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.
There is no “should be” when it comes to tools. Only what people use them for.
The bits about “ad-free” were clearly because who the hell would’ve thought Facebook of all companies would pop into the ActivityPub scene? I’m sure they would adjust that statement now.
But fediverse isn’t only a tool, but also a network and thus, a community. And a vision is pretty important for communities. So the question about what should be the main values and ideals behind the fediverse are important. If we would be only here because the fediverse is a tool - a social network - then there is a lot of better alternatives, with more content and better user experience. I mean, unless you want to talk about some super-controversial topics that would get you banned, there’s not really that much of a difference in how limited are you in the way you interact with Reddit, Facebook or Twitter, apart from the UI being a little bit more difficult.
And letting any other big player into the fediverse will only lead to them eventually bringing the difficulties in, as has been already mentioned in other posts - by extending ActivityPub, and using their teams to create difficult to implement but really handy features that any FOSS will have difficulties with implementing, causing them to be inferior and bringing people over to them.
This federation stuff is nothing new. Nobody calls emailing a network, they call it a tool. That is what ActivityPub is. This culture of glorification surrounding “federation” is silly.
Assuming the fediverse becomes mainstream one thing I hope to actually see is that existing company forums start to join the fediverse.
Think if you no longer needed to login to EA’s website to post about bugs to the Sims. Or if Prusa’s 3d printer community forums could also be found right here… Or any other existing community help forum.
The problem though is, that in order to get there, Meta and others have to bring the users and essentially show the way first.
Decentralization to me is instance to instance communication. I don’t see it as necessarily being anti-corporate, just lacking centralization. Sites like Twitter and Reddit are popular because of the content, not the site themselves. With decentralization, content is more powerful and I can access it from any instance. Even if I’m federated with a big corp website, it gives me more content and it pulls more people and community into decentralization. I see it as a win-win. More users are better to my, I really don’t care the instance, I just want content.
I agree that decentralization isn’t anti-corporate. I would even say that it has nothing to do with your motives for doing it. But I’m hoping that the consensus that is reached about what Fediverse should be will include focus on being anti-corporate, and stay in the realm of community-owned and non-profit. Actually, I don’t mind being for-profit, or even ads that are respectful, as long as it’s not manipulating with users in any way based on their data, for example though the content they are shown. DuckDuckGo would be the best example - you get static search results, nothing is “personalized”, and the ads you get are related to your current search only. No ML models exploiting you as much as they can. That’s what I imagine under “privacy-centric”
And unfortunately, this disqualifies almost every larger company.
The current matter with Meta is that they have bad intentions towards the fediverse
https://infosec.pub/post/400702
And even if you don’t have Threads app installed, Meta is also a privacy threat to fediverse users. If there are fediverse instances that are still federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
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I love how almost everyone hated Facebook as a company, they change to Meta and people continue to hate it and everyone is downloading their new app now
Companies can do whatever they want as long as they keep going
The best part is when you read about how people would rather not talk to non-iPhone users because they can’t imessage and they don’t want to install third party chat apps like whatsapp, and also tease them about the color of the bubbles or something. But they’ll gladly install instagram or threads.
tells you something how they value individuals/their “friends”.
I’m positive that most of that reporting is outrage farming and anecdotes. Take the really famous example—people not dating people if they use an Android device. It originated with the NYPost. The NYPost is a rightwing gossip and conspiracy rag that makes its money with outrage farming.
And other outlets just uncritically picked it up and went with it. Now it is part of the assumed zeitgeist.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure it happens. My Android-using family needles me constantly for using an iPhone and Macs. It is very annoying. But it isn’t exclusionary.
What’s exclusionary are what Apple and Meta do with iMessage and Whatsapp, respectively, and what Google does with what they call “RCS,” which is actually a proprietary fork of RCS entirely reliant on their proprietary middleware such that Google can gate keep (which is why there aren’t a slew of RCS apps out there; Google doesn’t allow access just like Apple doesn’t). These companies need to be broken up and whatever remains should be forced to create/adopt a standard and stick to it.
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
If thr Fediverse really is decentralized and open-source, then all of those other things are just suggestions. Nothing is stopping Meta (or me, or you) from launching an instance that has ads, investors, and sells all its data to people, whether that data comes from that instance or is discovered through federation.
But this will be a test of the protocols that underpin the Fediverse. I’ve read that the devs were extremely paranoid, and made sure that a bare minimum of personally identifying information is exposed between servers. The whole point of this is posting publically, after all, so some info needs to be exchanged. Meta already has access to our public posts just by scraping the instance, they don’t need to federate to do that. But is there anything more leaking out through Federation? We’re about to find out.
Nothing is stopping Meta (or me, or you) from launching an instance that has ads, investors, and sells all its data to people, whether that data comes from that instance or is discovered through federation.
You are right, they are only suggestions. But suggestions I would really like to se enforced, and that is exactly what defederation is for. If we want to uphold the values mentioned in the quote, and not let our content be monetized through federation, then defederating with those who don’t uphold the values is the solution. It’s as simple as that.
Meta already has access to our public posts just by scraping the instance, they don’t need to federate to do that.
While they don’t have to federate to do that, federation makes it a lot easier, because the content is served right to them. It also legitimizes them monetizing and stealing our content, because after all - that’s how the protocol works. While scraping for content is much more effort and grey-zone, since then they also have to somehow show it to the users - by impersonating us? By using fake accounts or bots? Probably, but that’s still more effort. And that’s what I take issue with. Meta would decide how is our content shown, they would be monetizing it and they would be using it to manipulate with their users (because as far as I know, the instance you are on is in full control of the UI, and the order in which content is shown and how), or watch and analyze how users interact with it. And I want no part in that, in spirit of the above mentioned suggestions.
