ActivityPub but is not part of the Fediverse because it is closed off.
A little off topic, but I was very surprised Reddit didn't pursue a similar approach of "we will lower greatly the costs of API but we will serve advertisements in the API as regular posts, so you must display them and can't strip them out."
Why will Meta care? To their large user base, they are on the “federation” and we’ll be the odd ones out. Their users won’t care either. They’ll just use it. And Meta can spin up any number of servers they want. Any company can.
They might not, and frankly that would be the ideal solution, wouldn't it? They fork Mastodon, have their own isolated little universe, and we have our own little Fediverse over here. But the rumors swirling indicate that they do want to federate with larger instances that will be willing to follow their moderation standards and optionally take advertisements - I explain over here why that is likely the preferable approach for Meta.
When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end?
It's a design flaw when simply "outspending" other fediverse platforms allows you to dominate them. There are ways to design a system where that's not possible.
The fact that those other fediverse platforms can defederate from the "big money instance" if they don't like what it's doing, for example, is a part of the design of the fediverse that can help counter influence like that. You can't force other instances to federate with you even if you have an enormous amount of money, and even if you did manage it in specific cases other people without that vulnerability can just spin up new instances.
We'll see whether this sort of thing is "enough", I guess, because Meta is coming one way or the other. If it turns out that stronger defenses are needed then there are other technical methods that could be used to strengthen the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I think defederation is not really that useful in this case, because then your users will just leave and sign up for the platform where they can view where the most content is. Although I do agree with your general premise.
Then it's no different than them just jumping back to Facebook or other corporate owned social media like the current situation. That's not a lost. The lost is if they are allowed to federate in the first place and people get used to it. But even then as the concept of enshittification becomes more well known more users will also be resistant to the idea.
The situation I'm thinking of is one where Meta creates Threads (or whatever it will be called), and then a bunch of people defederate. In that scenario, there will of course be big servers who choose to federate with Threads. Given Meta's reach and influence, they will undoubtedly have one of the bigger instances, so a lot of politicians, journalists and everyday people will go there.
Making it so people can't see that content will just make the fediverse become more centralized, because people will just go to the bigger instances that will allow for them to see that content, or just go sign up for threads. I think that's bad because it creates further centralization, even if they're providing the content that people want.
Even though I know a lot of people disagree, we need all types of content in order for this place to grow. I'm not talking about any far-right nonsense, but even garbage like tabloid fodder and stupid meme bullshit will keep our networks alive and users engaging. The easier it is for the average person to use the better. If the point is not profit, then it must be to allow people to come together and talk about almost whatever with almost whoever, and wherever.
Making it so people can't see that content will just make the fediverse become more centralized, because people will just go to the bigger instances that will allow for them to see that content, or just go sign up for threads.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but it sounds to me like you're still saying "if Meta is providing the content that people want and it's not available elsewhere then people will go to Meta for it."
And that seems fine by me, in that case they're competing by providing the content that people want. However, not everyone wants the same thing. I have no interest in "following" politicians or celebrities. A lot of the sorts of conversations I'm interested in do not benefit from having a huge number of people in them. So even if Meta is some kind of juggernaut there's going to be people (like me) who don't want to participate in a juggernaut. The smaller defederated instances will still be attractive.
I agree with OP's title on the social side of the problem, not the technical one. If we allow them to destroy the Fediverse, then it was already lost to begin with. It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of whether the key people are able to keep it out of the corporate control in the long run. If they can't, then it was all just a matter of time.
EDIT: I don't imply it's a particularly useful thought. It might help with coping though if it would ever happen. Let's enjoy it while it lasts and hope for the best!
Hard disagree with to see sentiment that people who use the fediverse want freedom, alot of the people I see on here instead look for choice. 'Freedom' may be a side effect of that, so is many of the positives of choice.
The idea of 'freedom' is inheritly flawed if your relying on someone else.
I have many accounts with instances I trust, and my own instances.
That is choice, not freedom.
To have 'freedom' on the internet means a P2P model where everyone directly communicates with each other.
Meta has shown repeatedly that they aren't trustworthy. This is like watching a wolf eat every one of your chickens in the coop and then swearing up and down that if you let it in the hen house, it won't touch the chickens in there. Absolutely zero chance that they aren't going to try to take over and steal data and control it. Why else are they trying to come in? These corporations don't make moves like this unless they see a potential profit. I vote block.
Bingo. If Meta get their foot in the door, then the writing will be on the wall and the Fediverse as we know it today will slowly disappear. These huge corporations have extremely covert and efficient methods of influencing change and instilling their evil values which aren't fully-apparent until it's already too late.
If Meta get involved, personally, I'll be leaving, and will just accept that the internet will never again be allowed to exist in a free state; the system won.
EDIT: I also left all social media over two years ago, and this was largely because Facebook was making me remarkably unhappy and angry. I don't want them in my life full stop and have gone out of my way to rid my digital identity of any ties to corporate proprietary bullshit. I like it here precisely because it has no corporate overlord, and it makes me sick to think that Meta can just waltz back into my life in a space users largely want to be left alone in.
Big companies are driven by profit and power. I don't expect us to keep them out but it would be nice to prevent them from becoming the default, or else we'll just repeat the same thing over again
Multiple smaller communities connected together is the best strategy for a free internet IMO
I can't imagine that meta aren't already collecting fediverse data. It's an existential threat to their business model and the data is comparatively easy to harvest. I'll bet their internal user model already has records for which federated services a facebook user also uses. There's not a lot of privacy here!
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I made a mistake, it was Fosstodon. They told Meta to fuck off. https://hub.fosstodon.org/assets/images/meeting-with-meta-email.webp
Mastodon is 100% a competitor to #Meta, and if I were #Mastodon, I would watch my back since everything Meta does is only for the benefit (or the endgame is) for themselves and their market share. Best case scenario would for Meta to extinguish Mastodon and have everyone go to #threads.
I do not understand why Mastedon is downplaying the very likely scenario of Meta EEE'ing the shit out of ActivityPub once they get people to migrate to Threads
Whelp, time to pack up I guess. Mastodon is the biggest player in the fediverse right now, so if Meta EEE's us then the fediverse as a concept is doomed.
We have the foreknowledge of seeing EEE happen with XMPP/Google Chat, now. We can fight back against EEE against ActivityPub as it actually happens, with instances defederating with Meta and so on, when they start actually taking those negative actions. It's gonna be fine.
Can we actually fight back, though? most of the people using the Fedi are on Mastodon, primarily coming from places like Twitter and Reddit because of the recent drama. The biggest complaint new people have is about how complicated Masto and other fediverse services are to get into for people who aren't tech savvy, between choosing different instances and figuring out how to use them. Meanwhile, Meta provides a familiar, convenient experience from a brand they already know, even with its horrible reputation. Then when 90% of "fediverse" users are on Threads instead of the rest of the fedi, they'll announce that they are dropping support for ActivityPub and there will only be a few thousand people left elsewhere to mourn it.
I think it’s worth noting that many more of us are aware of EEE than in the past, and while meta is very well known, it’s also kind of infamous. While some services have brand loyalty, meta kind of has a mix of brand apathy or brand repulsiveness to a lot of people. I think the most loyalty you might find would be in people who purchase into the quest ecosystem, or are avid users of Instagram.
I think enough of us are aware of the circumstances that when Meta eventually does start taking steps towards the “extension” phase, they’re going to get called out immediately, and communities are going to better able to resist than in the past.
I would agree if they didn't already shovel in 10 million people from instagram in the past few hours, and you cant leave without deleting your facebook and instagram accounts and everything you have invested in them. They gained in the past few hours more people than the entire Fediverse has gained over the course of several years.
I think most people are here because we don't really like groups like Meta. We existed before, and I believe we can persist without. Meta is going to have Facebook/instagram/whatsapp integration in threads that will require us to visit their site and/or link accounts to view. I think we might as well just defederate at that point.
But they took them from Instagram. As somebody on another forum said, because it sort of came with Instagram, they didn't sign up to Meta out of the blue. People not on Instagram will likely not sign up for it, at least not in those numbers.
That’s a really hot take. It could be that Eugene - exactly as he says, thinks wide adoption of ActivityPub is a hood thing and that federation is robust enough to handle any potential threat from Threads - which isn’t even federating yet.
Why jump straight to ‘the guy is clearly corrupt and has taken money from Meta’?
if you believe meta is going to act in the best interest of the fediverse, and not try to fuck it over, then please kindly remove your head from your ass.
I believe they may try, but I think the approach Mastodon is taking isn't necessarily a warm embrace. They seem to be handling this with skepticism and I have read that they have plans to Defederate if Meta tries to exploit Activity Pub in any way.
Meta will act in Meta’s best interest. We don’t know yet whether that will be be beneficial or damaging to the Fediverse. It could be beneficial in terms of user numbers and general adoption. If they are arses then sure - defederate
that would be censorship, something the fediverse aims to avoid. We all shit on meta/twitter/other large corps for censoring content, but when instance owner's do it, its fine? De-federating for ideological reasons like this goes against the principles of federation.
The thing about the Fediverse is that you have the choice to pick an instance. We shit on "big tech" when they do something, because there isn't anything else to do. I personally want to be on an instance that will defed the fuck out of threads (and anyone else who will bring over people who will delight themselves on harassing me and my friends) should they federate, and if you don't want that you're welcome to go to an instance that won't, and we can still talk to each other.
ps: As far as I'm aware, Fediverse never "aimed to avoid censorship" nor had any "principles on federation". In fact, there are large parts of Mastodon (well, mostly Pleroma/Akkoma/Soapbox) filled to the brim with the worst kinda people you can imagine, yet they're all defederated into their own little sandbox. Nobody can decide who can use and build upon ActivityPub but we sure as shit can decide to not federate with a company so shit at moderation that everyone opposing federation with them seems to be a minority in one way or another.
I see no way they aren't a competitor. Meta is a company. Companies exists to make money. Meta makes money by driving engagement and then monitizing via ads or user data sale for others to target ads.
Like are we all supposed to pretend a company, Meta of all companies, is an altruistic entity? Because that's not how it works... At all.
It's poisoning the well though, even if I don't see the ads. Also they will prioritize inflammatory content to drive engagement, which would affect other instances as well (you know, like they do for all their other apps/platforms).
And corporations are not good or bad, but the for profit ones... are for profit. And I'm sorry but there is no justification for a profit motive in social media.
This is true with Kbin and Lemmy, and Mastodon instances but Meta doesn't have that mindset. They are going to have ads and are going to see users not on their instance as eyes that rightfully belong to them that are not set on those ads.
Again, from the user POV, yes, that is fine. From Meta POV, it's incentive to try and lock as many eyes in as possible using tactics that we probably won't think of because we aren't able to think from the POV of being pure scum.
It’s because you can’t “kill” a the AP protocol. XMPP didn’t go away when Messenger and GChat removed support for it, it just went back to how it was before hand, a fraction of tech enthusiasts using it for private communication. It would probably be the same with AP. A separate collection of sites using it to federate information.
… even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Granted this leaves out how Google used it’s influence to control and stagnate the XMPP protocol, but that’s another can of worms.
I understand all the fear around meta. However on federated platforms, is all competition not a good thing?
Also I have to imagine the overlap between the type of people currently on federated platforms, and those willing to use any platform made by meta is rather slim.
Also what do you think about the comparisons with XMPP?
when a large monopolistic company is trying to join the fediverse, its not because they want to play fair. They literally can not try and play fair, if their profits are not continually growing, then they are legally not representing the best interest of the shareholders. if you actually believe that meta joining the fediverse has an altruistic motive, or they they will not act in a way that benefits their shareholders(to kill any competition that takes any of their profit in any way), then you are probably not looking at the full story and need to consider if you are capable of thinking.
Why erect this straw man? No one is claiming Meta is being altruistic, that’s not the question. They aren’t federating at all yet. We have no ifea what the eventual form of federation will take.
I’m not saying they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that Meta has no other microblogging platform. They’re not trying to choke out competition, because there isn’t any competition.
I personally believe that they are trying to tap into the Fediverse and use it as a springboard to grow their own platforms. However it’s worth keeping in mind that as any federated platform grows, other federated platforms grow with it.
Kbin’s growth is good for lemmy. The Fediverse grows with this kind of competition.
While Im not personally a fan of meta. It’s probably in the fedieverse’s best interest to at least be willing to come to the table and consider the possibilities, instead of just immediately fighting this. Remember, we haven’t seen the implementation yet. This is all just speculations.
“i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity”
Meta won't federate anyone. They don't want to host illegal content on their servers, that would be an absolute PR disaster for them. And this is what will happen if they federate with a random instance. Even clean instances will want to play tricks on Meta if federated.
They are the prototype of the mono instance federation. They want control. They want to attract the people leaving Twitter. I don't think they care about us, what they want to avoid is that our instances become too big and start to offer an alternative.
Hmm... sounds a bit too idealistic to be true, especially given how Facebook has acted in the past. I appreciate his hope for the future, but I think he severely underestimates the lengths to which FB will go to monetize and control users on their platforms.
Here's the scenario I don't like. Threads scrapes my OC on a federated server, then reposts it to their users with advertisements. Now, not only has FB taken my OC without getting my permission or even informing me, they're now garnering profit from it. If this were a print publication, this would plainly be copyright theft. And if I want to remove my content that's now hosted on Threads without my permission, there's no possible way for me to do so - I can delete the post and hope their federated server does the same, but given how hard they make it to delete a FB account, I'm not terribly optimistic.
It's no wonder #threads isn't launching in Europe - there's no way in hell this kind of thing is even remotely GDPR compliant.
That's an interesting point. Can anyone take your original content and repost it to make money? As I understand it, anything you create is theoretically copyrighted at the moment you created. You're not required to file a copyright, at least not in the United States.
Sure they can. Stack overflow is one example. Any business operating on user driven content will be culpable. When you agree to the EULA and it tells you "what you post here belongs to us and we grant you a license to publish it yourself", you're signing over ownership of your content in exchange for a license to replicate it. That's how social media all works, all the EULAs work that way. FOSS is no different.
Dude a federated SO would be a dream. Imagine actually be able to post something without it being flagged as a duplicate of a 10 year old outdated question.
US copyright starts at the moment of creation, but the issue here is really enforcement. To get a copyright enforced, you have to bring a civil suit, which is considerably expensive in terms of both time and money. If you're going after a company as big as FB, your expense dramatically increases while your likelihood of getting a favorable judgment drops. And even then, you're probably only looking at getting the content taken down, not a monetary award, because in this scenario it would be near impossible to tell how much ad revenue your specific content generated for FB, or how much was lost to FB if you were getting ad traffic revenue from your content on another platform that's now going to FB.
While these potential problems exist with or without FB in the picture, as any instance owner could theoretically do the same thing, the difference in scale combined with how FB treats its users (cattle) is what's making my alarm bells go off. There's so much potential for abuse, with very little benefit to the existing users of the Fediverse.
Look I don’t want to be combative here, and my sincere apologies if this response comes off that way but here goes
IMHO this is already the way activitypub works. Platforms that choose to federate, are able to pool their posts and the like. And yes instances can make money off of content posted on other instances. That’s not a bug it’s a feature.
On the other hand, meta sucks and I’m not sure if I’d really want to federate with them either. So like, idk lol, just spitballing
100%. The open and public nature of the fediverse is something everyone should be considering every single time they post on a federated platform. I don't want to federate with meta because ew , but it would be absurd to think that a public platform like this isn't gonna get scraped to hell anyways.
Go to the relevant domain's front page (e.g https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social for kbin.social).
The URL scheme is "https://kbin.social/d/DOMAINHERE" assuming you are currently on kbin.social.
On the right in the sidebar you can see "Domain" and below that options to subscribe or to block.
Really it's the same thing as magazines, just that you generally don't visit the domain itself.
kbin is still in its growing pains phase. there are tons of little user experience items that need to be worked on. good thing is that @ernest is working hard on it.
Does that actually work for you? I'm still seeing posts from magazines on domains that I blocked that way. It looks to me like it only blocks articles, and also link posts to the domain, but not link posts on magazines from the domain.
What I hear is that a copy is still made so the posts made before defederalization is available and basically forks without them connected now at the point of being deferated
I hate tankies myself as well, but I also hate that some communities are only created on lemmy.ml. Plus some official subreddits moved over there as well (and no - no far-left ones).
Uh, they do, actually. The belief is that the USSR was attempting to build communism.
I reject this because they didn’t implement any communist policies, even Lenin himself said what they were doing was state capitalism.
The tankie defense is that they were doing it to later establish communism, but nobody who knows what they’re talking about actually believes the USSR achieved socialism.
They even refused to help Yugoslavia after they implemented an actually socialist policy (workplace democracy).
The situation with the USSR was rather clearly that an authoritarian dictatorship wanted to call themselves a utopia so they said they were communist.
I don’t understand why people give the USSR the benefit of the doubt and assume they were actually trying to do something good.
A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.
1 is "real communism." Everyone owns everything (to an extent. Despite assertions to the contrary, there is still private property in communist thought. No, nobody wants to collectivize your towels), everyone has a job, everyone has all needs met and exceeded. Healthcare, transportation, tacos, whatever you need is covered.
2 is what we've seen in the real world because dictators gonna dictate. A group of individuals will get to the "we're in charge and can really do a communism this time!" step and immediately go "but it's kinda cool being an asshole and living in a fuckin' palace, you know?" and BOOM, STALIN.
"Real communism" is something that has actually, literally, never been achieved because it devolves into a dictatorship.
Meanwhile, all captalism devolves into oligarchies but people are fine with that because... reasons?
Problem is that there's a bunch of major communities on that instance. They have no affiliation with the server admins and mostly just chose the instance because it seemed like the default very early in the migration to the Fediverse.
The term "tankie" is a slang term used to describe a person who supports or apologizes for the actions of authoritarian communist regimes, particularly those that have used tanks or military force to suppress opposition or maintain control. The term originated from the Soviet Union's use of tanks to quell protests and uprisings, most notably the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
While there may be varying interpretations and uses of the term, it is generally used pejoratively to criticize individuals who defend or downplay the human rights abuses, political repression, or atrocities committed by these regimes.
I’m not sure this blog post is the “ah-ha!” revelation you think it is.
If you’re posting something, you’re choosing to put that out there on the public internet which should henceforth be considered “public.” This isn’t a privacy violation unless you choose to make it one by violating your own privacy by oversharing sensitive information.
This has been the case online since time immemorial. Once something’s out there, consider it non-retractable. This isn’t specific to the Fediverse/ActivityPub. Even in centralized forums/reddit the things you post were cached by web archive/scraped by unscrupulous sites/used to train AI, etc. even if you tried to delete them from the source server. “Deletion” has never truly been a thing on the internet, which is precisely why people should really consider what they post. Heck, there were specific sites dedicated to showing which comments were “deleted” from reddit in full.
I don’t consider any of these things “privacy violations.” A privacy violation would be if the email address you signed up to your instance with was being broadcast to other servers in the open. What you choose to put out there is up to you and the inherent danger with interacting with any form of social media.
The core issue is not the technology imho. It’s the people : their rampant narcissism that has become the new norm since facebook, and the urge to always post useless crap about themselve everywhere, then suprise-pokemoning when they realise it may not have been the brightest of ideas.
Maybe you didn’t read where it says even DIRECT MESSAGES aka private messages you send to people, and don’t choose to post in public, is easily and easily available.
This place is already an echo chamber. Jesus that’s bad. Everyone is on a new team and now we love this team and this team is never wrong and all criticisms are invalid. Even the really bad ones.
I don’t really care. I’m old enough to have never trusted the internet. But let’s not pretend this isn’t a huge fucking deal, and isn’t completely fucked just because Reddit bad and fediverse good
Huh funny how a direct message is not a private message, almost like they’re even called completely different things.
Everything is public here, some stupid Euro anti-user ideals on privacy aren’t the be all and end all .
Things put in public are public. There is no privacy concern because there has never any privacy, nor will there ever be any privacy to be concerned about in a non-private platform such as this.
Yes. DMs on Twitter are Direct Messages and are supposed to be private messages send to someone else that no one else can see (except server admins, et al, as we are talking about here). If you send a DM to someone on Twitter or whatever social media (they use DMs to mean private messages on Instagram as well) it’s not on the public feed, no one can search it. Like having a text message conversation
"Direct Message" and "Private Message" indeed mean different things. In practice, because both involve messaging one individual user, a good deal of people (including myself) still expect them to be functionally the same. Part of this functionality we expect is that there is an attempt to make these messages less visible and easy to access than the reply I just sent to you right now. This expectation is validated on Twitter:
Direct Messages are the private side of Twitter. You can use Direct Messages to have private conversations with people about Tweets and other content.
a private message sent on a social media website, that only the person it is sent to can see
and by the fact that if you go on anyone's profile, you can see post history, comment history, and boosts, but not a list of who they tried to send an individual message to or what those messages were. I believe that more technical people could retrieve such messages, that the messages are not totally secure, but to my layman eyes, I do still expect that there was at least an attempt to make these messages private.
Even on traditional centralized platforms I’ve never treated DMs as “private.” Anything not end-to-end encrypted cannot be considered private and never has been able to be.
Of course you can have encrypted group chats on Signal, if you're not concerned about meta data. Or xmpp group chats with encryption if you want decentralization. You can keep your secret stuff secret and your public stuff public simply by using different apps.
And if other instance owners have access to the private messages of people on every instance, that is a shockingly large flaw. I’m not exactly sure how insecure private messaging would be here. Not that I have people to message. But it being centralized would be more secure if decentralization would allow a much larger number of people to have access to something that, really, should be private.
There are an overwhelming number of people I don’t think are savvy or cynical enough, call it what you will, to understand that just because they call something a private message - or just because it’s supposed to be a one to one interaction - doesn’t mean no one else can see it. I would think, if anything, an overwhelming majority of people who send a private message/DM on a social media assume that no one else at ALL has access to that information.
I would think, if anything, an overwhelming majority of people who send a private message/DM on a social media assume that no one else at ALL has access to that information.
Yes, but as others have pointed out, this is no different than any other social media service that isn't end to end encrypted. This ignorance is no more true here than it is on any other service.
The mechanism could be different (bad actor as an instance admin) but every private message from any other service you've used (minus E2E encrypted services as noted) could also wind up exposed.
Direct messages on most social platforms are a convenient function, not a privacy shield.
This place is already an echo chamber. Jesus that’s bad.
Folks not reaching the same conclusions you have on an issue doesn't make it an echo chamber.
Everyone is on a new team and now we love this team and this team is never wrong and all criticisms are invalid.
Now you sound like conservatives complaining about how reddit is just a liberal echo chamber. There's plenty of threads around that have criticized various aspects of how the fediverse works.
I’m old enough to have never trusted the internet.
Me too. Nothing that would be more than mildly embarrassing goes into a social media message, private or otherwise, here or on any other platform. Nor for that matter into an email. It's fairly basic behavior these days.
I'll go so far as to say the very public nature of the fediverse should probablly be more explicitly communicated at sign up time, but again, the nature of the fediverse is still such that it's going to be up to individual instance owners to communicate that.
Direct messages, private messages, whatever you want to call them... have ALWAYS been available to your social media hosts. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Discord... they can all read your private communications if they choose to do so. While I'd support E2EE for private messages for kBin etc, pretending that this is some sort of flaw inherent to the fediverse is inaccurate. It's fair to want the fediverse to be better. It is not fair to hold it to a standard no one has ever applied to other social media.
Hmm interesting. I do think it's just as important that we double-defederate unfortunately. Meta/Threads has to be treated as if it's contagious.
If we stay federated with an instance that has accepted the Embrace, what do we do when the Extend happens? Is that when we defederate? Will we even recognize it?
EEE only works because it's difficult to see it happening to you. Instances that ally with Meta/Threads will actually present the same threat of EEE, or even a greater threat, because the Extend step may appear to come from non-Meta instances.
Imagine ActivityPub upgrades developed by a Meta/Threads-ally, let's say improved inter-instance moderator tools. That sounds good right?
It's basically all the exact same arguments again, but with a middle man.
Meta/Threads have different foundational priorities (namely, profit) and real incentives to monopolize.
Meta-ally instances have real and implied incentives to accommodate
Meta/Threads.
And we have incentives to accommodate the instances that we federate with, so of course kbin would use the well-developed new mod tools right?
Seems crazy not to, even if it was developed by a Meta-ally. Right?
Great! Repeat for thousands of tiny changes, that's called Extend.
That's how accepting EEE works, each little step looks great but big picture we're unknowingly in trouble. We'll have to treat any Meta/Threads-ally as if it is Meta/Threads. (Hell, some of them probably will be lol, the fediverse is just asking for astroturfing lol.)
We can trust instances that don't have economic incentives. But any instance that shows they can be swayed by money, or that shows they'll accommodate instances driven by profit, well they're showing that they'd consider eating us to become the next reddit.
The more I read, the more I am in the camp of "let's not." Meta has rarely acted in the best interests of its own users; from their unethical experiments into causing depression to their privacy issue to... well, everything, they are classic examples of bad actors. The fediverse is not secure enough or big enough to counter Meta's takeover if we open that door... there's a reason we're in the fediverse and not the metaverse, after all.
The decision of whether to federate is up to the individual instances, and I'd not want it any other way. But I do think we should be encouraging instances to hold off on Meta-fying. Else, we'll be fighting Meta in a game that they're much better at than any of us are ever likely to be.
This is utterly baffling and goes against the whole idea of the Fediverse. To take advantage of the impending mass migration, just days before Reddit shuts down their universal API access for good, this all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
So users now have to choose between two already-smaller communities when making the transition? This is only going to make a semi-complicated process even more confusing, and end up pushing users back to Reddit.
I had mostly used Lemmy.ml up to this point, but I didn’t leave Reddit to join another u/spez dictatorship. What a disappointing turn of events. Kbin is now my primary.
I don't think it's a case of a personal ego here. I think it's something different, that has to go with the main devs' ideology. I feel like @feditips 's concerns are quite valid.
Presuming for the sake of argument that it's a deliberate move by .ml to freeze out kbin users, it only really goes against the idea of the fediverse in that it's an underhanded way to accomplish something that was meant to be done openly. By design, every instance is entirely free to choose whether or not to federate with any other.
What a disappointing turn of events. Kbin is now my primary.
And (again presuming for the sake of argument that it's not simply a glitch), that's the fediverse working exactly as intended. Just as every instance is free to choose which instances to federate with, every user is free to choose which instances to join or follow.
True, but the original intent was that defederation would be a nuclear option, reserved only for instances that totally failed to moderate stuff like hate speech, bot activity, etc-- given that it damages the Fediverse as a whole.
The lemmy.ml admins are free to federate or defederate from other instances as they please-- and we're free to criticize their decision as we please, too.
I'm not sure how much you know about networking or HTTP, but from the evidence posted, this very much is not the kind of thing that just accidentally happens.
Lemmy.ml is about to find out what decentralization actually means. User migration is trivial, and absolutely nobody has had an account long enough to give a shit about it anyway.
Just a reminder that nothing on the Fediverse is private. Because of the distributed nature, anyone with an instance can scrape everything you’ve ever posted and this is working as intended.
Direct messages are readable to whoever is hosting your instance and the instance of the person you send them to.
Be careful what you share on the Fediverse and be careful what you share when setting up an account
A correction/clarification for those people who are trying to find freedom of speech on Fediverse,
as Nate says, nothing on the Fediverse is private.
Because everything is transparent, and they all link to your personal email address.
Freedom of speech on Fediverse is still limted cuz it is not private, and still has moderator.
Most public platforms interacting with the Fediverse today does require you to register an email address out of practical considerations but this is not a requirement of the system in itself. It is possible to both post and read an unmoderated fediverse with enough effort.
If you don't like the moderation of your particular server, you are fully able to create your own or set up an existing solution yourself that gives you 100% control over what kind of content you post, and in turn which content you federate to your server. Of course, you can't control which servers decide to allow your content on their server, but any user of servers where your content is blocked can do the same and have access to your content again.
As far as privacy goes, you can rent servers and purchase domains with crypto currencies which are not traceable back to you where you can host your own service that interacts with the fediverse, making you 100% able to control the information you post into it.
Of course it can. They are simply 2 unrelated concepts. Expressing yourself on reddit was like going into public space, and yelling whatever you had in mind. Doing so on fediverse is the same, but with microphones picking up your yelling to propagate it around the world.
You can have Freedom to express yourself while respecting your privacy: just don’t yell it (i.e. chose a closed private invite only community) or go to som remote forest / desert where there is nobody to hear you yell. Join an invite-only group/room on signal or matrix.
Freedom and Privacy can only exist with common sense.
@wrath@kbin.social Defederate with any instance Meta has infected - including any instance at Mastodon who thinks this is a good idea. I left FB years ago because of this and their boosting of the alt-right
I’m really happy to see so many people posting this article. While I was a little annoyed at first, I realized that it’s better overall to see this popping up everywhere.
If you haven’t read this yet, It’s great for understanding the upcoming challenges the Fediverse will face.
I had just found that it appears an instance only pulls posts/comments from when their first member subscribes. Even after subscribing any and all comments/posts remain missing for that instance.
This is something that I hope is improved, along with the above mentioned concerns.
I agree. I understand it’s a lot of data to pull, but even a status bar that can be checked on it’s own page would be a help for people to understand why their comments/posts aren’t showing up/why the stats are unbalanced.
I haven't looked into the protocols in detail yet, but maybe it's possible they're using eventual consistency. Upvote counts don't have to be 100% accurate across all instances all the time, as long as they're eventually accurate at some point.
Part of the issue is an upvote means different things on different instances. I have a Lemmy account (inactive) and a kbin. Lemmy has Upvote, Downvote, and Star buttons which can be compared to Reddit's system, with Star meaning saved. Kbin is different. It has Upvote, Downvote and Boost. For whatever reason, upvote on kbin is equivalent to Lemmy's star (called favorite on kbin instead of saved) and Boost is more equivalent to a Reddit upvote. Boosts and downvotes affects post visibility and your Reputation, while upvotes seem to only save the information (for you) for later reference.
this seems so messed up. I like kbin, don't get me wrong, but I consider this to be a bug, not a feature. When you have upvotes and downvotes one next to the other, you (a user) expect these 2 to do the exactly opposite action. Not one of them just add something in your favourites while the other starts negating another user's karma.
Well now I don't know. Couple of days ago, if you look at your profile there was a favorites section. That section is gone now....just when I thought I was figuring it out.
Things here get pushed from publishers to subscribers and their servers, and boosting is basically a way of republishing things.
Communities are, in some significant way, bots that boost anything that they see, and they see anything that mentions them, or that is in reply to anything that mentions them. Lemmy and kbin just hide the "To:" field of thr message, which is where the community bot (or "group actor" in Fediverse technical lingo). Boosting things that mention the community bot also triggers the not to boost it in turn, which sends it out to everyone following the bot.
Also interesting, Apple implemented XMPP in its messaging app way long ago and pulled support a few years back.
When people insist that Apple needs to implement Google's new secure messaging stack for better interoperability with Android, I wonder if they are thinking back to XMPP and saying "Yeah, fooled us once…"
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