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How will we keep Meta out of the fediverse?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
232 points (95.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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The protocols and software are all free and open source. You can't stop a company from running a Lemmy or Mastodon instance any more than you could stop an individual from doing so.
The nice thing is that the system allows for free choice. Your favorite instance isn't forced to federate with a hypothetical Meta instance, and and even if it does you can choose which communities to subscribe to or avoid. Who cares if Meta runs an instance, or a hundred instances? You can simply choose not to use them.
Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn't a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn't hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can't prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.
Due to the dominance of just a few companies' big email services, it's now almost impossible to set up an independent email server. Emails from small independent servers are just not delivered by Gmail and the like. They will only accept emails from other big email providers. In this sense it is a problem that Google owns the most popular email instance. They and a few other large companies have effectively turned a democratic and distributed system into a closed loop owned by a handful of big corporations.
Any reading on this? Seems a little outlandish. I self host an email server for both my business and personal use, and have never had issues sending or receiving mail. Not saying I don't believe you, just that that has not been my personal experience.
Yeah, I've been running E-mail servers for a long time. You kind of have to get things right, like not configuring an open relay and properly setting up SPF (and maybe DMARC) but I've never had an issue with E-mail delivery to Gmail.
Even with all of that configured on my instance. Emails are sent to spam to gmail by default because it comes from a linode IP.
Rdns is setup. Dmarc is in reject with a simple spf record. Even went back and setup Mx records my vps uses. Still flagged.
shrugs
Maybe this guy is exaggerating. I haven't tried running my own email server, but I have seen a few people recently complaining about problems with the big providers' blocking policies. Here's one I read recently:
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html
It's made up bullshit. It's a pain to run email because most services require quite a few dns and other records set, as well as making sure you aren't spamming from it. You can run an email server if you have yourself all day.
Never had any problems the last time my company self hosted our email server. Not sure what you meant by this.
On what planet can this be true when there are tons of companies and organizations that operate their own email systems? Have you ever spun up an email server and see what happens?
I don't think it's the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy's. Fact is, it's trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.
Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn't known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won't let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a "prove you aren't a spammer then we'll whitelist you", rather than the opposite.
But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren't spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don't track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that's the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can't talk to their members ever.
Kind of like how Facebook Messenger (and GChat, and AIM) used to federate with XMPP, and then dropped it like a bad habit once their platform took off.
I think it is really important for communities to spread out to avoid exactly this. Users can centralize, but distributed communities is what will prevent what you describe.
This "anyone is free to join any instance, you can just avoid what you don't like" kind of thinking is perfectly reasonable in theory, but I think what OP wants to know is if this also holds up in practice. You could "defederate" Google and Microsoft by blocking emails from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but the reality is that the majority of people you will need to contact use those addresses. In most cases, your school/workplace will even make you use them for your organizational email. Yes, it is possible to avoid these companies and choose alternatives, but you'll be isolating yourself from the majority of the network.
The question is not if it will be possible to use the future corporate-owned Fediverse without Meta (of course it will), but if it will be feasible for the majority of users.
My bigger worry is that they'll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you'll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they're the backend of the entire fediverse. If they're able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don't know the developers personally so I can't be sure if they'd pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.
ActivityPub is not a company or entity that can strike deals
BRB I'm off to to strike a deal with HTTP
Good to know. Not the most knowledgeable with tech.
You can think of it like HTTPS. It's just rules for computers to talk to each other. If your computer follows those rules, it can talk to the other computers that adhere to those rules. These rules are necessary because otherwise the internet is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, you need rules to tell computers which 1s and 0s to send, and rules to tell computers what those 1s and 0s mean.
The World Wide Web Consortium are developing this set of rules, just as they've developed many other rules. They're a non-profit organisation just kinda trying to make the web a better place.
I agree on some points, but I think it's not fair to compare it to email. People use emails for work and are somewhat forced to use them pretty often. I don't know anyone who browsed Reddit for work over the past 12 years I've had an account, and I don't believe Lemmy will change that. People are not forced to use Lemmy, reaching the maximum amount of people is usually not the point unless you're advertising, and if you're targeting the Facebook crowd you can... advertise on Facebook - this wouldn't even be anything new.
The question isn't whether or not the majority of users can use the Fediverse without being hampered by the corpos, it's whether or not the core users can. Unless Meta can somehow force federation unto all instances, I will be able to choose an instance that is not federated with them.
Sorry, I don't get this argument. Is not being able to avoid corporations justified because people are forced to use email? Social media is also becoming a lot less optional these days. I know a lot of small businesses that only share location and contact information on Facebook or Instagram, because they don't want to invest in building their own website.
I also hate this concept that there is a hierarchy of users in the Fediverse, the "core users" and I suppose, the "idiots who migrated over from a bigger social media site". Look how well Lemmy performed from 2019 to mid-2023 with only "core users", it was a graveyard. As long as a real person has an account on the Fediverse that they actively use, they are a Fediverse user, and they must be considered when discussing the Fediverse in general.
There will always be instances that do not federate with corporate instances, just like how you can set up an email server that blocks Gmail and Outlook. But I don't want to see a Fediverse where these instances are dead and marginalized because corporate instances consumed most of the Fediverse.
A good analogy is Google with Gmail. They became the biggest player in email and even gained a lot of influence over for email works, but you can easily use another email provider and not be locked out of the system.
Imagine how horrible things would be if email were centralized. We really need to thank the founders of the internet for having the foresight to not let that happen.
It's funny you bring Email as an example because everyone using the same 3-4 providers effectively centralized email. Anyone who tries to run any self-hosted email with decent volume quickly discovers this fact
let's say the instance i belong too has been bought out by zuckerberg... can i transfer my data and move? or do i just lose everything like i did with reddit?
currently you lose everything. I'm hoping they add a transfer tool like how masodon(i think it was that) has with transferring accounts
That will be a great idea!
Transferring is theoretically technically possible (Mastodon does it), but Lemmy hasn't implemented the option yet. There's an issue for it on their GitHub.
Why would Facebook bother buying out existing instances? They have the resources to create thousands of instances, and the userbase (the idea is to migrate all Instagram accounts) to populate them.
Not to mention that they're creating a Twitter/Mastodon clone, not a Reddit/Lemmy one.
I don't think so, but the fediverse is an open standard that's being actively developed, so if it's technically possible it could be added.
That said, this kind of social network account has zero lock in for me. I don't care about my history and none of this is connected to my real life so I wouldn't mind switching instances. The important thing is you can still access the rest of the network after you switch.