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How will we keep Meta out of the fediverse?
(lemmy.world)
Most of the good content I see is from here.
I think the real threat comes from the larger user base they’ll likely bring. Because they’ll certainly favor their own instance’s communities, which means those communities could then grow to the point that they have enough leverage to do the bad things.
The main strategy I’ve seen is to form a pact against federating with them. I hope it works.
I'd have to imagine that Meta would be locked within their own little bubble. I find it hard to believe that many of the current instances out there wouldn't immediately opt to defederate from Meta out of principle. I don't think it'd be difficult to find a community that's blocked all interaction with Meta.
Meta plans to fedi with activitypub so I doubt that they’re trying to be a closed island. They are probably trying to come into this space to disrupt and destroy. All of fedi needs to cut them out right away.
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the phrase is embrace, extend, extinguish, and Microsoft has been doing it for years
So has facebook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms
AT&T is the best known example. They supressed innovation for decades, buying up or squashing anything that posed a threat to their monopoly. A phone bought in 1920 wasn't that different to a phone used in 1980. Judging by what happened when their monopoly was abolished, if it hadn't been for AT&T we'd have had the internet in 1960.
People have no clue about how detrimental these (quasi-)monopolies are for technogical innovation.
Companies like facebook, microsoft and google are actively preventing innovation not furthering it. They've become so big, they no longer have a vested interest in things changing too much, so they squash anything new.
Corporate vampires, undermining democracy, hurting the planet, and actively hindering progress. Fuck 'em.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is a very particular kind of monopolistic behavior. you're just listing people buying out their competitors. which to be clear, is also bad.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is when you have an open standard, which a company nominally embraces, and then adds unique features to their version that only interoperates with those using their product. Apple and SMS is a current example, since their reactions only work on iPhone. the Wikipedia article has plenty of examples from Microsoft. it's also quite likely that it's exactly what Facebook plans to do with activitypub.
if it hadn't been for AT&T we'd have had the internet in 1960.
There is no world in which the DoD declassifies packet switching, invented in the late 60s, and opens that up into the world. This work was essential to making ARPANET, which was the first interconnected network that we can call useful internet, which was only open to the few academics and military institutions that worked on what was later known as DARPA projects. There is no putting this on Ma Bell as a reason for us not having internet in the 60s.
If you invite them in, they will send you advertising
They should make an instance, it would help the general public discover the fediverse. Most people I talk to at the bar don't know about the fediverse, I've explained it so many times, some people show interest, some people don't see the point, or how it's a big deal. I probably just come off as a total geek.
Once meta opens up a channel to the fediverse, people will start to stumble upon the different instances, decide they are done with meta, and move on from meta.
There are some billionaires out there who are watching whats happening, they are noticing the patterns, the trends, what people want, and what people dont want.
All it takes is one clever billionaire, who realizes they have enough money to create the next best platform and be able to fund it by other means.
We are at the point where bots can generate ad revenue, so if we just abandon the old websites to bots, they become bot-towns that generate revenue, and that revenue goes towards funding ad free servers in the fediverse.
This may be what just happens.
Being aware of your instance admins stances and what they plan to do. Bit rich coming from my kbin account (no idea the stance), but I have two other accounts already on instances where I‘m certain the admins wouldn‘t sell out to corpos. So if kbin were to federate with Meta and their stuff invaded my feed, I would move to one of those as my primary account.
What I think is going to be important here to make this less of a pain for users who get very attached to their accounts, is some ability to export and import account data, comment history and so on. I personally don‘t care (deleted a 15 year Reddit account without a care too), but I want this to succeed and for that it would be important.
Once this influx has died down and the devs got some more room for requests, I hope they can give us this ability.
Now before anyone regales me again with "Why not give them a chance, companies are our friends" stuff, I‘m gonna link a few things to read for you instead of replying to me, cause I can‘t be bothered to argue with pro-corporate people anyway and won‘t respond:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I'll definitely be on an instance that's not federated with Meta. Right now, I have accounts on sh.itjust.works, .world and .ee, but I'd drop any and all of them the moment I find out they'll federate with them.
You sign up on (or create) an instance that defederates from them.
Class action against activitypub (or whoever has the final say of whether they're let in or not) if they allow Meta into the fediverse. They are putting all of our data and privacy at risk by doing so.
ActivityPub is from W3C and is an open protocol for anyone to use. No one to target there legally speaking. It’s up to the consumers of the protocol to reject and defederate.
That's like calling on people to sue the W3C for "letting" Meta use http.
It doesn't work that way.
The only class action we can and should take is to defederate.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
232 points (95.3% liked)
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