I guess I don’t understand why we would be lenient with a corporation that has actively destroyed the modern internet for profits, blatantly violates user privacy, etc etc.
The topic of defederation seems to really make people want to break out their soap boxes to talk about open access and free love, despite you know… the real world being real, and corpos willing to shit on your good thing for a few bucks.
Allowing an org to federate is not being lenient, it is how federation works. Defederating should be done to protect the federation from a node causing harm to the federation–not preemptively in my opinion.
Facebook will cause harm by its very presence.
In any event, people with your opinion may end up in one fediverse “neighborhood,” and people with my opinion will end up in another.
I’m fine with that, as the “neighborhood” I end up in will have a lot less inane garbage everywhere.
Remember, Facebook literally facilitated ethnic cleansing as a result of their techbro “move fast and break things” philosophy and their disinterest in paying for content mods with knowledge of local languages.
Meta doesn’t give a fuck about anyone here or anything we’ve built. Mark Zuckerberg wants power and money and to push his weird bloodless McDonalds-ized vision of what the Internet should be on every single person on this planet.
Fuck that, and fuck any sort of cooperation with it.
I made the decision to leave shitty corporate platforms for a reason. The people I’d like to follow or interact with who still only use such platforms can come to their decision in their own time.
I am not interested in selling out my values, nor am I interested in enduring a tsunami of bottom-of-the-barrel interaction with average Meta users, in the name of interoperability. Meta made the choice to be a shitty entity with shitty values that builds shitty things. I don’t feel like being covered in shit.
My opinion on this is to preemptively defederate as Meta has proven itself time and again to be a bad actor; they have proven willing manipulate their feeds and algorithms to induce rage based engagement and even though they wouldn’t be in control of the fediverse, they will still at the very least try to heavily influence it. If the fediverse wasn’t a possible threat to them, they wouldn’t have created an app for it and made current fediverse operators sign NDAs. Additionally, if we are complacent, they could start creating Lemmy style fediverse communities to gain control of that aspect of the fediverse as well.
This feels a little bit like a “corporations are people” spin, intended or not. But I don’t think that’s benefited society all that much, in past.
are people and don’t deserve to be presumed guilty of Crimes Against The Fediverse for exploring it with any particular tool.
If they would like to explore, they are free to use any of the many tools not built by a shitty company with shitty intentions and many, many, many shitty users.
I would counter that Meta has used their “tool” to in essence to support a genocide and that makes them untrustworthy.
As for having open standards with no gatekeepers… that point is a false equivalency. We have open standard like encryption, but that doesn’t mean one should go post their private ssh keys online. There are bad actors in this world and Meta Inc is one of them.
Meta is not a person and Meta as a corporation (and the people who run it) are complicit in war crimes.
As for their users (which I am not conflating with Meta, the corporate entity), there is nothing stopping them from creating a Lemmy account.
Again, Meta is not a person and Meta is not it’s users. There is nothing wrong with many of the people who use Meta products.
Edited: I apologize, I removed part of the comment that was on retrospect, uncalled for.
If you block all of Meta just because they’re Meta, not only do you punish countless potential valued contributors who have done no wrong,
Bullshit. There’s no “punishment” whatsoever. Those users are free to open accounts on fediverse servers at any time.
you also embolden Meta to engage with the Fediverse in less legitimate, more underhanded ways.
You mean like anointing a few heads of big instances as representatives of fedi and trying to get them to sign NDAs? Shit like that?
Let’s focus on building affirmatively and consciously the community we want
This is literally the point of pre-emptive blocking. Meta is an existential threat to the quality of this place, period point blank.
People, individual people, built Fedi out of nothing. It’s our party, we quite like it, and we can pre-disinvite entities with an enormous track record of shitty behavior whenever we want.
If you want to interact with such entities and the typical user that comes with, by all means, find servers that federate. It will drive a netsplit, and that sucks, but it’s also working as intended.
I just hope SDF is on the right side of the split. Fuck Facebook and every single thing they stand for.
I don’t understand the point of doing so preemptively. Just make a standard set of rules. Defederate when someone breaks the rules. Keep it simple. No point of sending the message of “there is no value in integrating with the fediverse if you’re a large corporation”. Much better to send a message of “if you continue to be a bad actor, you’ll lose out on the benefits of the fediverse”
Ask yourself, in three years from now will you be thinking “it’s so nice how Meta lets me follow and interact with their enormous userbase for free, without advertising, using my own open source server and frontend”?
Remember that’s the basic expectation today for a participant in the fediverse. If this feels implausible, doing anything else is very incompatible with the fediverse’s existing values.
The problem isn’t just that it’s Meta, it’s any situation where a much larger actor comes in with different motivations. Today we have a small number of users whose servers are almost exclusively run on a “community service” model. Meta is an advertising business. They are much bigger and will define the fediverse if allowed in. If we allow them to connect, it should be much later after organic growth which means we can assimilate them properly and deflect any bad behaviour.
What might happen if Meta throws their weight around? I can predict at least three outcomes
- Proprietary variations to ActivityPub, probably starting with something that seems “understandable” like moderation reasons.
- Certain new features get centralised on Meta’s servers only (e.g. search) claiming that it’s for efficiency in the distributed environment.
- Claiming spam problems, require individual instance operators or their users to verify themselves with Meta to enable federation.
The question in my mind is whether their intention is to destroy the competition, or keep the fediverse alive as a way to claim that they are not a technical monopoly that needs to be broken up by regulators, in the same way that Google provides most of the funding for Firefox.