A very interesting idea! Actually it seems to me there are two interesting ideas here:

• endorsements. Something like this (whether it's from feeler servers or other sources) is clearly needed to make consent-based federation scale. IndieWeb's Vouch protocol and the "letters of introduction" Erin Shephard discusses in "A better moderation system is possible for the social web" are similar approaches. You could also imagine building endorsement logic on top of an instance catalog like the FediSeer (of The Bad Space) or infrastructure like FIRES.

• restricting visibility of a boost to servers the original post is federated with. This is something that's long overdue in the fediverse! Akkoma's bubble is a somewhat-similar concept; Bonfire's boundaries might well support this.

Yep, I've said for a while that if a schism with transitive defederation happens, it'll be a good thing. There are many fediverses!

That's a great article. I linked to it in the OP:

The same is true with Google's adoption and then abandonment of the XMPP protocol, which is also often described as EEE. I don't think that's the right way to look at it; for one thing, XMPP is still around, and thanks to adoption by Zoom and others it has hundreds of millions of users – or billions, if you count WhatsApp'a non-standard derivative version. But in any case, whether or not it was EEE, Google didn't go into it with a goal of killing XMPP. They just wanted to exploit XMPP to address a business problem of making Google Talk successful – and did so, until it wasn't useful to them any more.

Yes, Mastodon instances can indeed refuse to federate with Threads -- you're not misunderstanding anything. You can track what instances are and aren't federating at https://fedipact.veganism.social/ (the "FediPact" it mentions is an agreement that hundreds of instances have signed to block Meta). Currenntly, about 40% of instances aren't federating -- but most of the largest instances are.

On "influencer", I don't think we're going to convince each other. I've sometimes described professors as influencers -- Dan Gillmor and Scott Galloway leap to mind.

I also don’t think many of those people would agree that they “strongly support Meta.”

That's true! Meta's got such a deservedly bad reputation that very few want to see themselves as supporting Meta! And I agree that they're supporting federation with Meta despite their real misgivings about the company, and they're doing it because they see it as in the fediverse's best interests. But still, Meta's saying "we want to embrace the fediverse" and they're saying "this is a good thing" and telling people that concerns are overstated ... that's supporting Meta.

If the Alex Jones server decides to terrorize a bunch of families, how can they claim to not have an association? How would they not have pressure to defederate or cancel their hosting?

The legal responsibilities and pressures are different for a service provider or infrastructure provider than for a social network. They'll get pressure, and Threads (a social network) might defederate, but I wouldn't expect them to cancel their services or hosting. Organizations like EFF argue that instrastructure providers should stay out of policing content -- even for content like Kiwifarms. I should probably discuss this in more detail (or maybe do a separate post on this).

They can track everything they do because they control their servers; they can’t track us because we control ours.

If you're on a server that federates with Meta and haven't blocked Meta, then most things you do can potentially be federated to Meta at which point it'll be tracked even if they aren't using any Meta services

Whether we federate or not also has no impact on their ability to do any of the Meta-Fediverse stuff. We can’t run up and smack the ActivityPub out of their hands and be like, “No! Bad Meta!” ;)

That last statement is true. Still, in an alternatie universe where fediverse influencers said "we don't want you" and the vast majority of instances chose not to federate then it would be similar to the Gab situation "Meta wanted to come to the fediverse, we said no we don't want hate groups and genocide-enablers here, so they're doing their own thing" with the addition of "they're also calling it the fediverse but don't fall for it". But we're not in that universe.

I didn't have that in the original draft, and half the people who reviewed it said "I don't understand what you mean by exploit". And no, I don't think people reading the article are dumb as shit, I assume that most people who already know what exploit means are intelligent enough to skip over the four lines of cut-and-paste text and read the rest of the article.

Try reading the article, others seem to understand the point I'm making (whether or not they agree).

Yet another word that starts with an E! Thanks for the link, I added a link to the post near the end of the "Extinguish isn't the only word that starts with an E":

Either way, as Ramin Honary suggests, it's a great opportunity for Enshittification – yet another word that starts with an E!

No worries on the tone and wording, it's the internet, I've experienced far worse. And your feedback is helpful, so the time you put into it is appreciated.

On Evan as influencer, I've highlighted for a while the contrast between opinions of Eugen and other lead devs of fediverse projects, large instance admins, the people still on the SWICG standards body, and journalists who write about the fediverse -- who in general almost all strongly support Meta -- and people on the fediverse, who are much more split. "Influencer" is as good a term as any to refer to the first category of people.

I think the story of their public statements is that they’ve said everything you’d hope to hear. I’ve seen many takes that they somehow betray a hidden agenda, and that seems wrong at the very least....

In the statements I quoted they were very up front about their agenda! Similarly in the section where I talk about their potential long-term plans if they decide to invest in this direction is consistent with Zuckerberg's comments about his interest in a decentralized approach. But yeah, they're also saying what they know people want to hear.

I think it’s also important to note that they’ve only said that they’re not sure what the default will be.

Fair, I've rewritten that section to clarify that this is only their current plan. It's be really funny if Meta suggested taking the privacy-friendly approach knowing that Mastodon would try to talk them out of it 🤣🤣🤣. I still expect them to go with opt-in, but we shall see. I agree that if they go the opt-in route it's not necessarily for nefarious reasons, in my view it really is in their users best interest. But that's the thing about the embrace-and-extend strategies (whether or not the third step is to extinguish), the extensions are very often in the users interests, they just cause problems for the open alternatives.

On Cambridge Analytica, I agree the data flow was in a different direction, but still: they trusted Bannon and CA with it the data that was the most valuable asset in their business model. And (other than some bad press) it worked out just fine for them! So I guess we draw different conclusions on who they'll trust with what in the future.

In any case though...

So they would need to admin those instances or trust that the admins wouldn’t tamper with that data.

No, they have other options here. One is to provide services that cooperating instances in "Meta's fediverse" can use that involve sharing data with Meta, and create a win/win scenario for them to share the data. Think of Disney or some corporation that wants to target ads (using Meta's services, in return for a revenue share) to people on their instances -- and automate some of the moderation (by using Meta's services). Why wouldn't they harvest data and share it with Meta so that the services are more effective? Another is to provide a hosting service for corporations (and perhaps individuals) to have their own instances ... it's kind of a variant of the first one but packaged differently.

(And both of these apply to non-public data as well.)

In terms of blocking a DeSantis instance I agree it's not surrendering control to them, I just meant that Meta could monetize the heck out of it even if all the instances i the current fediverse blocked it. If they had the infrastructure in place today, DeSantis and others would be paying to boost their instances' posts to Threads (and also Gab and Truth Social and the instances that Fox News, Breitbart, etc are running). They might well miss the window for the 2024 US election but it (hopefully) won't be the last election in the world.

Thanks for the feedback! You really don't think Evan's influential in the fediverse?

They conclude that their (obvious!) goal is to be completely untrustworthy while giving people the false belief that they’re trustworthy. And the evidence? It’s all in the quote!

No, I'm not saying their goal is to be completely untrustworthy. It's a means to an end. And the evidence for them being completely untrustworthy isn't the quote, it's Facebook, Instagram, and Meta's long history of being completely untrustworthy. I wrote about this in Wait a second. Why should anybody trust Facebook, Instagram, or Meta?. Do you trust them?

It’s “already clear that people won’t be able to move all their followers to other fediverse servers.” Why?

Good question, I edited the article to clarify:

if somebody's following you on Threads but hasn't opted in to federation, then when you move to an instance in the real fediverse they won't be following you any more.

Trusting someone like Alex Jones with the core of their business model? Riiiiight.

Yeah really, it's not like they every trusted Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica ... oh wait, they did.

Anyhow it's not the core of their business model. The core of their business model is harvesting data and using it to sell and target ads (and sell other stuff), Alex Jones is just one more channel to leverage.

Even if Ron DeSantis had his own Meta-sponsored instance, everyone could just block it.

You really think most Republicans would block it?

Exactly. And they've already done your second and third bullets!

It's not so much that they'd take it over, it's that they'd extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it's basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum's got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html and there are a lot of parallels.