I sure hope there’s a large group of servers that refuse to federate with servers run for profit. I didn’t come to be a product and be manipulated with algorithms.
I don’t see anything inherently wrong with servers that try to generate some kind of income (servers don’t pay for themselves after all) but it’s absolutely the right of every server to choose whether or not to federate with them.
I’d take issue with free labour (e.g. unpaid mods) on a profit-making server.
I worry that through federation Meta will be able to track users of non-meta instances. Then you won’t even know you’re being traced
There’s a difference between generating income naturally through a platform and whatever the hell public companies are trying to do.
For instance sports teams would naturally have their own instance. They can generate more income naturally from their fans that way. Because their fans want to interact with them. They have a product that people want to pay money for.
In fact, I hope we sort out a fair and simple method to support servers in a way that makes people feel liket hey are also getting something.
One easy option is a server can have their own emojis like Twitch & Discord. A simple method is for Gold/Silver that goes to whatever server the comment was made to.
Please no. I don’t want this place to be emoji ridden. This is where people go to look for useful information and discussion, not a colour soup comment section.
I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
We have the power over ActivityPub
Who is ‘we’? And who doesn’t say that there’s something on top of activitypub?
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Because we don’t have multiple thousands of paid developers.
One of the “powers” of OSS is that the license usually required changes to be fed back upstream.
If Meta were not to do that the authors of Lemmy could ask someone like EFF to take legal proceeding against them.
Well think of the iMessage example for a second, other phone manufactures wanted to extend upon SMS with RCS to enable cross-platform read-receipts, better image quality on messages, and more… and you can use RCS between various android phones, but apple has not yet adopted RCS. Then because of the pre-existing market share of iPhones being so high, if you want read-receipts, high quality image messages, and more you with most of your contacts will either have to convince all of your friends and loved ones to use a third party app or cave and get an iPhone.
The features don’t have to be revolutionary, they just have to find ways to flex their market share with their features. And their market share is almost destine to be huge if they put any meaningful effort or money behind it.
That’s an interesting example, but note that in Europe, at least, WhatsApp is king. I only mention it because the walled-garden approach Apple favours isn’t necessarily a guaranteed outcome, and third-party apps can happily become the norm among non-tech people.
@emi @shipp I think an open standard converted to a walled garden is still better than a garden walled from the beginning.
I can still send emails to GMail accounts.
I can still send SMS to my friend’s iPhone.
I wish everything was fully open, but at least I get to chose my email provider or my SMS app. (Although SMS is completely irrelevant in Europe these days, due to providers still charging money per message.)
In the Fediverse you are still 100% under the control of whoever runs the server. Your user accounts can’t move between servers. There is no easy way to export communities and import them on other hosts. On top of that, all the federated features are completely optional and can be switched off.
Fediverse really doesn’t offer any securities beyond what a plain old Web forum does, all the federation aspects depend on everybody playing nice with each other.
At the moment even basic GDPR conformity isn’t given, as there is no way to export all your data from an instance, a deletion request for your data also doesn’t seem to be guaranteed to make it to other instances.
If Facebook builds something with ActivityPub and it gets popular they can play the whole embrace, extend, and extinguish game from start to finish.
If there are some big players (like in email), i think the biggest risk is that the big players would end up only talking to each other.
Similar to email, where a random host is likely to be spamming, that might happen here too. (Although I’m not that familiar with the protocols here)
Plus, if they do create cool features, why would we not also add them?
Limited developer time.
@CanadaPlus this is referring to far in the future. In the long scale of things, developer time is not so limited. Fedi doesn’t necessarily have a time limit after all, it’s just going to go stronger over time. I don’t see a stopping point.
Even though email is supposedly “open”, and federated, is no longer is really the case. Big services like Gmail are suspicious of non-big-name servers, and often flag email coming from them as spam.
About a year ago I came across an article from a guy who’d been running his own email server since the 90s, and finally gave up. I couldn’t find that article in my quick search, but I did find this:
https://twitter.com/greg_1_anderson/status/1425113874722820100
“I run my own email server. It’s no longer a good idea, because the anti-spam arms race makes delivery from small independent servers very difficult, even when you keep yourself off the block lists, so it’s a continuous struggle. Would switch, but I have too many domains/addresses”
This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as “not spam” whenever it showed up in the spam folder.
Everyone who cares about their instance and the fediverse as a whole needs to defederate and block their instances as soon as they pop up.
The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
There has been some good commentary about this on Mastodon, but the long and short of it seems to be that federation is actually a pretty terrible way to harvest data.
The entire fediverse is based heavily on openly accessible APIs - Meta doesn’t need to federate with your instance to scrape your data, there’s really not much that can be done about it.
The real solution to Meta’s unethical behaviour is unfortunately going to be legislation, not technical.
My question is : how do we keep our block list up to date to stop every new data crawler from Meta ? And also, they could gather what is posted on public…
Yeah I really don’t want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we’ve built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭
List of Fediverse admins pledging to pre-block Meta instances: https://fedipact.online
It will be possible to have accounts on multiple instances, those that block Meta or federate with Meta. Then see what happens.
I’m glad to see my server doesn’t plan on federating with anything Meta hosts. I really don’t like the ‘wait and see’ approach; Meta has shown its true colors time and time before, they have not earned their trust.
Mine seems to be defending the idea, so I’m looking to move soon just not sure where anymore or when. It’s frustrating because it’s hard to find any actual positions he actually has on this topic when his timeline is just endless boosts giving people props for defending this. indieweb.social if anyone is curious.
What I don’t understand with the “wait and see” people is the presupposition that it means to federate day 1 and see if they fuck things up to decide if defederation is needed. Their reasoning often includes “two clicks” as if the amount of effort defederation takes was the concern people had.
“Let’s wait and see how they behave first, and then decide if we can federate safely” is just as much a “wait and see” stance, and it should take two clicks as well.
Why do we have to get exposed first and react later when we can observe first and then decide if we want it or not?
