Corporations don’t just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can’t force them to. Defederating from Meta’s new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything.

Protocols are going to be adopted by corporations, whether we like it or not. SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, IP and 802.11 are all examples of that. If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end. Something would then clearly need to be different in order to prevent future abuse of the protocol.

FOSS is propped up by corporations. By for profit corporations. If you want to stop those corporations from killing projects, you put safety guards up to make sure that doesn’t happen. You don’t just shut them out and put your head in the sand.

  • Spzi
    14•11 months ago

    as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say “no, this is our house. If you don’t adapt to us, we don’t federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that.”

    I’m afraid we will lose if we accept them until they do something bad. Given their track record, that’s just a matter of time. If we let them become important to the fediverse as long as they play nice, the final decision could be disastrous for the fediverse when they stop playing nice.

    So the right thing to say seems for me: “No, this is our house. We don’t federate with you.”

    • ryan
      13•11 months ago

      That is a completely valid take here. My partner who runs our Mastodon instance will be preemptively defederating with Threads (on my suggestion), so I do agree with you, but I realize not everyone in the Fediverse may share that take - it’s a weighted scale where one end is “mass adoption of a Web 3.0 decentralized Fediverse” and the other end is “but adoption in which most people are on Threads will be centralization anyway, so we will have already failed.”

      I think in any case it may not matter, as I believe Meta / Threads will only federate with instances that agree to follow their moderation standards - after all, Meta likely doesn’t want porn and Nazis federated to their communities because then they can’t run advertisements. As a Fediverse community, we’re pretty good at taking care of the Nazi thing, but Mastodon’s got an awful lot of porn on it.

      It will really depend on which admins take that deal to be beholden to Meta’s standards, potentially opening themselves up not only to huge moderation concerns but to a future requirement of taking advertisements. I hope large instances will not. I would prefer to see the Fediverse operate separate from Threads, who will be using the ActivityPub protocol but not part of the larger Fediverse. Similar to how the conservative “truth.social” uses the Mastodon application and ActivityPub but is not part of the Fediverse because it is closed off.

      A little off topic, but I was very surprised Reddit didn’t pursue a similar approach of “we will lower greatly the costs of API but we will serve advertisements in the API as regular posts, so you must display them and can’t strip them out.”