Interesting perspective. Yet, server admins actually do have control over who they federate with. People do have control over what servers they use. Why not exercise this control?
My understanding is that one can post things publicly online but still retain rights, including distribution rights in certain jurisdictions.
I don’t think it is out of the question that the fediverse as a whole could make some decisions going forward that would make it more difficult for Meta (or other official corporations) to monetize the things we post with ads in their clients or through training of predictive models.
I'm worried that what they'll do is just set up hundreds of instances on various domains (not even necessarily *.facebook.com, or similar) in order to connect and scrape. Banning them would require resources and time people just can't dedicate in the way a megacorp can.
Why spend the money up front? That's just bad business.
Yeah agreed. They're building a multi-million dollar social network - why spend all that money up front when they could have just installed small anonymous Pleroma on Raspberry Pi for under 100 bucks if they'd wanted to mine our data.
All the "but muh datas" pearl clutching is just annoying and frankly, ridiculous. If they wanted to mine us, they already would have. They're probably doing it as we speak. They didn't have to create a multi-million social network for it. A raspberry pi on someones desk would have sufficed. Fedi doesn't have any (/very much) privacy.
They're doing this to escape the wrath of EU privacy watchdogs. They were already fined for $1.3bn and more is coming. Running their Twitter killer on interoperable protocol is nice, because it's free and they get to point at W3C and say they're LIKE TOTALLY supporting data portability. Why would they "extend and extinguish" that? It's their alibi.
I don't like Meta. It's a shit company ran by shit people. I hope they burn in hell.
But I can't really get my panties in a twist about threads.net existing.
I'll get angry if they somehow figure out to push ads to my face.
But for now. Maybe I'll block it. Maybe I won't. We'll see.
Agreed it would be trivial for Meta to obtain the posts. But I think the concern of most people here isn’t Meta obtaining the posts, it’s Meta monetizing them through ads and training. Would it not be in our best interest to try to prevent this?
Oddly enough, my understanding is that in many jurisdictions it is a matter explicitly asserting these rights. Aside from that, requesting that they be enforced when they are violated.
Somehow I don't think many instance admins have resources or knowhow to drive legal processes against Meta?
And while a disclaimer on the instance page might have some effect, the Federation protocol makes it hard to avoid getting a copy of the said content in your cache.
Sounds like a decent approach. Private by default but without taking away the freedom to interact with threads if so desired. At worst an inconvenience
Yeah stuff is public, but that doesn’t mean we have to hand it to them on a silverplatter and allow them to scrape it legally. Because they don’t have the legal right to just scrape websites, as everything is copyrighted unless the ToS specifically allows federated instances to copy it. By defederating you make it pretty clear they they are not allowed to just take it.
Next point equally dumb: no one owns the fediverse, sure. But if enough instances say no, that means they are not welcome. Democracy and all…
And the last point is the dumbest: Threads will just include a revenue sharing model like Youtube does and the ”dumb fucks" (quote Zuckerberg) will love to include ads in their posts; even praise Meta for being so generous to throw them some crumbs.
doesn’t mean we have to hand it to them on a silverplatter and allow them to scrape it legally
They could have just set up a simple Pleroma on Raspberry Pi and it would have been just as "legal" as any other instance. You'd need to turn on AUTHORIZED_FETCH and set up authentication on the Mastodon API, otherwise everything is public and unauthenticated (even if the instance is suspended/defederated).
But if enough instances say no, that means they are not welcome. Democracy and all
mastodon.social has already said yes. So have all the other big instances. Most of them have said "we'll wait and see". So democracy served I guess
And the last point is the dumbest: Threads will just include a revenue sharing model like Youtube does
Yeah, maybe. Who knows. I'll deal with it when it happens rather than knee-jerk years in advance. Threads has a long way to go, it's missing a lot of features to put it on par with their other commercial competitors, so I think they're going to be busy doing other things.
Individual blocking means nothing, it just hides the accounts and politely asks the remote server to not allow any responses.
Only defederation really makes the server stop sharing data and only that has a decent chance to convince the Meta lawyers that maybe copyright prevents them from gobbling up everything and feed it to their advertisement algorithms and train their AIs on it.
they can already download what people are sharing. that’s not what this is about.
if they want to train AIs on your data they can scrap it from the regular feed without any integration. If they needed federation to do it they could just set up a mastodon instance to grab the data - but they don’t.
They can not legally just download and use what people share
Can’t they? The internet is full of scrapers and reposters, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company like that going down. I’m not sure what the point would be (generate a dataset? perform sentiment analysis on certain topics? streamline their tag detection system with off-platform data?), but they can, as long as they follow the relevant privacy laws (“practically no restrictions” outside of the EEA+UK+California, “anonymise before processing” everywhere else).
They would only violate copyright if they redistribute the content. Downloading and processing the content offline wouldn’t really be breaking any laws, outside of a structured PII situation.
You are missing the point entirely: in order to put advertisement next to it, they of course need to copy and redistribute it.
Why do you think they haven’t enabled two way federation yet? It is precisely because of the unclear legal situation regarding content sourced through federation.
And as shady as Meta is, they are an established company with a big legal department and not some web scalper operating from a 3rd world country.
if they run a mastodon instance, you’d be federating with them just as much.
are you sure these comments are somehow protected by copyright and they can’t use them? when I post publicly like this I have no expectation of control over use.I’d be very surprised if I could somehow sue a company using this comment to train AIs.
I’d also be surprised if that status changed somehow if the server was then connected to threads?
If they run a Mastodon instance they would be defederated as well.
And yes you retain copyright over what you write automatically and Meta can’t use it legally just like that. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it, the only thing that matters is what is written in the ToS of your instance which you agreed to when signing up. Usually it has a clause that allows them to forward messages to other federated instances, which would include Threads unless defederated.
Training AI is a big exception to all this as it is currently not known how to deal with all this legally, as training an AI does not require to copy the content but rather just have the training algorithm “look” at it…
I can’t find anything like what you’re describing - my instance has a legal notice which is just a disclaimer saying they can’t be held liable, lemmy.world has a fair use and terms of service which are 404s and their privacy policy just says they won’t sell your data (but might use it for internal research) - can you tell me what you mean?
Well, if they don’t have a ToS clause for that, then technically they are violating your copyright by sharing your contributions with other instances.
Most commercial services force users to completely sign over the legal rights for their contributions to the service.
On the Lemmy instance I am on the ToS clearly states that people agree to have their original contributions licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 or later license, which allows redistribution if certain terms are fulfilled.
It only takes looking at your data to figure out your trends, save the trend, and serve you ads.
Think about it: public posts are public. It’s the same as you putting a note in the town square. Anyone can look at it and see the username of who wrote it.
Defederation doesn’t stop that, it just inconveniences people who want to use/see both sides from one login.
For Meta to analyze your data they need to either scrape it (legally questionable and scraper bots are commonly blocked on server level) or work with a local copy. By federating with them you are allowing them to legally make a local copy of all the posts of the instance.
Newspaper articled are often also public, yet google got sued (and lost) because they were scraping and analyzing them to put previews in their search results.
Just because something is public doesn’t mean you can just take it. Copyright still aplies.
Defederation does stop legal use, and Meta is already in enough legal trouble, especially in the EU, that they are unlikely to blatantly pirate user contributed content from sites that defederated from them.
You are arguing against something I never claimed.
I said that if Facebook wants to copy and republish something (so that they can put advertisements next to it) they will do that through legal ways as postd are copyright protected. The only way they can do that is through openly federating instances that allow republishing in their ToS.
It is totally irrelevant if scraping is legal or not (its a gray area), the questing is rather does defederation stop Facebook from using posts from the Fediverse, and it likely does (IANAL).
That just forces everyone who wants/needs the bigger ecosystem to leave Mastodon and join Threads. It’s daft.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that different instances can make different choices and people can choose their instance based on the choices they prefer. The Fediverse is not a monolith and demanding that it become one is just wildly missing the point.
Isn’t he also the SO creator? Anyway, I’m sure he understands the technology, yes. And maybe I misinterpreted him. But it sounded like he’s saying that if we don’t federate with Threads, then there’s no point in being on the fediverse, because we’re effectively isolationists”. That’s simply untrue.
Why have a social network if an instance is not social and not a network? He makes pretty good points on why he wants to federate with Threads. I’d personally also like to follow people who are on Threads but not on Mastodon (without joining Threads)
I believe defederating should be a user choice rather than an instance unless done for spammy/toxic instances. If instances starts to be too liberal with defederation, you create silos and introduce more hurdles for the growth of fediverse. This creates a broken up network that may not be social for everyone.
Obviously, you can be on an instance that defederates Threads.net if that’s your preference.
"spammy/toxic instances" - Meta are a toxic company. They literally have blood on their hands.
"too liberal with defederation" - we're talking about one body specifically; Threads. Nothing else.
As to whether it should be done at an admin or individual level, I have no idea. But they're an unethical company and people less privileged than you and I have died while they profit from it. That alone is enough reason for anyone with empathy IMO.
Sure they are unethical. But the millions of users who have joined them are not and they are not that tech savvy to have even heard of Fediverse. Federating with them opens 2 avenues: Possibly decrease the influence of X/Twitter as it gets more toxic and introduce general people to the concept of Fediverse and give them an option to easily migrate to one of the better Mastodon instances in future from Threads.
I bet he does. You can block/mute influencers pretty easily and you can block the whole domain if you so wish.
He's talking about some kind of nefarious ad injection into ActivityPub objects as part of server to server activities.
It’s important to note that XMPP is used no less than it was before Google messed around with it (I for one use it). It’s just that it was going to get mainstream when Google got into it, but then Google did Google things and killed the project, making it seem like Google killed the entirety of XMPP.
HOW is this blog post still being posted??? It’s debunked literally every single time someone posts this trash.
Google Talk did not kill XMPP. Google Talk had millions of users who wanted to use Google Talk and when Google switched the protocol away from XMPP, it became suddenly apparent that XMPP didn’t actually have many users and that felt like XMPP dying, when in reality Google Talk bringing in their millions of users was the only thing that had kept XMPP alive that long.
Stating your opinion that you disagree is not the same as debunking. If this has been debunked so frequently, link to the debunking. Repeating a wrong opinion over and over doesn’t make it true.
Reality is not subjective. One of those things actually happened.
If you read both arguments and think that an obscure open source protocol had a chance in hell of taking on Google Talk when Google was in its heyday of public love, that’s fine, but that takes a lot more faith than believing that Google Char’s millions of users wanted to use Google chat, and weren’t using it because of the server communication protocol it implemented behind the scenes.
Saddens me to see instance admins reducing their users legitimate concerns as ‘reactionary’ as if we/they are dumb ignorant fucks with no concrete concerns.
This is the very start of Meta gaining a foot hold in the fediverse. Of course they’re not going to do anything overtly shitty at the very start. That’ll come later when they get a firm foothold, start suggesting ‘helpful’ tweaks to ActivityPub, get a seat at various tables etc. The privacy issue is not so much (to me) about what they can do now , because he’s right, anyone can set up scrapers and use the API, it’s about what they’ll introduce on Threads instances a few years from now, then offer to make part of the ActivityPub standard because its just so cool.
Of course there’ll be ads at some point on Threads instances and Meta are the absolute masters at online ads. They’re so good at it, not even UBO catches them all. If anyone honestly believes they’re not going to be capable of injecting ads at some point in the future, they’re living in a rose tinted fantasy land.
But those things are the future. Right now, Threads is already a place that is awash with hate groups like LibsOfTikTok etc. One of things I love about the fediverse is that I don’t have to wade through that type of shit. It’s mostly not here via defederation and if we know (as we do) that threads already has that type of content on it, why the fuck are people so keen to ‘wait and see’? We can already see.
And yes, I know - I can user block and instance block, but the times I have to do that right now with an active userbase of less than 2 million across the fediverse are few and far between. Ramp that active userbase up to 100 million and it’s going to feel like most of my time is spent playing whack-a-mole. That’s not an enjoyable user experience in any way. And even after I’ve done all that, the open warfare that’s going to break out with well-meaning non-Threads users reposting, quoting ‘look at this evil fuck’ type posts is going to mean I still end up seeing some christian fascists dumb take on COVID or whatever.
We, as a group of people, developed and use fediverse software precisely to escape this sort of shit. When are we going to learn that growth for the sake of growth is absolutely meaningless? Focus on quality and organic growth will occur. Let’s have enough faith in the software and users that corporate users want to come to us.
Excellent post. I’m convinced everyone arguing in favor of letting facebook or twitter into the fediverse, are just ignorant of the these company’s history, and what they’re capable of.
There is exactly zero reason to let a rabid wolf into your house, or say things like, “but what harm can this wolf do???”
Yeah, and some of us are software engineers and IT admins who understand the technical working of what’s happening and can make informed and reasoned posts (like the one linked), instead of making decisions based off of inaccurate metaphors.
I created the software you’re using right now, and I’m fully aware of how fragile this entire experiment is. We’re going up against a system that can throw nearly unlimited resources in brainpower and money to subvert a system. It takes an astounding level of technocratic arrogance to think that you’re immune to EEE, and that you can outsmart that amount of power.
And some of us understand that what’s happening here is not just about the technical workings and impact, it’s also about how cultures and societies form and operate.
Following full federation, how long do you think it’s going to be before the ultra-right groups that already post regularly and freely on Threads start targeting and brigading fedi instances where black people or gay people or trans people or disabled people or women currently feel safe?
Now, you might answer ‘well, if they do that then we can just defederate’ to which my response would be; they’re already doing that, but at the moment only on Threads. We already know how they operate, we already know who they hate - why expose people in the groups they will target to that when it can be avoided?
Some of us are IT admins who have been in the game since the 1990 and have seen this happen before. The chances of a good outcome wrt Threads are vanishingly small. Not zero for sure, but damn close.
As an admin of a small instance, the privacy stuff is pretty secondary to the moderation headache Threads’ traffic would surely induce. mastodon.social by itself produces enough crap that I’ve silenced them, I can’t imagine that Threads will be any better and indeed assume it’ll be much worse in that regard.
Besides that, I think there’s a difference between having data publicly available and voluntarily sending it straight to a data broker. Either way I don’t think you should need much of a reason to tell Facebook to fuck off and I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it ¯\(ツ)/¯
I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it
I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we’re going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.
Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that’s a bad outcome for all involved.
If it was almost any other corporation I’d be willing to give them a chance. If Tumblr actually launches ActivityPub I doubt many people will complain. The fact that it’s Facebook though makes it pretty much a non-starter imo.
The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn’t uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.
I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it’s still misguided in this instance, because at least that’s overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.
I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media “migrations” that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.
You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.
You’re describing the ideal you want in a perfectly spherical fediverse in a vacuum. You have to consider the very real labor and server costs needed to maintain & moderate an instance that gets flooded by the content of corporate juggernauts.
Put simply, if you make people choose
We have chosen; that’s why we’re here. Others are welcome to make the same choice when they’re ready.
Personally I’d never join such an instance, but I think it’s completely understandable for admins to do so since it makes moderation a lot more manageable.
I agree with Kev but also, the best argument I’ve seen for defederating is quite simple: if any other instance moderated as poorly as Meta, they would instantly defederated, so why are we making an exception for them?
“If you’re a publisher, creator or brand on Flipboard, you’ll start to see new visitors and engagement as people discover and share your content across the growing Fediverse.”
And there’s the rub. Once something starts talking about brands, the whole thing just means someone is trying to make money off of someone else’s work.
Now, that’s not an inherently bad thing! That’s part of how an open system works. It just means that whatever is joining the fediverse has to be watched carefully and pruned as soon as it starts turning into spam.
Not really sure how flipboard is working (I believe it was "included with my old samsung phone but that’s it). However, would I see spam if I don’t follow them ?
I known brand have CM whose job is to get re-tweet/boost whatever how it’s called and use hashtags to extend theirs reach. But if I don’t follow them, I doubt the person I follow would start massively boosting corporate content. If once in a while I hear about a new phone/jacket/book I’ll survive
If you only use your own feed of followed users and hashtags, you won’t likely see any of it. But it can still be a problem for new users, and it’s antithetical to the idea of the fediverse being run by people for people. There’s a certain degree of leeway in what can be considered a person for this idea, but once a company that’s publicly traded dives into things, it starts fraying at the edges.
Basically, those companies start treating their ability to “toot” as free ad space. That isn’t cool. We should all be able to use an “all” feed without the bullshit.
And that’s ignoring the possibility of a company making accounts on instances to artificially “retweet” their bullshit, which just isn’t cool. It’s bad manners.
I think it’s telling that flipboard’s received a fairly welcoming reaction from the larger fediverse, while threads had huge backlash. Meta and their practices were always the problem.
Tumblr’s plans, too, are met quite warmly, just as federation should be. Corporate players are very unlikely to destroy Fedi due to its distributed nature, and are generally going to improve reach and strengthen the trend of federated social networks. It’s just that people and admins simply don’t want to have anything to do with the absolute shit show that is Meta.
FIlpboard started as a magazine view for your social media, and if this goes right, this could be a return to form for Flipboard. I love their app and user experience but its been rudderless for the past few years as a news federator.
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