This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
Defed from anything they touch. Quarantine the meta virus. Ezpz
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.
Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we're going to end up right back where we started.
Genuinely curious as I'm new to all of this, why would it matter? Isn't that the whole point of the fediverse? If their spyware app interfacing with it is what gets the casual users into it who already have Meta's spyware installed, you can still use the fediverse from whatever service you prefer, right?
Here’s a pretty thorough explanation of why this Meta app is dangerous for the Fediverse.
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Fediverse concepts as well but the thing that stands out for me is that there is a history of private companies effectively killing open source projects.
For us, the vulnerability is ActivityPub. If Meta begins “contributing” to a foundational Fediverse technology, they have the resources to extend the protocol in a way that benefits Meta only, at a pace that only a company with the resources of Meta can.
Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It's very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others... I don't know who runs all of those or what they're doing with the data...
You can't be both a small community and replace for profit social networks. I thought the point of all this was the second one.
The TL;DR is "so it doesn't become XMPP" - if a big player from the corporate internet world achieves significant sway over the Fediverse, that gives them a position of power to steer the platform itself, eventually letting them undermine the whole "open-source" and "decentralised" part of it entirely before taking their chunk of the federation private, effectively kneecapping the remaining communities outside the walled garden.
If you've ever heard "the three Es" - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, best known from the Microsoft antitrust days - that's what we're worried about happening here.
It's more or less the same problem as XMPP (end-to-end encrypted, federated chat protocol) had with Google Talk.
All users went to Google and then Google broke interoperability with federated servers, leaving them dead/unable to communicate with the majority of users.
Later Google killed the project as they always do. XMPP is still around, but the userbase is very small.
Here's a post worth reading:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The "fediverse" has been gaining traction recently, the fear is that Meta comes in with 1.2bn users, gets everyone on their service and the breaks federation, leaving the rest of the fediverse a drying carcass as they "move on".
Personally, I don't really care about the "popularity contest" - I'm not here because the community is large, I'm here because it isn't. Signal > Noise. So I'm all for defederation.
Meta has zero trust after all they've done.
@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
Nothing would get me to delete my account quicker than federating with a Meta instance.
kbin probably federates with over 1000 other instances by this point. Would you really review ownership of each one of them?
You’re right. Reviewing ownership of all instances might be a bit unreasonable.
How about we just focus on the ones that stand out for things such as mass surveillance, conducting social experiments on their users, taking over markets, buying out competition, and influence upon genocidal political movements?
Does that seem a little more manageable?