A very detailed article about the whole Meta (Instagram/Threads) vs. Fediverse discussions. It’s a long read, but well-worth it if you’re interested in the subject.
Just yesterday i was seeing this comment by one of the Calckey maintainers. pasting here for the lazy the relevant bit:
Okay, if your community can’t survive Meta using ActivityPub, then it doesn’t deserve to exist.
I frankly cannot fathom how can somebody be so blind to how odious it is. And yeah, when called up on it he also fell into “But the protocol!” arguments, which seems to be the take people holding the pro-Meta arguments are holding. They just don’t realize that this is not a technical problem but a social one, it’s not about the marvelous internet machine, but about the people that rely on it. Like Treebeard said, “a mind of metal and wheels”.
“then it doesn’t deserve to exist”
When I hear that, I hear an implicit value judgement with Meta as the standard. The value of an instance is in if it can survive against a social aggregation to Meta’s instance. Only then is it worthy of existing, if it can compete with the degree of funding, advertising, and account creation streamlining that we would expect from a social media platform giant.
When I hear that, I hear that small, self-hosted instances don’t deserve to exist.
That sounds like a very naive view on part of that developer. He probably never heard of Microsoft’s „Embrace, extend, and extinguish“ approach. This is going to be similar with Facebook. They have a lot more resources than all current instances combined and can provide a much better user experience. They are going to be the main instance on the federated network slowly starting to extend it and support features others lack. Making it a unique selling point until it’s too late.
And that’s not even looking at the moral/ethical standpoint of getting involved with Meta.
„Embrace, extend, and extinguish“
In the case of Facebook, it’s “copy, acquire and kill”
The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.
It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.
I agree with your point. Metaface is the most hilariously transparently bad actor on the internet. That well is so poisoned there’s no olive branches that will save their reputation. The incentives for these companies are clear and produce a consistent pattern: build something useful and start building walls around it so you can exploit whatever you’ve built to produce the most shareholder returns. Any instance that cooperates with a Bookmeta instance is willfully ignorant how it will end, even if MaceTook truly does not have malicious plans at the start.
But beyond the other responses, I think it’s worth thinking deeper on this. It’s easy to reduce it to “It’s simple. We kill the Zuckerberg.”
There have always been bad actors, and will always be bad actors. There are probably bad actors in the room with us right now. If this whole threadiverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able robustly handle them even when the bad actors can bring a lot of resources to bear.
Also the real fun happens when TheMeta.Com starts proposing changes to ActivityPub. Even if the changes are purely technical and make perfect sense there’s going to be slapfights.
People act like facebook isn’t a hellspawn of far right hatred, fascism, and general stupidity in all of it’s glorious forms. I’m just fine with my instance defederating them because Im just fine with not seeing posts from Moms for Liberty, or proud boys, or ivermectin treatments, or whatever the fuck goes on over there now a days. If I wanted to see facebook shit, I’d go to fuckin’ facebook wouldn’t I? It has little to do with corporate or not corporate.
It has little to do with corporate or not corporate.
It does a little. Because controversy sells better. And scandals are free marketing. So these platforms thrive off this shitty content. At a minimum they tolerate it. Maybe they even actively push it.
Given that they default to showing an algorithmically curated feed, instead of just by most recent, a strong argument can be made that they’re actively pushing the content you see.
But the guy above is right, it’s more about the choice of affiliation. Certain communities will want their privacy just by their nature.
The first quote is an great demonstration of using logical fallacies to sell a point, and I am glad the article breaks down the argument. Anyone using a loaded question such as:
Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness?
Doesn’t fundamentally understand the fediverse. Almost every projects goal is supporting the decentralization of these technologies. To quote the website fediverse.to:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Allowing a single entity with a larger and more dominate platform, more power in the legislatures of the world, and effectively infinite times more capital to come in destroys the decentralized nature. Meta also doesn’t stand for “community-owned”, “ad-free”, nor “privacy-centric”. Meta’s goal here is pretty obviously to centralize and control the networks as much as possible, and scrap the remaining data from other instances, using the ActivityPub protocol. Meta is a corporation who’s motives are to increase shareholder value. The fact these are community ran instances is like Walmart coming in to stomp out the local grocery.
If I run my own instance, I can choose who I share with and who I don’t.
The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t want my data to be Zucc’d, and clearly I’m not the only one who thinks that way.
Exactly, and that’s why the response has been so negative. Every instance that federates with another stores a complete copy of the posts and comments from every federated user.
If the majority of instances do not defederate from a Meta instance, that Instance will inevitably become the primary destination for discussion, even between and by non Meta-Instance based users, just because the communities in that Instance will be so large and active. And even if they don’t, Meta Instance will have a stored copy of every community whose Instance is federated.
Meta will then have carte blanche to collect data on a huge collection of users from outside their own Instance.
I acknowledge that they could get the same data by scraping the public Instances anyway, but still… Fuck all of that.
I want something different away from that crowd. I want a community of nice people that get along. I want to get away from Facebook, meta, and all. They just suck the soul out of everything
