There is one argument I've seen missing in most of the de/federation discussions, that I think should be mentioned, and warrants it's own discussion.
I've seen a lot of people mentioning that defederating with Meta means we have broken the promise of Fediverse, that you can use one account to interact with whatever service you choose, and that it should be inclusive.
But I don't agree that's the main idea. There is something that's more important, and to make sure I'm not misinterpreting it, I'll just directly quote various websites about the Fediverse I've found (I was just taking top results for Fediverse on DuckDuckGo, but I did select only the parts that are the most important point for me personally). But I do concur, I was not able to find a single source of truth, and I'm not really sure how credible the resources are, so please disagree with me if it's wrong or I've chosen some no-name site that just matched my rethorics.
https://www.fediverse.to/ has the following sentence as the main hero header:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.
Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
Another search result is for fediverse.party, which has the following quite in https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/ :
Fediverse (also called Fedi) has no built-in advertisements, no tricky algorithms, no one big corporation dictating the rules. Instead we have small cozy communities of like-minded people.
The page also mentions some link for knowledge about the fediverse. Some of them are only tutorials about how to join, but there's also https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_the_Fediverse%3F , with the following part:
How does it compare to traditional social media?
...
Morals
- Traditional social media is neither social nor media. It is not made for you, it is made to exploit you and it is full of misleading ads and fake news.
- This is because the aim of traditional social media is to make a whole lot of money.
- The aim of the Fediverse is to benefit the people.
- The aim of traditional social media is to control and steer the users.
- The aim of the Fediverse is to empower the users to control the Fediverse.
I wasn't able to find more websites directly about the fediverse, and I did not want to quote random articles. But for completion sake, here is a list of FAQ/About sections of websites that are about the Fediverse, but don't directly support or imply the point of view I was trying to make (one that can be best summarized by the Morals in the last quite):
- https://fediverse.info/frequently-asked-questions
- https://fedi.tips/what-is-mastodon-what-is-the-fediverse/
- https://framatube.org/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
- https://the-federation.info/
The split seems to be 50:50, but at least for my DuckDuckGo search results, the https://www.fediverse.to/ is the first result you find, and that one is pretty clear about what Fediverse should be. I wanted to start a discussion about what do the users here see as a main selling point of the fediverse, and whether morals and non-profit nature of the instances is important to most of the users as it is to me, or whether you'd rather have interconnectness and inclusivness.
I didn't research it too in depth, but from the quick understanding I have about it, it works something like this:
Fediverse is just a name for servers that implement the protocol ActivityPub. The protocol defines a way how different servers should share data and interact with eachother.
For example, you have Mastodon, which has decided to implent a Twitter-like social network. Or Lemmy, that implemented Reddit-like social network, or the Pixelwhatever, that implements a picture sharing service.
When someone hosts an instance of the social network, you use it just like you would a normal social network. But in addition to that, ActivityPub protocol defines a way how can the servers talk to eachother - how they share data. So a user of i.e lemmy.ml can ask their home instance "can you let me subscribe to posts from programming.dev community?", and the instance will use the protocol to start fetching posts from there, to show to the user, while also sending back comments the user makes on said treads.
It would also be possible to connect Mastodon with Lemmy - assuming that some kind of UI is created that would handle the difference in type of content. But the ActivityPub protocol gives them a common language about how to interact. So if a Mastodon creates a special post type for Lemmy posts, users can start requesting "Hey, can you get me posts from this Lemmy instance?", and it will be able to get them though ActivityPub and then somehow show it to them.
A fediverse is just a network of servers that are allowed to talk to eachother. If Meta would join the Fediverse and we did not defederate with it, it would mean that Meta's servers can ask any instance to give them their content and let their users interact with it - but Meta will decide how is it shown. So Meta can riddle it with ads, run analytics about how are users interacting with the posts, scrape it for user data or simply use the content we have as a way how to kickstart their platform that noone would want to use in the first place.
So, defederation just means "I don't want to talk to you, and I will not give you any data."
Thank you for the detailed information. From the sounds of it it's starting to sound like web segregation, would that be the right takeaway?