Defed from anything they touch. Quarantine the meta virus. Ezpz
“i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity”
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.htmlThe “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-sedan@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
So Google was really embracing the federation. How cool was that? It meant that, suddenly, every single Gmail user became an XMPP user. This could only be good for XMPP, right? I was ecstatic.
.
First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing.
Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”
.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
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?
I’m pretty sure they just requested every single permission. There’s no good reason they need access to your Health data to make an app like this, and why the hell did Apple’s app review allow that to fly?!
They need it if they want to make more money by selling granular data of their users.
Companies like Facebook and Google don’t sell user data. This is a common misconception that people keep repeating. Logically it doesn’t make sense: The data is what makes the company valuable, so they’re not going to give that away! If they did, Facebook would just buy Google’s data (and vice versa) and neither would have a competitive advantage any more.
Instead, they let advertisers target people based on data. For example, an advertiser can specify that their ad should be visible to people aged 20-25 that like computers and live in Los Angeles. You can access Facebook and Google’s ad management products and run your own ads, and see exactly the same system and data that advertisers see.
Pretty sure all their products do that by default. That’s their entire business model.
Can I comment here from a different instance?
Should be able to if the different instance federates with this one