Was the lemmyverse/threadiverse aware that Mastodon has been convulsed for the past 2 days?
Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook's imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
I think meta is deliberately trying to fly under the radar until it too late. Several fedi communities have signed a 'pledge' saying they will actively block meta fedi content from their servers. (Similar to what most are already doing with Truth Social which is just another mastodon instance).
I'll be honest, part of the reason I didn't come to the Fediverse earlier was I knew that Truth Social was "on" Mastodon. That discouraged me from investigating anything about it. When Reddit forced my hand and I looked into it further, I realized that avoiding the whole space because Truth Social ran on it was as absurd as avoiding the Internet because Fox News has a website.
I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it's shady that there's Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it's even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and have their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems bizarrely starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
I think there's probably a reasonable explanation for this. The entire idea of Mastodon was built around getting away from companies like Meta. The admins arent going to just do a 180 on that.
It's more likely that Meta wants to do a similar thing as Truth Social and they are doing some consultation work. It would be good money and I don't blame them for taking it.
To give them the benefit of the doubt, having to sign an NDA doesn't mean they actually get into bed with Meta.
If you catch me completely off-guard, or for example 10 minutes ago when I started reading the thread, I definitely would give a hot-headed "hell no, fuck you Fuckerberg" response to any approach from Meta, but now that I've had the time to calmly think and see other people's responses I have a better idea (which follows the benefit of the doubt train of though I mentioned).
Sure, the NDA ties your hands, but only until Meta makes the stuff they are scheming public. If federation is part of it, once they federate it would become public knowledge anyway. I'll admit it's not a large group of people who would be signing the NDA and sitting down with Meta, but that group of people now has advanced warning of anything Meta is planning and they can begin to counter plan, which is better than being caught totally off guard when Fuckerberg exposes himself.
If they do lie in bed (and federate) with Meta rather than use it as an opportunity to gain Intel on Meta's horrid schemes, then sure, they will have chosen that side. If they just take Meta's money and ultimately it helps the fediverse, or just use it to gain Intel, then no harm, no foul?
Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.
As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.
There's also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they...Don't really need their own public app to do that), and so on.
Upvoted for mentioning EEE. Meta has been really active in facilitating progress in the opensource community lately with their work on LLAMA, so I'm not surprised to hear they are involved elsewhere.
Like much of big tech, they've been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it's a nice sounding alliteration, but it's a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they'll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it's just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.
It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.
I'm all for anything that will provide an avenue for people to move off of corporate platforms. The average user doesn't care, but for some of the more tech-savvy FB/Insta/WhatsApp users who join it could be an interesting way to get their feet wet and maybe look to move to alternate platforms without leaving their contact behind completely.
Yeah. I have some concerns about moderation, but, like, it's 3 or 4 clicks to just silence the whole domain and pick and choose who I want to follow by hand.
I've heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.
And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We've had enough of corporate socials lately.
The shocking news this week was that a couple of admins of large Mastodon instances were talking with Meta (under NDA's!), so it seems your hope (and mine) will be in vain.
It's really going to be up to the users to push back should the admins get a payout to do something not in the communities interest.
Everyone is going to have to remain nimble and not rely on finding a permanent server until corporations get the message that this is a space that cannot be monetized in a capitalist way.
There is a risk that they start going the path of Microsoft's "Embrace, extend, extinguish". Although they probably wouldn't call an isolated instance "Lemmy", they could start as being federated. It might not even be obvious that it's run by Facebook.
But once they have a stranglehold on users/communities, they can pitch themselves as the "most complete" portal to Lemmy. Even if they completely defederate, they would have the instance people want to be on
People are wayyyyy underestimating what a market cap the size of meta can buy you. Mainly, it can buy any feasible competitor or threat to your perpetual domination. Then you simply eat them.
It's not that much different than how meta et al were trying to get tiktok banned on the guise of "security" when really they just didn't want to have to compete with them. The arguments will look a little different, but the strategy is the same
I heard Facebook was going to make something "built on Mastodon," but I didn't think federation was on the table too. I would think a company wouldn't want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
Likewise, if I ran a Mastodon server, I'd block them immediately. I don't use Facebook for a reason, and anyone who would just blindly let Facebook scoop up their community data is part of the problem.
I posted this on Mastodon, but I completely disagree with the idea of defederating from Meta instances on principal for the same reason I don't want my Fastmail account to stop interacting with Gmail accounts just because I feel Google is too corporate. That defeats the entire purpose of open standards and federated content. I should be able to choose to personally block content from Meta instances if I want to, but it's to the detriment of the community to fracture the Fediverse just because it's starting to grow large enough to attract attention from one of the big tech companies.
The reality is, a federated Meta service would at least initially grow the idea of federated social media as a whole, and likely drive traffic to Kbin/Lemmy/Mastodon from people who want to get off of the Meta platforms, but don't want to cut contact with their friends/coworkers/enemies entirely. While I probably wouldn't make an account, I'd be interested in at least being able to follow a few of my friends who I actually have interest in seeing updates from via my Masto/Kbin accounts.
And I'm aware of the embrace/extend/extinguish paradigm, but premature defederation isn't the answer there either.
I'm an advocate for federated content for convenience, not on principal alone.
Admin decided defederation is the reason I left beehaw (and by extension didn't go to lemmy.world/shitjustworks.) I get why they did it, but it was alienating in that it took away my choice to interact in communities on both sides so I had to choose a neutral instance (and eventually ended up on kbin anyway.)
Having said that, I've seen references to a mass defederation of Gab which I am less upset about.
The difference with Facebook though is they will likely bring a ton of users and having your instance defederate by default doesn't really impact a massive company coming in like it did with Gab.
I'll be interested to see what, of anything, shakes out from this.
Strongly agreed. Federation becoming mainstream accessible is a good thing IMO. Content is what made reddit good and let's face it: we don't have that much of it. Eg, my local city sub used to be fairly active. I don't have anything like that here. I even tried to make it myself, posted a bit, and tried to promote in relevant places, and last I checked it's population: me, myself, and I. We clearly need far more people to be able to have many of the smaller, niche communities that I love.
I agree, I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot by immediately defederating. This is an opportunity for a lot of people to get their feet wet with the Fediverse, and potentially bring them to more open parts of the platform. I don't think a lot of people understand that Meta is free to set-up their own dystopian corpo-instance without that carrying over to affect the independent ones.
I think comparing it with E-Mail is a bit naive. It a different history. Accepting Meta basically means making it the main instance of the fediverse. The main content and users will be over there. There will be policies what is allowed and not allowed on the main instance and who can federate with it. With new additions of features and policies the federation of will slowly become meaningless. In the end it will be a similar situation like with Reddit. Where Meta is Reddit in this scenario and the other instances are the third party clients. Yes they will still be able to communicate with each other. But in the grand scheme of things the rest of the network will be irrelevant.
There already is a tendency to flock to the largest instances. Meta can provide a larger instance than all current instances combined and will have better UX.
This is a social / business problem. Not a technical one about open protocols. Meta has shown in the past that they might have good developers and open source a ton of stuff. But their business side of things is borderline evil.
On Mastodon any individual user can block an instance from their feed. You don't want to interact with Meta Thread? Fine, just block it and stfu. These "defederation" bullies want to choose for everyone.
It's amazing seeing people who, after everything destructive action taken by these large corporations in these settings, still think maybe this time will magically be different and look to a corporation like it's their potential dad who they can't possibly survive let alone thrive without.
Even in here some are like "but we need the corporations".
I certainly don‘t and I‘m fully prepared to go to an instance which stands with me on this. Defederation from all big corporations (small ones are probably impossible to weed out and hopefully less dangerous but should be kept an eye on). If that makes my version of the fediverse smaller, so be it, I like small communities anyway.
They infiltrate these spaces, they take over and "make it better" to lure people, then they centralise and then when people become dependent they enshittify it to sell us, sell our data, sell anything we say and also sell shit to us which we don’t need. All the while condescendingly applying their "codes of conduct" on us to be allowed the privilege to make them money.
I repeat: I don‘t need them. I don‘t want them.
If the majority accept this and even those small communities fold and die too, this will be the last time for me. I‘m just gonna live like a monk in some Austrian forest without internet. All I ever wanted is to talk to some cool people around the world about life and stuff I like.
I feel you completely. I spend most of my free time with my family, hiking or paddling, or reading books. It's nice to have places online to burn some time, but I'd sooner give it up than be forced into some corporate playground. The past 15-20 years have shown that it just doesn't work.
There's money involved and it could end up lucrative for the devs themselves either having the project bought out or getting very well paid jobs with Meta.
Any sane person puts their career and family first in such a situation and gets that potential bag of money. The people who don't are admirable but rare. The owners of just about every Lemmy instance would do the same too.
probably an unpopular opinion but facebook does also have a sort of track record of contributing to open source projects in ways that benefit everyone. facebook wanted to use subversion (or some other non-git source control) and contributed significantly so that it would work great for huge repositories like theirs. and facebook use memcached for their caches and contribute heavily so that they can use it more efficiently.
i’m also skeptical about end motivations, but in terms of being able to lend engineering effort to open source projects and helping to create a better product for all, it’s not such a bad idea.
At least it's not a bad idea until they leverage those tools they helped develop to takeover or dissolve services. I think it's about time we start learning our lesson with these big corps rather than trying to give them a chance.
I hear you. I could imagine that the biggest "threat" is that facebook comes out with some incredible contributions and features, but it requires modifying activitypub or in some way restricts instances that want those tools from collaborating with the rest of the fediverse. Causing a fediverse split between those who want meta's features, and are willing to fall under meta's control, and those who would rather not have them could be bad.
Google has a reputation of creating Google versions of popular open source projects. Then, they abandon it when some corporate hack decides they're bored with it. I'm amazed that Angular has lasted so long, but it does have some deep Googlification. Just recently, they've been moving off of the well supported bundler, webpack (which they didn't give you any access to the configuration of), and onto their own custom made bundler just for Angular. It'll probably result in faster, better builds but it's unlikely to be useful for anything but Angular.
So while it's nice that Google has made their internal tooling available, it's still at the mercy of Google getting bored and moving on. I like the cohesiveness of it compared to React because it does come fully loaded, no configuration needed, but it's also not as bullet proof from corporate meddling as React is. Fortunately, coin counters don't seem to pay attention to build tools, otherwise I'm sure there'd be some PRO version for a major payment.
For the source control system you’re thinking of Mercurial, and yep indeed that’s accurate.
They also notoriously open-sourced Hack and HHVM, their monolith’s language compiler and runtime. It’s a pretty narrow use case (having a PHP monolith and wanting it to scale), but they didn’t have to do it.
Anyway yeah, they indeed have pretty good genuine history with their open source efforts.
They're in this to eat Twitter's lunch, not "ruin the Fediverse" with EEE like people seem to think. Twitter is dying and people want an alternative, but Mastodon doesn't have critical mass yet. I have a buddy who hates Twitter, wants to be on Mastodon, but most of the accounts he follows aren't there, so he is waiting and "looking for an alternative." If Facebook gets in the game, they think it could be enough to fully pull users from Twitter (I think they're wrong and think Twitter's new CEO is going to right the ship, but I digress). Importantly to them this gets more people using Facebook (I highly doubt it will be its own website), AND importantly for the Fediverse it gets more people on Mastodon if they play nice together and they eventually figure out they can get all the same content they want without being on Facebook. Early AOL wasn't a hindrance to the world wide web, it was a (very literal) gateway to it for a lot of people.
Given the "anyone can join in" nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.
There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there's a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But... there's definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.
I stole this phrase a long time ago, and use it often:
1 million things can happen, and only a few are any good.
The beautiful thing about distributed/federated content hosts is that you can block out the noise, greed and other bullshit if it's not your thing: Spin up a server and save your sanity.
My [paranoid] take: its vaporware designed to distract from the reddit fiasco, with plans fo mr meta to later absorb reddit instead of a reddit IPO. Reddit users are very different than Twitter users; the mass exodus didn’t happfrom Twitter to Mastodon, but looks very promising from reddit to lemmy/kbin. And it takes only one social media giant to crumble for the rest to follow. Once people are on Fediverse there is no going back
I think it has absolutely nothing to do with Reddit and everything to do with Twitter.
I think they scrambled to get something up and running quickly so they could get the wave of disgruntled Twitter users and jumpstart a new social media for them, and the only feasible option in 5 months was to use Mastodon/Activitypub to get there.
It will be interesting to see how much they give back to the community and if they federate.
Yea, Facebook, twitter and mastodon are different from reddit and Kbin/Lemmy so why would meta try to get reddit users to switch to a completely different kind of service that's nothing like reddit
Honestly, a lot of people might disagree but, corporate involvement is essential to FOSS projects surviving. The biggest FOSS project on the planet, Linux, is literally propped up by the biggest corporations on the planet.
The only potential issue I see here is maybe Meta forks ActivityPub and it becomes a "Meta Project" or some other fuckery. Outside of that I don't see any major issues with it. If we want ActivityPub to become something greater, we're going to need corporations on board. We have strong protections in place right now with a lot of the stuff that's being used being under strong copyleft licenses, and decentralization by nature is going to allow us to opt out of a lot of the ads and tracking that takes place by being forced to use an official app.
My problem is that they will have their own mods, their own communities and their own content. They will flood the federated space with their content and ban people and servers they don't like. It could easily centralise due to the sheer amount of users they bring and you will find it hard to find non Facebook based communities.
While that is true, I anticipate that as a user you can choose to block all of that, just like I could have a reddit experience without r/conservative and without ads. We will always be able to find our niches, the size of which is determined by how many people share your values.
That being said, it's indeed up to us to make sure the largest communities don't end up on some weird fork that has ads.
They certainly want to compete with the fediverse with their own fediverse product, and are just approaching ActivityPub to learn as much about their open standard as possible, so that they can adapt it to be proprietary. But even that could work for me if it was still compatible with the fediverse, although they might be defederated from. It could actually be cool if it was defederated like on a protocol level, so that users from all lemmy instances could interact together on meta posts separately from users on meta instances
Okay, but I didn't know the real Gila Monster from PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation was on Lemmy!
Same here. I still find Twitter’s UI nearly incomprehensible. It’s never clear who is responding to whom, or what the topic is. I only go there if someone links to a tweet, and I usually back right out.
it's an interesting development that will have a direct impact on lemmy since mastodon and lemmy users can interact with each other.
time will tell how closely they follow microsoft's old "embrace, extend, extinguish" game plan for combatting open standards. who knows? maybe they will be good faith actors in this new space, or won't be able to gain enough user share to truly do nasty stuff.
Regardless of what people think of them, Facebook has a history of open sourcing their own code and tools, unlike early day Microsoft. They're very different companies and I think it's silly to arbitrarily apply the same playbook across entities, especially when that playbook is over 20 years old at this point.
But most importantly, that's just not how the fediverse works. What's the worst case scenario here? They pay developers to enhance open source code and instances selectively update? They know the second they push an update people don't like they'll be defederated, and maybe they're fine with that, but the fediverse as it exists now is not going anywhere. It's open source and it isn't the 90s anymore, I'm sure someone is going to fork it as soon as Meta releases a single line of code.
On the one hand, embrace-extend-extinguish is a classic playbook for big evil companies.
Facebook runs a version of mastodon or lemmy or whatever that is actually good
People get on board because it's usable and ostensibly open
Facebook invents features that, sadly, are not possible with ActivityPub (actual private messages come to mind)
On the other hand, it remains to be seen if anyone takes Meta up on a new offering. I'd have complete faith in the future of the open Internet if it was Google trying this.
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
It doesn't have to overlap if they bake it into their existing website. A huge portion of humanity has a Facebook account, even if they don't use it. They're baking in as much as they can with Marketplace taking over Craigslist's former space, trying to capture VR with your Facebook account, and now they want to take over Twitter's space. And I'm not saying the backend work wouldn't be huge, but their whole "posting stuff to people who follow you" schtick fits perfectly with the Fediverse. There's nothing stopping them from just federating everything.
Eh, I use Mastodon and had no idea. I think it only matters to fediverse supporters who care about how it works. Not dismissing their concerns, Facebook is verifiably harmful to society and democracy, but for the average user this is not even on their radar.
I just opened Icecubes and scrolled the Federated timeline for a while. Not a mention of Facebook or Meta so far as this is concerned.
I've heard some rumours but I'm not worried.They can create an instance if they want, by fediverse nature if they do something nasty others would be able to defederste from them.
personally, as one of the people who has come over from reddit very recently, i don't really see it as being my place to comment on it and at any rate there are many other people saying the exact same as me anyway. screw zuckerberg, he doesn't deserve to share in what other people have built here.
I read the article on it. The concern is that the Facebook instances will be defacto entry-points by sheer size a la lemmy.ml et al to a much grander scale, and they have more resources to support dev work than most public instances to incentivze a cleaner UX/UI a la lemmy -> kbin.
And when they're the biggest show in town, they have a magnetic pull towards new/future activity in the same way that the top 25 subreddits tend to suck the air out of all of the lesser known alternative subreddits.
The growth that they bring could have positive or negative results based on your view of the coin.
Definitely negative imo, when Facebook's black hole means all the communities that create lots of content reside on their servers, it's only a click of a button to take you away from that. Centralised decentralisation.
People already post a lot of content to Meta's platforms, people already post a lot of content to the Fediverse. There will still be people that don't want to be part of Meta's community, and there will still be users that are comfortable inside Meta's platforms. Meta joining the Fedivrrse will allow it's users to see that there's life outside of Meta's closed garden
Discussion is small because lemmy isn't integrated much with mastodon and kbin isn't as greatly integrated into lemmy on multiple ways.
Kbin got a limited lemmy integration likely just to have content.
Kbin generally is way smaller than the lemmy user base.
There's always going to be big players, power mods, corporations, etc. trying to invade every community. I'm not worried. They didn't kill the web, they aren't going to kill the fediverse.
I've seen a few minor discussions on kbin/lemmy but I think since a good chunk of people here are fledditors at the moment fediverse isn't on top their minds right now. In contrast to Mastodon users who have a much bigger chunk of seasoned users.
Ugh. Nothing is sacred. Why does everyone want to get rich? We don't do anything for the public good anymore. I hope Jimmy can get an link aggregator up that is hopefully not for profit. I think that is the only way, it was only a matter of time before someone "OpenAI"'d the fediverse.