[Discussion] Potential of a Meta ActivityPub client
[Discussion] Potential of a Meta ActivityPub client
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/181146
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 [email protected] 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!
Reposting at the request of can, within the context of c/agora should this instance defederate from any future Meta activity pub enabled clients? From my understanding it is more so a Twitter-clone and I'd argue a more severe problem for Kbin / Mastodon, but it is still worth discussing here.
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If meta wants to harvest data they would just create boring no-name servers to pull down the data that they want. De-federation isn't going to stop that.
The goal isn't to create a system where there are no corporate instances. The goal is to create a network that doesn't rely on corporate instances.
This idea that we use use de-federation like a weapon will cause the Fediverse to fragment and then we're back where we started: 50 different social media services and a fragmented social media experience. De-federation isn't a super downvote button, its use should be limited to boring server-related things (spam, complying with laws, etc).
The strength of federated social media is that it is all available for everyone at all times via one account. Breaking the network into small chunks or having some central group decide who gets to have access to social media is the exact thing that the ActivityPub protocol is suppose to help people escape from.
Brushing this off as a data harvesting question seems a bit simplistic in my opinion as it ignores the concern for an EEE strategy.
What happens if they somehow manage to scale up and become the largest instance on the fediverse? Wouldn't they become that de-facto central authority? That would give them the ability to defederate instances which aren't following the "right" code of conduct, effectively silencing them for most of the fediverse users. They could push their own anti-features to the activitypub communication within their apps, forcing the rest of the instances to either follow suit and implement it, or break compatibility with that largest instance (not sure I explain that properly, but an example would be how microsoft and google forced their implementation of the W3C EME specification on Firefox).
Are we supposed to believe that after decades of building walled gardens and prioritising money over ethic, they had a change of heart and decided to embrace open platforms for the greater good of humanity?
They already are the defacto authority on federation. If you're not on Facebook then you're cut off from THE social media network.
I understand the EEE fear. It's certainly a thing to watch out for going into the future. The way to win here is to outcompete them in feature support. If they have a closed proprietary feature that is popular then the FOSS community needs to strive for feature parity. That's always been the way you win in software. Linux is a prime example of this. Microsoft can't outcompete Linux in the commercial server space because the overall Linux development team dwarfs anything Microsoft has.
We're not going to strangle Meta out of the Fediverse even if everyone de-federated them. They can still support ActivityPub pub and the lack of any ability to communicate with the greater Fediverse removed any chance of users leaving Facebook. It allows them to market themselves as supporting open protocols and avoiding accusations of monopolistic behavior without ever being put in a position to have to compete.
Make them compete. Provide their users with better features, better privacy protection, more useful communities, etc. That's the only way to win the long battle imo.
I say let them do the extra work and incur the cost of running separate instances or scraping instances and then injecting the content into whichever ecosystem they have users sign up on, rather than giving them an easy way to do it. They will have to have a stable place for sign-ups no matter what
If Facebook made a Fediverse node it would dwarf the entire population of the existing Fediverse.
Cutting them off from what already exists wouldn't hurt them, it would ensure that their users couldn't migrate away while still allowing Meta to say that they're not a monopoly because they support open protocols.
This makes the EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) tactic a lot easier since they'd face no competition for users. A Facebook user couldn't see sh.itjust.works and decide that they'd rather use Lemmy than Facebook. They'd never be exposed to Mastodon and decide that they like it better than Twitter.
Meta already has all of the users federating with them means those same users can now be siphoned off by creating software that provides a better user experience than what Meta can provide with their services.
This makes the EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) tactic a lot easier since they’d face no competition for users.
People are running around this thread spamming EEE and in this case you have argued that my suggestion makes it easier, while another user has argued that the original suggestion not to block it makes it easier. Rather than spamming it like a buzzword, break out concepts which apply and explain how.
A Facebook user couldn’t see sh.itjust.works and decide that they’d rather use Lemmy than Facebook
A facebook user would not understand that they were seeing lemmy or sh.itjust.works content at all. You may have forgotten that some of facebooks original sins were starving youtube content creators of views / revenue by embedding their content in a way that prevented following the link to the real content. Expect to see facebook pipe the lemmy content into their wrapper and maybe even strip the comments out, if not just censoring any mention of other social networks.
They're already Embracing Fediverse by creating instances. That can't be helped.
The Extend part of the strategy is to create proprietary extensions to ActivityPub/Fediverse services so users are required to use their instance rather than the public ones.
The users arguing for de-federation would help this part the most. By isolating Facebook from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities it allows Meta to dominate the sections of the Fediverse that are in its federation.
If there isn't any meaningful competition to Meta then the existing Meta users will use Meta extensions be default and their proprietary version of the Fediverse will be the default.
Meta already has all of the users. They're expanding into the Fediverse to try to avoid being regulated as a monopoly by being seen as embracing open competition. They don't WANT competition, no corporation does. By de-federation them we're effectively cutting ourself off from the billions of people who could potentially leave Meta's ecosystem and at the same time removing any potential competition to Meta's extension of ActivityPub.
Meta joining Fediverse is better for Fediverse than it is for Meta. Siphoning off users from their platform should be the goal, not giving them an isolated pocket of the Fediverse that they can dominate easily.
Okay I think this is the crux of our disagreement.
You are worried about people not flowing off facebook fast enough. You feel that it has 'all the users'. I don't know exactly this applies to the extend portion, but I can see you think it reduces our influence /reach over those users.
I think that federating with meta makes the 'extend' part you mentioned easier, because lemmy users will see the federated facebook content, which may have these extra features you mention. Lemmy users may be forced back to facebook to use these features.
I also just want to push back against your idea of metas dominance. Facebook and instagram have really low engagement when compared to tiktok. (I didnt see any comparisons to reddit, if you see any let me know. ) Sure a lot of us (north americans) have old dusty accounts that we never use, but a lot of us don't generate content or create communities over there. Facebook has a huge network of users and tons of astroturfed advertiser content and that IS IT. They need real content to legitimize that, or they will die.
We are already siphoning users without federating with them.
I would agree that de-federation could work to slow them if there was a way to ensure that there was 100% compliance. I just don't see having anywhere near that level of compliance with a Meta blockade. Many instances are going to federate with them simply for the traffic.
On paper it sounds good, but the actual implementation will be incredibly spotty. It will create a fragmented Fediverse where people have to pick and choose which islands they want to live on and the Network Effect will drive a huge amount of people to choosing the island that Meta is on which will starve the other islands of users.
The people who feel so strongly anti-Meta (and I am one of them) need to be able to directly compete with them. We're not benefiting anybody by creating a tiny Fediverse island of idealists while Meta takes over the rest of the Fediverse.
My stance on de-federation has been pretty clear I think. I just don't think it is a tool to be used like this. I think of it like a firewall or router, it's just a low-level tool to be used in order to ensure that the network functions. It shouldn't be used to carve the Fediverse into multiple completely independent services. We already have a situation like that where Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are all their own island controlled by a small group of people.
The Fediverse's promise is in the ability to have ONE social network that connects every person to every other person regardless of what platform you're using. These de-federation campaigns are the antithesis of that idea. We should be looking for ways to ensure that the network is more robust and accessible to everyone... not ways to carve it up into different ideological segments.
I think we mostly agree and whichever way the community goes on this, the best thing for us to do is to create fun and useful federated content.
Here's to that!