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.