I’m changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:
Of course, it’s possible to work with companies you don’t trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don’t trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is … risky. There’s a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as “prudently defensive” in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: “block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block.” Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:
We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though
Previously, I’d thought “some block, some federate” would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:
My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:
Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse
Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta
Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.
People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.
But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.
Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.
And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.
This whole controversy irritates the fuck out of me, because it’s driven by assholes who either don’t grasp the nature of the fediverse or are willfully misrepresenting it.
By design, there are no mechanisms by which Meta can be prevented from owning an instance, and there are no mechanisms by which the fediverse as a whole can respond in any particular way. That’s not a bug - it’s a feature.
The exact idea behind the fediverse is that centralized authority is ultimately harmful, and that a social media network can manage without it, through the carrot and stick of federation/defederation.
So anyone who wants to start an instance can (which necessarily includes Meta). That’s not an ideal or a policy - it’s a fact. There’s literally no way for anyone to stop anyone else from starting an instance.
And every instance owner can decide whether or not to federate with any other instance.
And every individual can decide which instance(s) they want to join or follow.
And that’s it. That’s the whole deal, right there.
The whole idea behind the ActivityPub protocol is that those things are sufficient to establish and maintain a healthy ecosystem. And ALL anyone can do at this point is wait and see if that works out to be true or not. There’s literally nothing else anyone can do.
So all of this sturm und drang is just pointless, emotive nonsense. It’s fear and hostility that cannot possibly have any bearing on anything. The system is already in place and events are already unfolding and it’s all going to play out however it does and all of your hand-wringing abd fear-mongering and anger and demands mean NOTHING. They’re just divisive noise.
I also think fear-mongering won’t help. There is little we can change about it. Let instances decide for themselves to defederate or not.
Yes, there is a risk Meta applies the “EEE” strategy. We shouldn’t be naive about that. But why would you stay on an ad-ridden Meta ActivityPub server if you see there are friendly, ad-free Activity servers on Mastodon and the likes?
For a more positive view and an interesting read on the matter, I recommend:
- https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/23/project-and-the.html (Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web)
- https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/25/project-the-fediverse.html (#Project92, the Fediverse: (First Time? Part 2))