Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
I strongly support basically firewalling the fediverse from anything Meta/Twitter/MS/Google/ as a default behavior. They will 100%, without question make some sort of attempt to co-opt, corrupt, and monetize this ecosystem unless their interference is actively mitigated and corralled.
And sure, maybe there can be a collection of instances that do federate with Big Tech… but to be blunt, I’d look at those mostly as canaries in the coal mine.
In the 1990s, Microsoft had an internal strategy called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft saw the emerging Internet as a threat to their business, so they wanted to kill it. The basic idea was:
It was working for Microsoft, and was a contributing factor in their killing off Netscape. For those too young to remember, Mozilla is the open-source "liferaft" that Netscape created before their business was destroyed by Microsoft. But, these days it's effectively controlled by Google, who provides 85% of their funding, as long as they keep Google as the default Firefox search engine and don't rock the boat.
The only thing that stopped Microsoft from destroying the open Internet was the antitrust case brought against them by the US Department of Justice. Antitrust action is the only thing that has kept innovation happening in tech. The antitrust case against IBM from 1969 to 1982 allowed for the rise of Microsoft. The antitrust case against Microsoft allowed for the rise of Google. Many people think we're overdue for strong antitrust actions against Google and Facebook/Meta.
Facebook bought out every social competitor they could: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They can't buy out the Fediverse, but they have to see it as an existential threat. Because of that, they're undoubtedly going to try to use their near-monopoly status to kill off the Fediverse.
The "Embrace" stage will likely be just implementing ActivityPub. That will convince a lot of people that Meta is really on their side, and are working hard to be a good Fediverse citizen. They'll probably even hire people who are current developers working on the ActivityPub standard, or who have developed key ActivityPub apps.
The "Extend" stage will probably involve adding features to "ActivityPub Alpha" which Threads uses but nothing else uses. It might involve some Meta-specific things, like embedding Instagram in an unusual way. It might involve something that is really expensive for an independent server, but affordable if you're a multi-billion dollar company, like some kind of copyright check, or flagging if something is AI-generated. The features they're likely to add won't be offensive, they'll probably be good ideas. It's just that they'll add them before going through the standards process, and so standards-compliant ActivityPub implementations will seem old and outdated. That will convince many people to move their accounts to Threads, or will at the least reduce the growth for non-Threads ActivityPub.
The "Extinguish" phase will be like when Google shut down Google Reader. Why bother having a standards-compliant way of doing things when usage is so low?
So... yeah, block Meta.
Please for the love of Internet connectivity as a whole: block anything remotely attached to Facebook, not just the instance, but in general Internet daily life.
Zuck should die forgotten.
It does not go against the point of the fediverse to do so, either. Why would the ability to do this be baked into the code if it was not the intent to use it in certain situations? This would be a perfect use.
I can see maybe certain instances wanting it for whatever reason, but I'll be packing up and moving to one that blocks it if this one allows it.
Agreed. With the nature of the Fediverse, defederating with anything from Meta doesn't really restrict access for those who actually wish to interact with them. They can simply join their next nefarious venture.
The drawbacks to interacting with a company that so obviously only chases profit above all else far outweigh any "benefits " of their content.
Ser Robin had the right idea: bravely run away.
I use Facebook and Instagram to post pictures and to stay in contact with friends and family. That being said, I don’t trust Zuck and I believe his intentions will always be to take-over and monetize. When I come to the Fediverse, I expect to see fresh, new, progressive, interesting ideas from the communities I join. And although I am older age-wise, I can see that Meta is tired and out of the loop. I would vote for not federating with Meta.
The day this instance federates with Meta is the day I leave. They, and any other big corporations, can fuck all the way off. We have seen where that path leads time and time again.
I'm sick of Meta
Meta has repeatedly introduced features intended to scrape larger amounts of data about our lives and tie it all into one big profile that they can sell. This area of the internet feels like one of the few remaining areas that they haven't reached, and I'd bet everything I have that's why they're introducing this. I couldn't be more strongly against allowing them a way to link my data here with the data they have from my usage of their existing products. While I understand the idea of open federation to allow disparate communities to interact, one of the lines I'll draw is letting a massive corporation in like that.
I dont think anyone should be federating with threads.meta. They dont have good intentions and are either just using the activitypub protocol because it was there and they needed something fast to take advantage of twitter quickly or because they actively are trying to take over and destroy the activitypub protocol. Either way the fediverse gains nothing from federating with them.
A good read about that with an historical perpective : https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
An important reminder of the right play here. If we are to keep the fediverse out of the hands of enshitification, we need to stay away from letting corporates play the game. Don’t federate.
I've been having a few back-and-forths in this thread about how it'd kinda suck from a user's perspective if my instance defederated from Threads, but after reading those historical examples, I'm more amenable to instances defederating. I saw a bunch of people talking about how Meta was gonna "ruin" the fediverse, but not really elaborating past that. Your link explains that better than anyone else has.
I'll have to ruminate on that some more to see how I truly feel about it, but those examples are compelling.
Excellent article. I am completely against federating with Meta, and this does a great job of explaining why.
I seriously doubt meta is going to have an open federation policy anyway. It's definitely going to be a tiered white list of Meta-approved Activitypub apps and instances. With built-in monetization for devs in the Activitypub "market."
Honestly it's what reddit should have done if they were smart. Figure out a way to monetize through the API by pulling third party apps into a walled garden.
I'll put it this way:
Or, to translate for those of us who don't speak "asshole":
There are good arguments for blocking Facebook as a whole on the web, such as cookie tracking. I don't like Facebook, but I guess I would consider any people who have made the jump to federated platforms as potentially missing out on interacting with their forever-facebooked-friends. Seriously, why can't people just try another thing alongside Facebook? Why do they have to be ride or die facebook-fiends? I digress..
I won't maintain a membership on any platform that is federated with Meta in any way. That's an absolute, 100% dealbreaker. Same with Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Apple. Anything they touch turns to assgarbage.
The zucc better keep his sticky fingers away
I would prefer Facebook/Instagram/Meta to stay far away from the fediverse that I use. I do not like anything about the online communities they develop.
Defederate unequivocally.
We should only federate with entities acting in good faith, and we cannot trust an entity such as facebook to act in good faith.
I vote to defederate. If I want to see meta shit I can sign up there but I'd delete this account and go find some other instance that chose not to federate with them. I want to choose when/if I interact with meta, not end up in yet another place where they dominate everything else
(Realized I posted from the wrong account. My opinion stays the same for both my accounts on sh.itjust works and reddthat and any others I may join)
I just joined this place this week, fleeing reddit of course. So my vote may not be worth much. But if this place becomes meta-adjacent then I'll see myself out. I have no desire to interact with Mark "move fast and break adolescent girls' self esteem" Zuckerberg.
Isn't one of the points of fediverse is to get away from big tech shit?
the whole reason im on fedi is to get away from megacorp social media and seeing them starting to creep into the space is kinda sad. I will drop any server that would federate with them, but hoping that is still a viable option and not just me turning off my router forever.
It's so insane, Twitter gets destroyed, reddit is fucked, and now just as I moved away from all that these cucks want to move here? Fuck off.
I only use Facebook messenger and Instagram to keep in touch with family, otherwise I want nothing to do with them.
I feel like this question might be missing a bigger picture: What's going on with the Internet?
Facebook/Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are all owned by people in the US. We've seen in tbr past few election cycles that Twitter and Reddit in particular were vitally important to progressive movements in the US, while Facebook largely sat by unperturbed as their platform was used to plaster right-wing disinformation in every corner of the internet they could reach. Now, as another election cycle is gearing up, we see Twitter and Reddit doing things that make NO SENSE for a business, but make PERFECT SENSE if you were a MAGA nut trying to take over or dismantle a successful progressive platform, at the same time as you have Meta moving to infect and corrupt the one significant platform that offers a great alternative to both Twitter and Reddit.
I'm not usually a conspiracy minded person, but the more I think about it, the more I conclude that this is the only explanation that can make any sense of Elon and (fuck)u/Spez deliberately imploding their platforms. When you factor in that both of them seem to also be encouraging right-wing provocateurs to return to their platforms while wholesale silencing any progressive dissent... this is a coordinated assault meant explicitly to tamper with the US political system while also driving right-wing fascism abroad.
Do NOT allow Meta access. At this point, I'm not sure why the license doesn't explicitly blacklist specific bad actors like Meta from using the ActivityPub software in the first place.
What I do know is that ActivityPub was created by a lot of people in the queer community, who created moderation features like defederating specifically for the purpose of blocking discriminatory instances, so there's that
I'm learning a lot about that. I find it refreshing to be on a platform built around ensuring both the safety and visibility of queer voices. While parts of Reddit definitely felt that way, recent history has made it very clear that that's subject to change, and Reddit is swerving aggressively right.
Do not federate with anything Meta
I came to the fediverse to get away from Meta and Twitter and Google and the like.
So personally I'd prefer if they stayed out of here.
From a post on Mastodon comparing privacy policies. Meta gonna pillage the village.
https://mastodon.social/@llebrun/110664586216685040
I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but I think this whole defederation business just stinks. I left Reddit because they were forcing me to use their app, but now I'm in a community that chooses what I see?
I'm hoping lemmy sets up a way to ban instances because this should 100% be up to the user.
There's also the fact that this place is starving for content, this really feels like a shoot yourself in the foot kind of moment. The userbase is going to completely stall if there's an alternative with 100x more content that can't be accessed from our endpoint.
Its definitely a complicated situation, I know it's an unpopular opinion so I'll accept the downvotes.
In this case I kind of agreed that content is content. But I'm pretty sure Threads has no intention of directly federating with anything other than Meta approved ActivityPub apps anyway. At least as far as participation goes. Meta might publish Meta content over like a dedicated read-only bridge instance, but there's no way in hell they are going to let users from chrisHandomeSexOffender.sk directly interact with branded content by default.
I don't get how this is even a question. Most people are here because they want to get away from corporate social media. It's like asking a person who managed to leave a cult if it was okay for them if they build a church on their plot.
I know I’m late to the conversation, but I stopped using Facebook 10 years ago. I left Reddit after Apollo stopped working, and now that Twitter is heading the same way I would prefer to not associate with them. I agree it stinks that it’s yet another platform that splits people up deciding how and whom they interact with, but I do not want meta to mess with something that works the way it should without corporate’s fingers in the cookie jar.
I am 100% OK with defederating everything run by Meta: They are a blight on the Internet.
I am reposting my answer from another thread : Nothing good will come from meta ( or any other Gafa Microsoft included), ever. They will alway look for a way to corrupt any social media to their favor in order try to dominate the Web. At this point of the internet history anyone giving a speck of trust to them is dream walking into a disaster waiting to happen. There are already trying to bring Insta and activityPub service lol , and they didn't haven't started yet.
No meta for me. They ruin everything that they touch. The Fediverse is the antithesis of all things meta; keep that shit outta here.
