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).
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
it's an interesting development that will have a direct impact on lemmy since mastodon and lemmy users can interact with each other.
time will tell how closely they follow microsoft's old "embrace, extend, extinguish" game plan for combatting open standards. who knows? maybe they will be good faith actors in this new space, or won't be able to gain enough user share to truly do nasty stuff.
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