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I sure hope there’s a large group of servers that refuse to federate with servers run for profit. I didn’t come to be a product and be manipulated with algorithms.
“Not that kind of open.”
I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.
What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.
Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.
I’m glad to see my server doesn’t plan on federating with anything Meta hosts. I really don’t like the ‘wait and see’ approach; Meta has shown its true colors time and time before, they have not earned their trust.
Mine seems to be defending the idea, so I’m looking to move soon just not sure where anymore or when. It’s frustrating because it’s hard to find any actual positions he actually has on this topic when his timeline is just endless boosts giving people props for defending this. indieweb.social if anyone is curious.
Defederate-Block-Ban
The question is, how does one keep tabs on which communities and instances are part of Meta?
I admittedly am new to this all, but it seems like a kind of take over that could happen quietly, ending us up in a situation similar to what we see now with reddit but even more confusing for the average user.
Communities: Basically impossible, unless Meta/Facebook has a public list somewhere.
Instances: That will be public, because they have to register the domain somewhere and I’ll also assume that they will actually want people to know which ones are theirs, so their users join those.
I truly can’t imagine a world where they do it in secret. They’ll advertise it and slap their branding all over it.
Oh there’s a list of all their known domains and a mastodon bot that keeps track of new ones. I run my own mastodon instance and I have everything preemptively blocked.
List of Fediverse admins pledging to pre-block Meta instances: https://fedipact.online
It will be possible to have accounts on multiple instances, those that block Meta or federate with Meta. Then see what happens.
Not seeing a lot of Lemmy instances on there yet. Hopefully more will follow as it gets closer
Meta should be considered “harmful to humankind” (the list of atrocities is long) and I personally really don’t want anything to do with them.
It was only matter of time before one of the big players took interest. Too bad it had to be Meta, but I don’t think the others would have been much better.
The protocol itself isn’t secure, so if anyone is worried about data harvesting, better log off now and never return. Meta and anyone else can do that already (and is probably doing) without having to roll in with their own instances.
Federating with someone who might have 1.2 billion MAUs is kinda scary because most protocol implementations (like Mastodon) are huge mess of bloat and inefficiencies under the hood. Someone paying their hosting out of their own pocket or trusting on kindness of strangers should be wary of the amount of data that’s going to hit them with federation.
It’s probably silly to expect “unified blocklist”. Some people are fixated with the idea of growth and equate mass popularity with success. Others would rather “wait and see”. Let them. The fediverse used to be much more homogeneous place 3-4 years ago, but we’re nearing 10M users. That’s simply too many people and voices for there to be just one response.
Luckily there doesn’t need to be. The protocol allows for creation of spaces that don’t have to interact with Meta.
I’m more concerned about tracking tbh. But it’s good to know they’re planning to get a piece of the cake. I’m ready to block them.
Each instance admin decides which servers to block for themselves. If you visit the info pages of some systems they will list blocked systems, and there are a lot of them.
There are some very unsavoury communities out there. Blocking usually revolves around how effective moderation is.
As an example you can see a list of servers blocked by mastodonapp.uk on the About page.
https://mastodonapp.uk/about
Oliphant maintains a minimum block list that most systems take as a starter list.
apparently some Mastodon admins got contacted by Meta and met with them after signing an NDA. I’m quite surprised how many Masto admins want to “just wait and see, maybe it’s not gonna be that bad”.
“Meta and met with them after signing an NDA”
This should tell quite enough.
I’d guess they were made an offer they couldn’t refuse, ie money.
I’m guessing you haven’t been on the #Fediverse very long so not picked up on the ethos of most of the folk who run the various instances.
Most are very protective of what they have created as a community and are definitely not in it for the money. Some are vehemently anti-capitalist.
There are many ways to get rich. Running an instance is not one of them.
Words are cheap though. Not casting aspersions on anyone in particular, but hypocrisy is a common human characteristic. Greed has a way of bending people’s principles when a real world opportunity presents itself.
Maybe we can counter offer an offer they couldn’t refuse, ie eat their donors.
Who are these donors and what does “eating” them actually entail?
I’m surely misinterpreting you, because it sounds like you’re suggesting murdering people over SoMe bullshit.
Pretty sure parent is making a glib reference to the common “eat the rich” saying. It’s meant to be a provocative way to illustrate a larger message of anti-capitalism and the immorality of extreme wealth disparity.
Let’s demonise a subset of the population and joke about murdering them just like my ideological comrades did in the 19th century! Look how provocative I’m being.
Defending billionaires is an even more ammoral act than making a joke you don’t like, comrade.
I dislike seeing radicals joke about murdering their enemies. It dehumanises them which helps extremism takes hold.
Of course that is the point of such jokes, but you shouldn’t be surprised if people call you out on it.
Yes, it absolutely is the point. I don’t think billionaires should exist, full stop. They have already dehumanized everyone but themselves, so IMO turnaround is completely fair in this situation. Starting with a very extreme demand like “eat the rich” gives us lots of room to negotiate their surrender.
In general, I agree with you. But some cases are too important and cannot be reasoned with. As an otherwise avowed pacifist, I’d put “punch a Nazi in the face” on this list of acceptable moral hypocrisy, too.
You’re kidding yourself if you think it’s a negotiation tactic. When the revolution comes, such revisionism will get you executed by true believers.
But at least you’re useful to them for the time being. Someone needs to radicalise the people who will carry out the purges.
SKill issue tbf, we should all unalive the rich
Won’t someone think of the poor billionaires!
Save the Rich! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej7dfPL7Kho
I am a donor on various instances.
I’d take a dim view of being eaten.
Absolutely! And given that they have a gazillion users they can willingly move around they can drown us out in a day if they want
They will drown us out even if they don’t want in that case. Them just using the service normally will flood all our feeds with posts from their service based on the sheer number of them.
Alternatively, imagine a world where the US government passed a “privacy bill of rights” and also required online platforms to be freely interchangeable via open protocols like ActivityPub.
Won’t happen any time soon, and if you ask why, go read !news@beehaw.org for a little bit and come back.
The bad news aside, I think “privacy bill of rights” is the right way of thinking to get people and tech to a happier place.
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don’t have the power you think we do.
What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They’ll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn’t even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it’s Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It’s like an absolute wet dream for them. They don’t even have to coax people to use their own platform!
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you’ve ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
Edit: And it’s even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.
Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.
What I’m taking issue with is essentially the same thing that is getting Reddit into hot water. Spez is acting like all the content on Reddit is exclusively his. And legally, it probably is, since it exists on his servers. Now if you extrapolate that out to Meta on ActivityHub, any instance that federates with them immediately puts all of your content directly onto Meta’s servers. Once it’s in their possession, it’s legally theirs to do with as they please. If they want to pull a Facebook or Reddit, using your data, they can with no way for you to opt-out. Sure, nothing is stopping people from doing it already, but Meta does not have your best interest in mind. Ever. They’ve shown it again and again. So I think people are preemptively wanting to cut off this spigot of user data to Meta because their abuse of it is a matter of when, not if. Any other company might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Meta? We know who they are already.
Also, as I said elsewhere, Meta could already use a bot to scrape Lemmy instances, but you can’t sell a bot to investors. But you can sell a platform. Meta will build a slick platform to sell to investors and sit back while federation fills up their instance with data which they’ll turn around and sell the same way they do on Facebook. To me this is very different than setting up an RSS feed.
I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.
Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.
Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.
If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.
So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.
Thank you for your clarification! I don’t know any of the legal specifics of this stuff and I very much appreciate you taking the time to help educate me and anyone else who needs it. I can only give a conceptual argument based on the history I’ve seen with these companies, but not any sort of specific knowledge of law.
The gist of what you’re saying, and what we’ve actually seen play out recently, is technically they shouldn’t be able to do this, but they’re going to lawyer it in such a way that they’ll get away with it unless/until someone actually sues them which is prohibitively expensive. We have recently seen class action suits against Meta, but realistically the damage has already been done, the money has already been made, and they go on with finding the next cash cow. Even a multimillion dollar settlement is a drop in the bucket, simply the cost of doing business for these people.
Exactly so! 🙂😭
You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn’t count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don’t process the data and simply present it, as is - they don’t break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don’t ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.
Yes, this is exactly the sticky issue we get into. And I’m wondering if lawyers would be able to make a case that using ActivityPub alone automatically gives your consent to have your data exist on an instance outside your own. Once they have data you’ve consented to give they can do with it as they please, essentially arguing you’ve become a consenting party when you consented to federation. I don’t know the GDPR well enough to have any answers, but you can bet Meta lawyers do.
I don’t think Facebook would be having high level NDA-protected talks with Mastodon people if they weren’t trying to work all this out. And by work out, I mean how to monetize/data mine. I’ve been talking about this with people all day, many of whom didn’t see a problem with this, but eventually all of them have had the lightbulb turn on when they realize the potential abuse Meta could do with/to ActivityPub.
If, by some miracle, Meta wants to be the good guy for a change, let them prove it. I would love to see defederation by default, and let Meta prove they’re trustworthy to federate to. And even then, have a really itchy defederate trigger finger if they even hint at pulling another Cambridge Analytica fiasco. But getting everyone on-board with that is probably impossible, especially if Meta starts throwing money around.
Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether “normal” users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.
Thank you for the clarification there. I hope you don’t mind having this conversation with me, I’m learning a lot by interacting with people on this topic. I don’t want you to feel like I’m arguing with you though. So the GDPR seems fairly bullet proof, but it only applies within the EU. So how about a scenario like this:
Your instance is hosted in the EU and has the full protection of the GDPR. My instance is hosted in the US where the GDRP does not apply. Your instance federates with mine. I federate with Meta. Meta now has your data but they didn’t get it from a GDPR protected source. You consented to give it to me, and I consented to give it to them. They have no obligation to uphold the GDPR because they’ve had no interaction with your instance whatsoever, they’ve simply accepted what I gave them and that transaction occurred within the jurisdiction of the US.
Maybe the GDPR still works here, I don’t know. But I guess my point is that if I can come up with endless scenarios like this, lawyers can too, and they know infinitely more about the law than I do. Hell, they can even come up with their own interpretations of law and act on them for years, only changing their practices when they’re forced to by someone actually suing them. Which by then they’ve already collected and sold millions worth of data.
I feel like outside the federated system, meta would rely on geographic metadata (eg IP address) to identify if a user was within the scope of the GDPR or not. But they aren’t going to have access to any of this information, when they receive the data from another server in the fediverse. There will be zero way for them to identify if a user from any server in the fediverse would be applicable to the GDPR or not, because any user from any country can basically sign up anywhere. It will be difficult for them to argue against that - since it’s highly publicised that when Mastodon was struggling under the strain of the massive influx of new users - that people were being advised to find an instance that aligned to their interests rather than just their geographical location. Indeed I am on a Scottish server - where I arrived in 2019, but I have recently started another account on a US server ( allthingstech.social) so I would indeed be a user protected by GDPR on a US server. Because Meta have no way of knowing where a user comes from, the only thing they can definitely legally do - is process data from their own known users - but they are crossing into dangerous territory the second they start trying to process data from users outside their own instance. In my opinion anyway.
And no I don’t mind debating at all. There needs to be a lot more debate, and a lot less death threats and screaming matches online - in order for us to start resolving anything.
Edit:
The GDPR applies to data on people. So in your example - it doesn’t matter how Meta got the data, the point is that they have data on citizens that are protected by the GDPR, the fact that the data arrived indirectly via a US server, doesn’t remove the protection afforded to the EU citizen
Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.
I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.
The whole point of the Fediverse is to add a human-based trust component. Why would a company that has repeatedly shown itself to not be trustworthy get the benefit of the doubt?
IMO, Meta can start their own instance and ask to be invited to the larger system, assuming they first prove to be worth taking that risk.
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Irrelevant. See above.
Wouldn’t the “extend” part be problematic for them since it’s W3C that define the protocol? If meta tries to change it it’d break compatibility with the rest of the federation. Not that it is that well defined right now, from what I’ve read even mastodon, kbin and lemmy all use AP in different ways, with upvotes/downvotes and post types being interpreted and used in different ways from the technical standpoint and then jury-rigged in frontend to look decent.
I think the major issue that people might be concerned about is they might try to use a carrot to get people reliant on their instances.
Then they start making breaking changes and integrating proprietary stuff into it so that it’s all much more closed source; and unless you’re on an instance that they control, now suddenly a lot of the people who you used to be able to talk to on the Fediverse just can’t be interacted with from your instance.
Like, the “World Wide Web” is the primary way people use to access the internet (we’re using it now!); but despite the W3C you’ll have commercial browsers that just don’t play nice with the standards and some websites that wind up, because of that, only working in commercial browsers (Internet Explorer was infamous for this, and apparently Chromium has its issues with this as well). You further see websites that’ll attract a huge userbase - using that open standard - and then kind of try to push everyone into using a non-WWW (but still internet!) app; meaning that what once you could have accessed from any web software you’re now restricted to one single option that’s beholden to the whims of that corporation. That’s not to say that any of these is what Facebook will do (I’m not actually concerned that they’re going to try to lock it behind an app; it’s just an example that I can think of, especially given the recent Reddit drama - Reddit is also trying to kill their mobile site and effectively move people on mobile from the open WWW standard to an app, and have made mobile painful for awhile; and they’re not the first site to add a “This site is better in our app” banner to mobile)
Of course, with the Fediverse they’d have a lot harder of a time doing that quickly without the cooperation of a few big instances. We aren’t really sure what the people who spoke to them have agreed to, but we do know that they signed NDAs meaning there’s something that Facebook doesn’t want them to talk about.
Personally if this really was something good that we shouldn’t be worried about? They should be able to be transparent about it. They’re not, and that’s concerning.
Honestly at the end of the day I’m just tired of people trying to make every single cent they can off of me. I want to live my life and have hobbies and talk to people and I’m tired of some greedy asshole taking a look at the tech and creativity that enables it and going “But how can I make money off of that?”
Some things shouldn’t be about money.
So… kinda like Mastodon then?
Let’s not pretend that Mastodon hasn’t also implemented it’s own non standard things - such that if someone wants to make an app that works with Mastodon, it’s MORE than just the ActivityPub spec they have to follow - you will see this quite a lot now where platforms will say they are using ActivityPub and are also Mastodon compatible.
I doubt they would be willing to let people host and control their own versions of federated facebook, and I’m wondering then what would make it “decentralized” exactly. Are they just using decentralized as a buzz word because they are using ActivityPub?
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Everyone who cares about their instance and the fediverse as a whole needs to defederate and block their instances as soon as they pop up.
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The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
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