I’ve been hearing that Meta (Facebook) intends to join the fediverse. I have some very big concerns about that, as do apparently many others. There exists a group of instances called the fedipact which will not be federating with Meta, and I was wondering if this instance would be joining. So there is no ambiguity with this post: I have no desire to participate in any instance that is federated with Facebook, and will kindly pass on another Eternal September. Hope that doesn’t come off as aggressive, that’s just where I’m at.
I’m curious what the downside of being federated with an Instance run by Meta is? By federating with the network, Meta won’t miraculously gain some authoritarian control over the entire thing. In fact federating with Meta may well provide the largest opportunity ever to bring new users over to sites like Lemmy and Mastodon by way of exposing them to the potential perks of those sites over Thread.
Not to sound elitist but one of the main reasons I want nothing to do with it is the almost guaranteed influx of normies and casuals. Additionally, Meta does not want to see the fediverse or any other social network grow, they want everyone to use their network and pay them.
I must say, your first reason is kind of asshole, I can understand wanting some communities to remain niche to an extent, but for the whole service just because casuals would join… I don’t know, it feels like useless gatekeeping, especially if those people were still bringing content.
Say that to XMPP which Google basically killed
I’m reading that Google chose XMPP to their Google Talk product, then later decided to drop the support of Google Talk in favor of Google Hangouts that wasn’t using XMPP. This affected Google Talk users who were using 3rd party clients to use Google Talk as they were forced to start using bloated Google Hangouts. But how did all this affect people using XMPP protocol for other than Google Talk?
I’m also seeing potential for growth here for services using activitypub, mainly for the microblogging service Mastodon, as that’s apparently a similar platform to Threads, or the other new player BlueSky, which also is going to use activitypub protocol.
I’m not a microblogger, but I’m seeing and clicking links to interesting tweets on chatrooms and websites I visit, and if they are going to be appearing through threads or bluesky in the future, and I am able to view them without having to access a bloated threads or bluesky app/website I see it as a good thing. If they one day defederate from mastodon instances for example and I can’t view them from the outside anymore, it sounds like it’s what happened with Google, then it’s just back to where it was before they came along, unless the whole show managed to draw people from mastodon (mostly) to threads/bluesky which I doubt.
Google had custom patches to their XMPP implementation. In theory, every XMPP user can talk to every Google user now. In practice, this wasn’t true. Google eventually abandoned XMPP, but that left a sore feeling in the XMPP user base. Basically, people felt like “XMPP just doesn’t work, it’s s*it”. If you’re coder, you’d know that’s not true, but not everyone is, so it basically left XMPP with a bad name.
In short, XMPP would have been much better off if Google never laid hands on it. Now, no one want’s to touch the code base to actually make a better version, cuz then you’d have to write in the readme that it’s based on XMPP, and again, no one will wanna touch it. That’s why people are reinventing the weel about many of these technologies, because no one wants to take on burden that XMPP carries with it.
Take a look at the telemetries Threads gathers and everything becomes evident. You’re signing away your privacy basically. I wouldn’t wanna be near that thing if it was the last social media platform on earth.
Thanks for explaining!
About the Threads telemetry. I wonder how does the telemetry they gather from the users of their app (“The Threads app can collect data related to your health, financial information, contact information, browsing history, location and purchases, among other things.”) affect users who interact from other instances (for example some mastodon instance) with thread users posts/replies.
I learned from #mastodon irc channel that in Mastodon for example, the instance owner/maintainer has the following extra information on users of their instance: “IP addresses, email, when they connect, what toots they browse and when”. So this information is not available to Meta, if you are interacting with threads user for example from a mastodon instance that is federating with the threads instance. I’m not seeing how they are getting extra information on you as they can collect all the metadata and your mastodon behaviour already by just creating another anonymous mastodon instance that gets federated with other mastodon instances and then collect the data that can be gathered across the instances. Or maybe you can even scrape the data from mastodon without running an instance even? I’m just trying to learn as I go and my information may be wrong. Please anyone correct/fix if there are mistakes here and inform me more thanks :)
If they really wanted to, they can make it work. Maybe add spyware through a security hole in Lemmy no one’s discovered yet. And since instances are federated, they just spread the disease to one another and it’s users. Anything is possible. If a human made it, it can be broken.
One thing I’ve learned thus far is to never trust a platform/software owner that has a financial interest. RHEL is also a perfect example of that. The latest changes basically do exactly what MS did 20+ years ago when FOSS and open source was at it’s infancy - shared source. It’s a company that deals with FOSS software for more than 25 years, yet they decided to do this. After you see things like this, you really start to reevaluate things. Many people are scared to donate code to companies now, that’s why projects like Arch and Void thrive nowadays. People finally said “f it, I’m not contributing code to a company that might wanna sell that some day, better donate it to community projects”.
That’s perfectly normal, Lemmy admins have that info as well. Forums also have that info… you can’t hide everything, that’s nuts, you at least have to have an IP to browse the internet.
Well, kinda, but not exactly. In order for a post or a comment to be saved on Lemmy (and I presume the same is true for Mastodon), 2 copies of the post are made. One resides on your instance (that’s called the original) and the other is saved on the instance on which the community you posted in resides (that’s the copy). Both copies share the same info, date, time, username, post content, original instance (the one you’ve got your account on), etc. Even if the IP is only available on the user’s instance, that still gives meta (or anyone else) a lot of info to manipulate with. They know my username, post content, date and time of post. That info can easily be exploited by people who know what they’re doing. As I said previously, all it would take is a piece of malware that could grab data from the instance’s database and send that to Meta, or whoever. People think that this is really hard, it actually isn’t, coders do stuff like this for fun every day.
They could do that, but with thousand of instances in the fediverse, that’s just not viable. Even if you do it only to the larger instances, you still have to automate the process, which can get tricky if you don’t actually use the fediverse’es biggest downfall (and it’s biggest strenth at the same time) - everyone is connected to everyone else. Sure federation is clanky ATM, but that will pass. Eventually, everyone will in fact be connected to everyone else. It’s a lot easier to spread malware that way.
I don’t know the exact details, But apparently, Google implemented xmpp wrong (possibly maliciously?) in a way where Google Talk users could see other xmpp servers’ content but those servers users could not see Google Talk content. Which meant that Google forced the Libre servers into obsolescence.
I still use XMPP regularly to this day. It exists and is even a standard now. Whether or not Google uses it. One of the smaller virtual world services that I use has an XMPP backend to allow you to receive and send instant messages into their grid even when you aren’t officially logged in.
They will have the money to run more bigger faster severs. The risk is the majority start to use those severs as home, then communities end up there, then Facebook end up controlling the communities.
So the threat is Meta offering a better service that draws a user base? Is that flexibility not the entire thesis of fediverse platforms?
Further, if Meta is able to provide a service that users see as so fundamentally better, then they should get a large portion of the population. That’s the nature of a competitive market.
That is the “embrace” part of embrace, extend, extinguish. It is great at first, but once they have that base all in one place it will be monetized and there will be none of the smaller sites left.
But the nature of the federated platforms is that they will always be able to have new instance created that can still access the content of the largest, without explicitly needing that community to move over.