I would like to know if I can feel safe here, or if I should pack it up and start looking elsewhere sooner rather than later.
If the kbin staff have already made there intentions clear, please let me know.
I would like to know if I can feel safe here, or if I should pack it up and start looking elsewhere sooner rather than later.
If the kbin staff have already made there intentions clear, please let me know.
I think misunderstand. I do understand that. I used XMPP. I’ve read that article.
My argument is that the fedipact, if executed as desired by the people running it, will defederate from Meta and anywhere that federates with Meta.
So now you have 2 fediverses, completely separated from one another. One side has Meta; the other doesn’t. If I want to post something and I want people to see it and react to it, I will post it to the side with more people. If I want to scroll endlessly without needing to stop and refresh or wait because the feed is stale, I will look at the side with more people.
The other side - the fedipact side - will slowly become stale and niche. There will always be hardcore users - people still use XMPP - but it will fade into what it was in 2020 and 2021. My Lemmy account - @EnglishMobster - is from 2020. My original Mastodon account is even older. I’ve seen this place grow and blossom into what it is now, and the fedipact is threatening that growth. People will leave the side of the fedipact and join the side without it… which is to say, the side dominated by Meta.
Instead of a big wide fediverse with open source projects living alongside random PeerTube creators living alongside movie stars… we have 1 niche one and 1 dominated by a large corporation. It’s literally the same result as if Meta went through with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish… but done without the “extend” or “extinguish”, a massive “own goal” by the FOSS community.
And worse - it doesn’t stop Facebook from going through with “extend” or “extinguish” later. It literally just destroys communities for no reason, leaving us in the exact same situation that XMPP is in today.
I am fine with an instance saying “we won’t federate with Threads”. I’d rather it not be Kbin, of course, but I will move to an instance that does federate because my friends are important to me.
I am not fine with me being held hostage for that. I don’t want to join Threads directly if I can avoid it; I’d rather use my Kbin account. But the fedipact is trying to make that impossible by saying “we will defederate anywhere that federates with Threads”.
If that’s the case, presumably you’re in the fediverse for other reasons? If audience size is central to you, wouldn’t you be on reddit and insta/facebook?
To an extent, but morality is important to me too.
I don’t use Facebook because they corrupt democracy. I don’t use Twitter because Elon Musk is a wannabe fascist. I don’t use Reddit because they have refused to clamp down on bad actors and have directly insulted their users.
If everyone defederates from Threads, I won’t use Threads, because I don’t use Facebook. My morals are more important to me than audience size.
But… as things stand, once Threads federates with the wider world, I will be able to interact with my friends without letting Zuck near me. In a most ideal world, they’d be able to follow me here on Kbin and I can follow them back. I’d see their posts in the Microblog feed and sorted into magazines, and I can like and comment and boost without logging into Zuck’s website and letting him have my data again.
You can say that’s supporting Facebook. Maybe. But if Threads is truly federated, then Facebook would basically be able to go anywhere regardless; in that sense I’d be supporting Threads whether I was talking to someone directly or not.
And in that sense, I totally see why people say “we shouldn’t federate with Meta, they’re evil and they’re selfish and they’re going to destroy the fediverse.” I can understand why people personally would want to choose somewhere that doesn’t do that. I don’t think this instance should block Meta because it’s large and general-purpose, but somewhere like Beehaw where that sort of thing is part of the mission statement… I get it.
But from my perspective, I am given the chance to talk to a large group of people; people who share the same interests as me; people I know in real life. People who would see my stuff - but (more importantly) I’d also see theirs. And I’m sure most people feel the same way; they’re going to where the people are. This’ll naturally create an audience, one that gives a wide variety of fresh content and also responds to content you give.
I’d much rather have that then return to 2020-era Mastodon where you’d be lucky to get 3 interactions to a Toot, and you’d see everything there is to see in 15 minutes (at most).
I think I might have misunderstood your wider point. The part where you were positing a hypothetical in which the fediverse splits and one side has Meta. I thought you were saying you will align with the Meta side because of audience size.
Which kind of implies that if Meta then moves into the Extend Extinguish phases you would end up at Threads?
At the Extend phase I would encourage fighting back - or at least making it clear that we are separate from Threads and shouldn’t copy them.
I wouldn’t leave for Threads during Extinguish; I’d stay here. But I would just sit back and mourn what could’ve been.
Just like how I mourn XMPP whenever I see Pidgin in software center.
Just like how I mourn when my Windows Phone had SMS, Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger all in the stock texting app.
I’ll survive. I’m not going to Zuck’s site. But I’ll be really sad that I’m not going to be able to talk to my friends from anywhere else.
i’m sorry but you’re naive.
do you know how FB or instagram work? Do you think that when you post, your post reaches your whole audience? I believe you know how they work but for some reason you chose to ignore now.
So, you’ve read the history of XMPP. Did you understand what google practically did? Simply put, meta will create new features on top of activity pub. Open source activity pub developers will be in a constant race to adapt their own projects in a way that will be compatible with meta’s project. They will have no voice but to follow whatever meta decides. Users will start getting fed up that their open source instance is not behaving as well as their friend’s meta instance. People will jump project and/or when users are polarised, meta will decide that they had enough with activity pub. It doesn’t cover their needs and they move to another completely closed project. Users again are forces to choose side and the open source community is just left with the project which they adapted in favour of meta, but now meta is gone because they were never in the same boat actually.
Staying away from meta is a decision in the basis of protecting the whole project. It is not because people don’t want to be close to the users of meta. It is because meta is not here to promote the federated networks. It is here to make profit of it and they may even destroy it if they believe that this is the way to make profit. Siding with them is naive and will never bring value in the network itself.
None of that addresses the objection that has been raised though.
If instances want to defederate from meta that is perfectly fine, the Fediverse is supposed to be about choice.
Instances should not however be able to dictate what OTHER people on other instances are able to do.
By doing so - that part of the fediverse is behaving in exactly the same way that they fear that meta will behave eventually.
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I don’t get it. Nobody dictated anyone. People want absolutely none relation with meta and they want to be on a different network than meta. By federating with instances that federate with meta, everyone ends up in the same federated network while some pretend that they don’t see each other. Meta is not here for the same values they are. Meta is not here for the values of the fediverse. Ostracizing meta is the only healthy solution if we agree that they have ulterior motives.
by not doing so, is like accepting meta as friend while at the same time you’re waiting for the moment they’ll stab you. Fediverse and activity pub have absolutely nothing to gain by allowing this.
@asjmcguire
Right… so - the long and short of it is -
A company (any company) decides to integrate with ActivityPub, and the entire fediverse has a toys out of the pram moment every time that happens, gradually closing off into smaller and smaller federated circles, that stop federating with the rest of the fediverse.
A reminder, Tumblr are supposed to be adding ActivityPub.
Wordpress has.
Discourse I believe now has.
So who exactly is it that gets to decide which companies are and are not allowed to be part of the Fediverse?
It’s all very very much like a dictatorship, whether you want to accept it or not - that’s exactly how it is being operated.
Absolute strawman from the very first paragraph. Some people might complain about any company, but this uproar is specifically about facebook. Let’s not pretend they are just any other company. They are among a short list of companies who have demonstrated just how awful a big tech company can be if allowd.
They have at no time in their history demonstrated any capability to be anything other than an example of all the worst things that Stallman or any of the OG greybeards would ever have warned us about. They are corporate greed exemplified, nearly to the point of parody.
I’m waiting for the part where you explain the problem.
Just like today the folks who want to interact with the quality of discussion you get on facebook will be able to do so, and those who don’t, won’t.
I have scrolled this thread quickly so maybe I’m misattributing, but I feel like you’ve commented on how you and others will go to instances with “more users” more than once - as if this is some universal success metric.
I will go to the side which has quality discussion, and I’m exceptionally doubtful it’s going to be the part of the fediverse that federates with meta. More users does not equal better discussion. I would argue that past a certain critical mass it almost guarantees lower quality discussion.
The fact that there CAN BE two fediverses seems to me a feature, not a bug.
If you want “quality discussion”, why are you on here and not Tildes? Tildes’ whole purpose is quality discussion. Shouldn’t you go for the place where that’s being optimized for?
Tildes is a great example, actually. They’re small and quiet and want to be quiet. They don’t want to take off. You can get through Tildes in an hour.
That’s why I get bored of Tildes easily. I don’t want to just be one-and-done with a site. I want to constantly be discovering new things. I want to see number go up (to an extent). I want to read a bunch of comments, some insightful, some dumb.
If I’m going to post something, I don’t want to post it to Tildes. I’ll get a slow trickle of comments and replies, people replying to a week-old post with something I’ve long stopped thinking about.
I worry that if defederation comes and severs the fediverse in two, engagement will go down. Mastodon.social isn’t part of the fedipact, and likely won’t be. Everywhere that relies on content from Mastodon.social - which is a lot of them, non-techies don’t want to find a specific instance - will have a lot less content, very suddenly.
People like me who love refreshing feeds will see the torrent of posts slowly… come… to… a… stop. People like me will get bored - where are all the posts? Why can’t I see the creators I really like?
“Well, they’re on a server that federates with a server that federates with Meta.”
So you’ll just be left with those in the fedipact. People who are used to the fast-moving feed (like me) will get frustrated. There’s a reason why I left Mastodon in 2019ish and why I left Lemmy in 2020 - they got boring quickly (well, Lemmy was also full of tankies). I left Tildes because it got boring quickly too.
I’m in this sort of industry. I’m not going to reveal much about what I specifically do, but I know that most people want something that is new and exciting and moves fast. It draws them in and causes them to spend most of their time there.
When that feed slows down, they spend less time on that site. When they have enough experiences of “opening the app just to close it again”, they’ll eventually remove it from their home screen (or bookmarks). Then it gets forgotten about.
When the user forgets about a site, it gets less content. In turn, that makes the content even slower. In turn, that drives more people away, except for the die-hards who love slow discussions (like Tildes or 2019-era Mastodon).
Where are the people who left going to go? Well, they might go to where their creators were - somewhere like Mastodon.social. Or they’ll leave entirely, or they’ll move to Bluesky or Threads.
A lot of those options aren’t healthy for the broader fediverse, so you’ll just have this one branch that is dominated by Meta and the other which slowly dies as people leave due to increasingly stale content. If they were united, they might’ve stood a chance against Meta if/when Meta made an anti-competitive move… but divided they’re a lot easier for Meta to scoop up and slowly extinguish, XMPP-style.
Again, the fedipact is doing Meta’s dirty work for them.
Well I mean first of all, it’s not “most people”. It’s “most people in the influencer industry”.
Second of all, fuck those people. They don’t care about corpos running their lives. We don’t need them or their content in the fediverse.
And thirdly, you’re in that category too. You’re a shill for big corpos but you want a veneer of respectability. Just join Facebook and get it over with.
How many times must I say that I disagree with Facebook on a moral level? How does that make me a “shill”??
My point is largely:
The fedipact is self-defeating. Nobody has refuted this point, they all seem to ignore it to focus on personal attacks. It won’t stop EEE; it will simply divide the fediverse and make it a worse place when it’s still new and fragile.
This is a general-purpose instance. As such, it shouldn’t sign the fedipact or defederate from Threads. If you’re running a niche instance - that’s fine, you can sign if it’s important to you and you wish to stay niche. But a loud minority shouldn’t speak for the entirety of one of the largest fediverse instances out there (which is what kbin.social is).
People may have legitimate reason to communicate with people on Threads, and because they may disagree with Facebook on a moral level (like me), you shouldn’t force them into Zuck’s slimy fingers. I’m not going to use the service if I have to go through Zuck’s gateway to do so. There’s an opportunity to use FOSS stuff and stay away from Zuck, but people who ostensibly agree that Zuck is bad are telling me I can’t do that? For reasons they can’t even vocalize. So me not wanting to join Threads makes me a corporate shill, somehow. Okay.
By opening up the fediverse to Facebook, you’re already in Zuck’s slimy fingers. You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too. Doesn’t work like that. Those who federate with them will get eaten by them.
And here’s a point for you to consider:
Why don’t you just host your own instance? Federate with Threads AND the rest of the Fediverse? Why are you trying to convince us to federate with Facebook at all??
Here’s a point for you, then:
Why must you force your beliefs onto communities with tens of thousands of people, many of whom don’t agree with you? The status quo is that kbin.social federates with basically everywhere, as it should since it’s a general-purpose flagship instance. Why do you want to change the status quo because of your personal beliefs?
Instead of trying to force Kbin.social to change, maybe you should host your own instance where you can block Meta and everywhere that federates with it. Or you can join a Kbin instance that already does so: https://kglitch.social/
But there should still be places that allow for federation if that’s what they desire. That’s how Kbin.social is currently set up. I am defending the current status quo, and you are trying to argue for changing it. There are instances that already agree with you; you don’t need to stay here and fight everyone who disagrees.