Lmao at you complaining about toxicity when you're toxically judging and gatekeeping 2 Billion people.

Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.

Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.

SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that's not really federating identity so much as it's getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.

I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don't know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.

How will not federating with them prevent that?

1. The regulatory angle makes the most sense given the scrutiny they're under from regulators, courts, the FTC consent orders, etc. Also entirely possible that the product manager building the project was able to pitch the fediverse because it was the hot trendy thing (NFTs, metaverse, ai, web 3, decentral etc.)

2. Given their history of buying WhatsApp and Instagram? Those aren't examples of EEE those are examples of anti-competitive corporate buyouts that should be illegal but aren't. Facebook does not have a history of EEE, and continue to be a large open source contributor, maintaining multiple open source libraries, frameworks, and protocols.

3. Because you can just block their instance.

4. They're scraping and selling your data regardless, this doesn't change anything.

5. Sounds like a lot more potential moderators.

6. I dunno probably the same way that half of Reddit posts are Twitter links. It will be fine. You can stay talking to your nerdy friends in the nerdy communities.

7. Threads came out of New Product Experimentation (NPE), Meta's (now defunct) experimentation division that produced tons of different experimental apps to see what would stick, or in this case, to have a card to play if a rival social media network were to suddenly implode for some reason. Was it developed in good faith in regards to Twitter or creating a healthy competitive business landscape? No. Was it developed in good faith in regards to the fediverse? Yeah, they're not gunning after the dozens of Mastodon users.

8. Until someone can actually state how federation with Meta would harm the fediverse, I'm for it. That EEE blog post that everyone keeps circulating does not do that. Its a quite frankly dumb take from someone who loved a protocol so much they didn't realize that users didn't. XMPP never had that many users, Google Talk did. The lesson to learn from that story is not that Google killed XMPP it's that a protocol's openness does not matter compared to user experience. It's awesome if you can have both, but if push comes to shove, and the protocol can't keep up, then the better UX will always win out, even if it's closed.

9. No, I wouldn't add them or interact with them.

10. I trust that they will do what they say want to do, which is to try and get a lot of users and make money advertising to them.

Now, I've answered 10 of your questions and I'm still waiting to hear what the problem with federating with them is that's not just someone blindly regurgitating that same blog post, or making vague accusations that they're so intrinsically evil we'll be cursed if we look at them too long.

No, I'm just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn't great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.

I'm sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.

The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.

Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it's an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they're built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don't provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.

It's working for me, but quoted below:

Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, this post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works here.

For now, let’s talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse.

Federation is not something new on the internet. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others.

When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site.

Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn’t reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site’s that are called out.

What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything.

Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the “main” communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will always be a biggest or most active - it’s just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.

[edit: grammar and spelling]

Signing an NDA to talk about an unreleased product is not predatory, it's standard practice for virtually any business (especially the kind inviting random people off the internet to see them). Many jobs require you to sign NDAs just to go through the interview process.

There is nothing gained by not going to the meeting with Meta, if they want to launch their Twitter clone they are more than capable of doing that regardless of whether or not this guy takes a meeting to hear them out. All he's done is learned less about what they plan on doing leaving him less capable of taking the best course of action, and if you trust him to make the right decision then that's objectively a bad thing.

Such bravery coming from someone who sounds oh so employed.

That's standard practice if you're going to be talking about an unreleased product.

This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just "hear them out". They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there's no reason for that if it's something innocuous.

They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.

I don't think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I've signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they're going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.

Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content

Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.

It's foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn't some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn't figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they're planning.