simple, don't federate with meta
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Are there already domains available to add on my defederation list?
Not yet. The rumors are confirmed by Meta reaching out to a Mastadon admin, Kev, from fosstadon.org. He kindly made public the email.
I love that mail. Everyone should answer like that.
Not everyone has strength of conviction he does. Companies look for the weak link, how can they buy off or stroke the ego of.
Adding some T&C's in as OP suggested could be a good idea. Sure they can ignore it, but it'd be good to put in as many road blocks as possible to prevent the enshitification attacks that will eventually come in the distant future.
Pwnt
I think that is threads.net, no?
Some of the bigger Mastodon servers have been having NDA talks with them, and I know that my instance, mastodon.art, has already Defederated from them.
In my opinion, "watch and see" is a good approach towards potentially hostile entities. Meta is not "potentially" hostile - it is a hostile entity already, due to its backstory of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), and it should be told to fuck off right off the bat. It will not contribute with the Fediverse in the long run.
Their strategy is potentially along those lines:
- Create its own instance (let's call it "Metadon"). Play by the rules at the start. Get a rather large userbase.
- Introduce policy, code, and monetary changes to Metadon; things that don't piss off the users, but make it harder for admins of other instances, that'll need to either play along or defederate Metadon. Over time smaller instances will bleed to death, with Metadon absorbing their userbases.
- Once Metadon controls a good chunk of the Fediverse, it pulls off the plug, because it's now in a position to piss off the userbase to further Meta's goals. "We're going to defederate everyone else for protection of the users. Think on the children!" Then it starts reintegrating into Facebook and WhatsApp, including crap like "you need a Faecesbook account to use Metadon".
And we can't really rely on "everyone doing the right thing", because most people won't. Cue to the users still using Reddit because they don't care about things in the long run; it would be the same here, plenty users will use Metadon if it throws them a big enough of a bone.
In my opinion, "watch and see" is a good approach towards potentially hostile entities. Meta is not "potentially" hostile - it is a hostile entity already,
This is a very valid point. We don't need to wait to see if Meta, the company that created tracking pixels, will behave as a good actor. They are already proven to be a bad actor and should be treated as such.
agreed!
And with Meta's resources and reach, they could stand up a Lemmy.world equivalent easily. Play nice, break their arms jerking each off the Fediverse. And once enough of the instances are reliant on the Meta instance, cut off everyone who won't pay to federate.
Copyleft should absolutely work. Not sure what we are currently doing, but nearly every toot or reply in the fediverse is copyrighted content. You must explicitly or implicitly give a license to every instance to use and redistribute that content. I could imagine a field in ActivityPub that declares the license, for example using Creative Commons licenses. If this license forbids commercial use, Meta can't use it. Also nobody else, such as journalists? Probably needs more thought on how a license should work. It is definitely a sharp sword!
I personally think the proper approach is to limit them to one instance. If they suddenly start trying to distribute a Meta "easy setup" variant of their server or something such that anyone can set up a Fediverse Meta-based server, that's where the line should be drawn. That does have the potential to run an EEE play.
However, if everyone from FB wants to be able to subscribe to Mastodon or Lemmy content from their FB account, that's not nearly as big a deal to me assuming they all come from @facebook.com or whatever. Because worst case, people just block that one server and their embrace is over.
I agree with the second part of your comment, and have concerns with the first part of your comment.
I'm all for allowing others to subscribe to Lemmy or Mastadon content, which is why simply defederating isn't as attractive as ToS. I want others to see that their communities/intrests/heros/what have you/ exist outside of Meta. I want the average person to contribute even if they don't know how to set up an instance. What I don't want is Meta hosting content then paywalling it, cutting off others.
For the first part about limiting to one instance... Well FB is technically one instance from a "domain" perspective. They have load balancers and tons of servers hosting their "instance".
like I said before, I'm not a policy guy, I don't know how to solve this. But it would be nice for those who are to spear head this and rally up volunteers so we can get in front of it. If there are no solutions, defederating would be the easiest.
I'm not a techie guy either, so I may be way off base on my expectations of how things work too.
Mostly I just meant that as long as the domain is a single one (@facebook.com) or whatever, then it's quite easy to defederate from for any server, or for an individual user to block completely if they want. (Or at least it is on Mastodon.) But yes, I support Meta being able to link up as long as they do it on an equal footing with the rest of the Fediverse and in a way that isn't a blatant attempt to run some sort of EEE op.
I see what you mean now, that makes sense.
being on equal footing
agreed. Now how can we level the playing field with a multi billion dollar corp lol
Policies won't stop them.
It won't stop them, but it will be our basis to act and defederte, or ban them from our instances.
At least our decisions wont be based on a whim. It will be based on an agreed upon policy that we adhere to. It's like a constitution of a country, but this is for lemmy instances.
But they'll give legal ground to potential retribution.
Who would enforce the policy? No way that any instance could have the legal power to compete with meta.
Not federating with them is the only sane choice
A policy is only as good as the ~~power~~ money available to enforce it. Companies violate FOSS licenses all the time as part of their business models.
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