I would like to know if I can feel safe here, or if I should pack it up and start looking elsewhere sooner rather than later.
If the kbin staff have already made there intentions clear, please let me know.
We (meaning the whole fediverse, all instances) need to be de-federating that crap immediately.
Nothing good will come from having Facebook streaming into here in anyway whatsoever.
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
Also, if Facebook is allowed to “work with” the development of the fediverse at all, they absolutely will eventually destroy it for profit. And “working with” it absolutely includes them federating with it.
When their vast resources are taken into account, and their existing userbase also, they would rapidly become the main instance (or collection of, but probably just one) of the whole fediverse. Once that’s them, they can use that position to dictate terms pretty hard.
Before you know it, everyone that would eventually have come here are there instead, and they’re now the fediverse. They can also fork the software and leverage their Dev teams to make their fediverse vastly more polished… No donations needed on their fediverse, less bugs, everyone you know is already over there… Seem familiar?
How does that effect us who aren’t there, how isn’t it just the same thing as now? Our fediverse dies off because the users leave, instances close down through lack of population/need, before you know it there’s nobody here and the idea just dies.
Literally been done before. The playbook is absolutely common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Fully agree. The reason I’m here is to escape corporate shitfuckery. if you expect anything other than more shitfuckery from Meta you’re either a shill or hopelessly naive.
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
The beauty of the fediverse is precisely that it is not monolithic. Each instance can be different, have different policies and decide who it wants to federate with. Some instances will federate with anyone, some with most, some with a few, some with none.
The claim that that the fediverse needs to be a monolithic whole, where all instances walk in lock-step with each other is entirely at odds with the fediverse philosophy.
this argument makes sense only if you’re talking about defederating instances. It doesn’t make sense here. The problem is not whether we want the users of meta’s instances. The problem is whether we want a huge corp be part of the fediverse. And why are we talking about it? Because people are trying not being naive and believing that meta is here because they liked the ideas of a federated network and want to participate. Meta will cause more harm than good as it has already happened in the past in different technologies/projects.
This conversation has been going on Mastodon for a while now. The problem kind of boils down to the following: there are people who think Meta is a bad actor and having the literal entire rest of the fediverse defederating is the best way of dealing with that. And there are people who also agree that Meta is a bad actor, and think that partial defederation is the best way of dealing with it.
Its really hard to come (read: impossible) to come to a consensus on this, because part of the argument about what is a better tactical approach depends on knowing how Threads implements things like account portability, and this is currently unknown. Most people even assumed that Threads would not implement this at all, but Adam Mosseri just announced that this is an important feature, so who even knows.
It’s an unpopular opinion here, but I truly think Meta joining is being a little blown out of proportion.
The fediverse is simply not valuable enough to EEE. We’re a tiny niche of nerds who all have ublock installed. Meta wants a low effort solution to eat Twitters lunch, and saw bluesky do well.
We could even see this as an opportunity to grow. You can join mastodon AND find famous people to follow. Thread users themselves may realize the moderation sucks and go elsewhere.
Defedrating at best makes Threads roll back their activitypub use…and their millions of users are in a walled garden again. We did it fedi!
We somehow defederated with the nsfw Lemmy instance over a big nothingburger.
If we stay connected with those hate groups however, then I’m out. That’s where I draw my line for support.If ans when it federates, you have a handy-dandy button that lets you block instances.
As far as I know that doesn’t work. I know I’ve blocked feddit.de but still get it on my front page.
I think I read something about how when you block a domain, it only blocks content hosted on that domain. But a text post, for instance, gets copied over to your instance and served from there, so it’s still visible. That’s why there’s so many posts from “kbin.social” that are actually from Lemmy.
If that’s the case here, then better blocking is needed.
This seems like a fundamental flaw. There NEEDS to be a user level privacy control for disallowing your posts from being copied to a place you don’t want it to go.
A lot of the FUD regarding #Threads joining the #Fediverse has been put to sleep by #Mastodon on this blog post:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers.”
Also @daringfireball made this blog post that I agree with:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open“the idea that administrators of Mastodon/Fediverse instances should pledge to preemptively block Facebook’s imminent Twitter-like ActivityPub service (purportedly named Threads) strikes me as petty and deliberately insular. I don’t like Facebook, the company, and I’ve never seen the appeal of Facebook, the product (a.k.a. “the blue app”). But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?”
There are a lot of good reasons to not let corporate media join the fediverse: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Meta cannot harm you by federating. If they want your data that you posted on kbin then they already have it. They run curl and they can swallow all your posts and metadata associated. Whatever you post is given for free to everyone with an internet connection.
Also Meta probably will never federate since it involves a huge risk that they will end up hosting illegal data against their will.
edit: also think in legal terms, meta will never publish content on their site if a federated server hasn’t signed a mountain of legal documents beforehand. It’s simply not happening. I’m only speaking on a user level. If our admin adopts a pro-facebook stance then of course it’s a different story.
edit: The more I read about this the more doubt I have about this story. It seems that kbin still hasn’t signed the fedipact? It’s becoming a big deal and it will affect kbin even if we adopt a neutral stance. There is in fact no more neutral stance. We should sign.
Meta can harm us by federating - the server load alone would demolish Kbin and Lemmy. We were overwhelmed with just the recent sign ups from ex Redditors, how do you think Kbin and Lemmy could handle the firehose of Threads’ data?
IG has 1B accounts. If each IG account makes a Threads account and chooses to automatically follow all of their IG follows that also have Threads accounts set up, while we were federated with Threads., Kbin and Lemmy instances would be done. ETA: I understand that it won’t be all 1B users instantly appearing, and that it would require someone from the smaller instance subscribing to someone from Threads, but it would grow pretty rapidly I’d imagine.
We absolutely have to defederate from Threads just to stay up and be functional. It’s not all about privacy.
There are over 70 kbin instances. If kbin.social is not to your liking, you can find another. https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
https://kglitch.social has defederated from Meta (well, blocked the domains that meta is expected to use). Registrations are open.
Where do I look to find official stance on the matter? I don’t know how to even find who the admin is for a domain. I’m assuming the kbin dev is hosting kbin.social.
Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.
However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.
I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.
As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:
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Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.
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Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.
Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.
Not that it was ever going to be any different, but it’s very funny how a userbase that so clearly sees itself as so much smarter and more mature than the average rando is obviously using the downvote as a “I disagree” button on your comment here.
I can see thinking that this is a naïve perspective, and I’d probably agree with that really, but you clearly have a position, have thought about it, and tried to explain it. This isn’t what downvotes are supposed to be for.
It’s almost as if people here are just as emotionally driven as the normies they detest so much.
Frequent assumption: I am smart and logical, so everything I think is driven by logic.
Frequent corollary: If I ever admit to being driven by emotion, I look stupid.
Maybe in some circles, but I think it’s better to be self-aware and to try to fix the holes in your own thinking. If you can’t see when you’re being influenced by emotion when you might not want to be, you can make a lot more illogical decisions and take your life down a path you don’t want. Doesn’t seem very smart to me. But people of all levels of intelligence fall victim to pride, so this happens anyways.
As you enter more online spaces you start getting a feel for what different communities put in their rules and notice it’s usually the same. Don’t be a dick. Don’t spam. Don’t post illegal stuff here. No (or limited) self-promotion, we’ll consider it spam. And you stop reading the rules. Maybe this is why so many people use the downvote to express disagreement?
nah fuck all that. meta has never acted in good faith; to assume they’ll be anything other than anticompetitive is naive
Traditional SoMe embraces open standards
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh man that’s a good one
I feel that this has been a bit of an eye opening moment. It’s nice to see that we at least don’t have to worry about the risk of importing a toxic community, because evidently we are fully capable of producing that ourselves.
I had no doubt that that this is a controversial topic, but the fact that we as a community aren’t even capable of having a civil discussion about it actually saddens me a bit (I’m not just referring to the comment I’m replying to).
Haha I chuckled every time I see someone describe the Fediverse as friendlier than traditional social media. The community here is far more toxic.
Every time I saw a post to that nature, I also saw that same post flooded by unfriendliness.
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Meta is facebook who engaged Cambridge Analytica to purchase our lives.
Not from us, but from them. Facebook literally sold out the world
Facebook nearly destroyed this country for a buck.
Fuck facebook. I don’t want to avoid federating because I dont want them around; I want to avoid federating because anything I can do to starve them of every resource for growth that I possibly can is the best thing I can do about facebook.
I would like to know if I can feel safe here
If you have privacy concerns, you should probably not post here for time being.
It is prototype software. Doesn’t remove EXIF geotags from photos, for example and posts here are public (and indexed by webcrawlers). Treat this as “open Internet” for your safety/privacy purposes.
It’s not much of privacy I’m concerned about as much as community and visibility.
Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users, meanwhile from what I have seen from kbin and lemmy, there is a lot more nuance and maturity in the communities here (for the most part) that I would hate to see overun by Thread users.
Secondly, it’s one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me. The fact that the fediverse is a prototype with vulnerabilities makes the likelihood of a company like Meta, who intentionally exploits vulnerabilities to harvest data, all the more likely.
Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks, and I have no reason to believe Facebook won’t do this. If I’m going to invest time and effort into making a community grow, I would rather not waste my time on a platform that is doomed to be consumed.
So. In 1 day, Threads has gotten more users than all of Mastodon combined. My friends are on Threads. They’re not coming to Mastodon. I’ve tried. I couldn’t even convince my fiance to join me on Mastodon for longer than a day, and we live together.
How would you suppose I talk to my friends? By joining Meta? Or by staying with FOSS on the fediverse? Because when you say “everywhere needs to defederate from Meta” you’re also saying “You shouldn’t talk to your friends here, nor should your friends be able to talk to you.”
Quite frankly - I really enjoy that I can both be here and still be in contact with my friends. Meta can’t track me here (as much, I’m aware they can still siphon data but they could do that regardless). I’d much rather stay here if I can. But if given the chance to choose, I’m going to move to somewhere that federates with Threads. Not because I like Meta - I hate Zuck almost as much as I do Elon, which is quite a lot - but because I’d rather see and talk to my friends than be locked in with a bunch of rando control freaks jumping at shadows.
If the fedipact had it their way, anywhere that federated with Threads would in turn become defederated. This will create 2 separate fediverses. People will have to choose which one they spend time on - even if they have accounts on both sides, one will always be the “primary” account.
I posit that for many people, the “primary” account is going to be the one with their friends and interests. It’s going to be the side with the influencers they follow. Simply, it’s going to be the one that federates with Threads. The other side will slowly wither and die, as all the content dries up and people move to where the network effect is strongest.
You can argue that we need to defederate because of “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Tell me: what is the end result of EEE? A diminished fediverse, where most people use the single app that has all the people and all the content. How is that different than the splintered fediverse caused by the fedipact?
It’s really not much different at all. If Meta goes for EEE, there is no stopping them. If the fedipact takes hold and rabidly defederated anywhere that glances at Meta, then the fediverse’s network effect will shatter. The fedipact will simply backfire and shoot themselves in the foot as people choose the side with the larger network effect. It’s ridiculous that the idea has gotten as much traction as it has; the fedipact’s best-case scenario is worse than the worst-case of EEE.
If a bunch of people want to live in small segmented communities, that’s on them. Beehaw is right there if you want it; that’s what Beehaw aspires for. But large, general-purpose instances shouldn’t bow to the whims of a loud minority that don’t even realize the repercussions of their agitations.
The fediverse is at its strongest when we federate. That’s what makes this place special. We’ve agreed that walled gardens are bad, and the one time that we have a chance to get a bunch of “normal” users on the fediverse everyone panics because they’re afraid of EEE.
The fedipact isn’t going to stop EEE. If Meta wants to do EEE, they’re going to do it with or without the fedipact. We don’t even know for sure that EEE will happen - it’s true that Meta is a business, but there are plenty of open protocols you use every day that never got hit by EEE. L
All the fedipact will do is hurt people who want to use free software to see their friends so this loud minority can exercise their control over everyone.
You have the power to block the domain here if that’s what you want to do. Please don’t let your personal fears ruin the experience of others.
I’m okay with a small bubble of randos as my Fediverse, I don’t need – or want – my social media to be “everybody”.
I’m in a discord with my friends and that’s pretty much all I need.
@EnglishMobster @0xtero @Roundcat So what you’re saying is “ignore all the horrible shit Facebook as done, they have more people and that allows them to do anything they want” ?
I’m saying 3 things:
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Facebook is going to do whatever they want regardless. They are a business, and they are in the business of making money. I don’t like Facebook. I don’t appreciate Facebook. I don’t use Facebook (or Instagram, or WhatsApp…). Facebook will always do what is best for Zuck, and if Zuck leans into EEE that is what Facebook will do no matter what.
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Right now, Facebook is giving me a chance to interact with my friends without using Facebook. That’s huge; my friends don’t share my anti-Facebook beliefs and are all still on there. I’d love to reconnect but want to do it on my terms. Federation allows that.
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The fedipact is going to do more harm than good. It won’t stop Facebook from doing what they want to do, as per point 1. If Facebook goes down the path of EEE (which we can guess but is technically not guaranteed - see how the Matter protocol is taking off), then Facebook will execute EEE with or without the fedipact. But the fedipact does Facebook’s work for them by inherently splitting the fediverse into a “Facebook side” and a “fedipact side”. This split is not healthy and many people will choose the side with a larger network effect - i.e. Facebook. Thus this accomplishes the same thing as EEE without Facebook doing anything other than Embracing.
Facebook is allowed to do what they want because they are a business with billions of dollars. They’ve done horrible shit but they’re also mainstream, where my friends hang out and where the celebrities are.
If the fedipact didn’t exist, I would be able to freely interact with the people on Facebook without needing to download Zuck’s data vacuum. I’d be able to see my friends and talk to my friends without having to deal with all the… Facebook parts.
The fedipact threatens that because it will cause large communities (like Fosstodon, which has many open-source projects I follow) to defederate themselves from anywhere that federates with Threads. This splits the fediverse badly and in the fedipact’s best-case scenario (for them) the only way I could even talk to my friends is by downloading and installing Zuck’s app. I’d rather not.
@EnglishMobster Yep, might makes right, why bother resisting, gotcha.
I’m not even saying you’re wrong about the damage that this could do, but you’re also ignoring how FB being here and dominating will make the fedi be a place that many just don’t want to be anymore.
And yeah, great that you can talk to your friends, but I see so many people be afraid of libs of tiktok, and other hate groups entering on an instance that, according to you, should never be defederated from because of its size.
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Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users
With this I agree. 1.2bn users is way more noise than I want to experience and I will, personally block the domain. As a kbin user, you’ll have the tools available for that as well.
Secondly, it’s one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me.
To think that the big companies that base their business models solely on datamining users already haven’t been mining the shit out of our data is a bit naive, I think. They don’t have to exploit vulnerabilities, make their presence known or launch huge products for it. All they (or anyone!) need is a $20/month linux VPS and a Mastodon installation. The fediverse does not have data privacy controls for content (beyond masking account e-mails/originator IPs).
Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks
I agree. Threads got 10M signups yesterday and they haven’t even launched officially yet. They’re already larger than the entire fediverse.
Many people will switch to their app. And at some point, they will most likely make interoperability hard (so we have to adapt to their “bugs” instead of it being the other way around).I just want to make clear that I’m in the “Defederate the shit out of them”-camp, but I also don’t think the fediverse is a place that puts privacy first - if privacy is your concern, then my advice is to stay away from fedi. For now.
Blocking the domain will not block the users, so in that regard there is nothing you can do about 1.2bn users coming here.
