See below:
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/798826
although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we’ve signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
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
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here’s a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
Frankly, I am leery (due to the 3 Es and will probably be blocking them on Mastodon as I do not think my server will. That being said, I am curious to see what happens and will not do it until I peer into the void… I plan on camping out on Mander either way. :)
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I prefer to wait and see.
Obviously I also do not like Meta’s track record, and I would never be in favor of any change in either the activity pub protocol or on Lemmy on the basis that it is a change that helps to integrate with Meta’s platform.
I would block them if they were to deploy a harmful strategy. For example, if they dump massive amounts of content in a way that fills up the disks of smaller instances very quickly, or if they try artificially inflate the popularity of posts from advertisers. But I don’t feel an urge to respond before it happens.
The ActivityPub protocol is quite robust to the presence of a malicious instance. No more than the necessary information is passed on to other instances, so from a privacy/data mining perspective I am not worried.
I read the article about how the Metaverse could kill the fediverse. But Google Hangouts is dead and XMPP works excellently from my home server, so I don’t think it is all doom and gloom. I have read through many issues from the Lemmy developers and some discussions from ActivityPub development, and they really do not look like the type of people who would side-track their project to help Meta out.
That said, my desire for open and decentralized networks is a lot more important to me than my dislike of Meta.
I don’t want to sign a promise of blocking something in the future that doesn’t even exist yet. When they do open their platform, we will see what reality looks like. And then we are free to make a choice.
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Would you consider such actions to be breaking away from an open and decentralized network, or taking the open and decentralized networks with them to a different place?
Both to an extent. It would cause some fragmentation, but you can still have open fragmented islands.
I personally don’t like the idea of blocking and cutting off myself and other users from an instance because of an ideological disagreement, but I understand why others do think that it is important or even imperative to do this to prevent certain ideologies from being given a platform. I think that the difference in opinion of how to enact a federation policy comes down to a difference in values, and so this is a difficult topic to discuss and agree on.
Defederating on ideological grounds closes the network a little, but you still often have many instances that can serve as bridges to connect the nodes, and people can happily live in those bridges and interact with the network in the way they see fit.
What is being suggested with the idea of blocking not only Meta but also anyone who federates with them is to destroy those bridges connecting the Meta island to the fedi island. So, the idea is to fully isolate them, and to achieve that by forcing the would-be ‘bridges’ to pick a side.
What is the next step? If someone defederates with Meta but doesn’t defederate with everyone who still federates with meta, will they be cut off too? This is a very strong forced fragmentation approach.
Now it is Meta, and this unique and specific event would not have the effect to fully obliterating the concept of an open network in my eyes, but it would close it off a bit and set a precedent. Creating a culture in the fediverse in which we can push each other to defederate as we please by threatening defederation is to me moving away from an open and decentralized network. As for me, I prefer to live in the open sea of those of us who prefer to keep our doors more open even if that means that we don’t get to play with the bigger fragments that choose to close off into their islands.
It’s frankly pretty upsetting that I just finally started using all this stuff and Meta wants to fuck with it. Literally just downloaded all my content from FB and Insta and deactivated the FB (keeping the insta at least for a minute I need it for work purposes)
Yes, I’ve been on the Fediverse for a little over 8 months and I am not pleased now that I have found a niche. Fortunately wrangling the fediverse is like herding cats or catching water with a strainer, so I have some faith. For perspective, about half of the internet runs on WordPress, which is integrated with ActivityPub. If these apps fall, I do not doubt there will be others to take their place.
Glad you bring this up. It’s been chasing my mind since I learned about it. If it comes to voting, my stance is a hard no. I have no appreciation for anything Meta does. I wish I could get rid of them entirely from my life but unfortunately the majority of people love their trashy platforms.
