I am assuming many of you have heard about the potential of Meta creating an ActivityPub enabled client (TheVerge, PCMag etc. have made articles). I was just wondering what people’s thoughts are on this, and if it came down to it should instances in the fediverse defederate from it considering it could be a case of Embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s a DefederateMeta magazine at !DefederateMeta@fedia.io if you’re interested, which includes an anti-meta pact on cryptpad with the responses viewable on a seperate website if you care to see which instance admins have agreed.
I’m just curious what my fellow sh.it.heads think of this development in the fediverse, any input is appreciated!
I agree with your sentiment, but I think its reasonable to not trust Facebook, especially around user privacy. One of the issues with federation is that it spreads your posts around a lot, and it is ripe for abuse. It sucks, because the only way to fight this kind of thing is to defederate. I generally think instances shouldn’t defederate, except as a final resort as a matter of decorum. But, a pre-emptive block if any Facebook instance or technology makes sense given their reputation.
It will be I threshing to see if the activity pub standard can be maintained in the face of a giant company like Facebook. They have a lot of power.
I don’t see what would be so bad with them having copies of data that we’re already sharing multiple times across instances now and that are public for everyone to see.
It’s because you can start building profiles of people from metadata. I agree that the privacy issues with the fediverse are kind of part of it, and you shouldn’t put anything on here you aren’t willing people to see publicly because the content get’s spread to so many different servers. But I would get why on a trust level, facebook would have less currently than instance admins.
Nothing would stop them from creating a profile from just scraping the fediverse without even joining it. Them being a part of the fediverse or not (including whether or not they get banned from certain instances) matters very little if not at all for this matter.