Meta and Mastodon – What’s really on people’s minds?
ianbetteridge.comA very detailed article about the whole Meta (Instagram/Threads) vs. Fediverse discussions. It’s a long read, but well-worth it if you’re interested in the subject.
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Just yesterday i was seeing this comment by one of the Calckey maintainers. pasting here for the lazy the relevant bit:
I frankly cannot fathom how can somebody be so blind to how odious it is. And yeah, when called up on it he also fell into “But the protocol!” arguments, which seems to be the take people holding the pro-Meta arguments are holding. They just don’t realize that this is not a technical problem but a social one, it’s not about the marvelous internet machine, but about the people that rely on it. Like Treebeard said, “a mind of metal and wheels”.
People act like facebook isn’t a hellspawn of far right hatred, fascism, and general stupidity in all of it’s glorious forms. I’m just fine with my instance defederating them because Im just fine with not seeing posts from Moms for Liberty, or proud boys, or ivermectin treatments, or whatever the fuck goes on over there now a days. If I wanted to see facebook shit, I’d go to fuckin’ facebook wouldn’t I? It has little to do with corporate or not corporate.
It does a little. Because controversy sells better. And scandals are free marketing. So these platforms thrive off this shitty content. At a minimum they tolerate it. Maybe they even actively push it.
If I run my own instance, I can choose who I share with and who I don’t.
The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t want my data to be Zucc’d, and clearly I’m not the only one who thinks that way.
I don’t use any Facebook products for a reason, and I would not want to have to move to a different instance if the one I chose would federate with Meta. And the same goes for other data-hoarding companies out there, in case they try to enter this space.
Exactly, and that’s why the response has been so negative. Every instance that federates with another stores a complete copy of the posts and comments from every federated user.
If the majority of instances do not defederate from a Meta instance, that Instance will inevitably become the primary destination for discussion, even between and by non Meta-Instance based users, just because the communities in that Instance will be so large and active. And even if they don’t, Meta Instance will have a stored copy of every community whose Instance is federated.
Meta will then have carte blanche to collect data on a huge collection of users from outside their own Instance.
I acknowledge that they could get the same data by scraping the public Instances anyway, but still… Fuck all of that.
That’s the point of the fediverse: owning your own fediverse experience. This blog post assumes the point of the fediverse is fill distributed connectivity. I see that attitude a lot. And if that’s what people want they deserve that. People deserve to interface with Project 93 how they feel like (be that enthusiastically, cautiously, or not at all)
Yeah absolutely. Instances are free to connect with Meta’s product as they please. If that draws a wall between a group of servers refusing to connect with those that do, I’m OK with that.
Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants. Nothing is stopping you today from paying your friendly local business or association to host a mailbox for you. Of course self-hosting e-mail is an absolute pain, but that’s because most e-mail sent is spam, the drastic blocking is just needed. Similarly if the Fediverse sees any kind of meaningful adoption, preemptively blocking small instances will just be needed to crack down on spam.
I’m cautiously optimistic about Meta adopting Activitypub for their new platform. It might signal enough interest to make other smaller (and more trustworthy!) actors follow suit and set up their own platforms or Mastodon instances.
I would be ok with allowing federation until they (inevitably) cause problems.
This was surprisingly worth every second of my time 1st I didn’t know about this whole meta vs fediverse thing and 2nd it was highly informative and interesting to read, now I totally understand why they wanna defederate from threads
To quote myself from an earlier thread:
I want something different away from that crowd. I want a community of nice people that get along. I want to get away from Facebook, meta, and all. They just suck the soul out of everything