I do not want my posts from anywhere on the Fediverse on FaceBook.
I have have seen people express worry over FaceBook posts showing up on the Fediverse. But, what about our posts showing up on FaceBook.
If Meta federates with the Fediverse, do my Mastodon posts (e.g.) show up on FaceBook?
It’s not Facebook that will federate. It’s their new to be released platform. So nothing will go on Facebook.
And like any other server you can just block theirs in your account so they don’t see you and you don’t see them.
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Pretty much this, your post could still end up on search engine results, people could share your post through posting the URL on other sites, etc.
It just means there’s better connectivity and (hopefully, in the near future) better content serving. Also you don’t need to create an account for every single site (if you dont want to)
I think it would be the new Instagram Threads app. It looks like a great way for them to get a lot of free content for their new app.
I’m very interested in what thr Mastodon and Lemmy instance admins have planned. I think there are great arguments made in: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I haven’t heard counter arguments that are equally well supported, but would love to hear them.
As someone who is cautiously optimistic about Meta’s ActivityPub adventure, my main disagreement with the author is over
The goal [of the Fediverse] is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer
I’d like to see ActivityPub and the Fediverse at large succeed, that is actually gain significant adoption among the average user, people that don’t care about freedom, decentralization etc. I disagree with a very common take on the Fediverse which seems to be “we don’t want to succeed, we want to make our happy little garden, it doesn’t matter if the overwhelming majority of people stay on centralized social media” because I think widespread adoption of federation (for social media, but also for code forges etc.) and open, interoperable protocols (matrix!) is important for society: less reliance on American tech giants, more resilience (services just shutting down as they run out of VC money impacts less content/users) and so on.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale. The risk of EEE is very real though, but Meta making an ActivityPub move will hopefully be a signal for others to follow, and the best way of ensuring Meta doesn’t subvert ActivityPub development is by having other stakeholders that are just as important to counterbalance its influence, not by having 5k-10k-users instances de-federate from Threads because their admin (rightfully!) doesn’t like Meta.
Im on the other end of this. As a recent reddit refugee and general anti capitalist i am strongly opposed to association or integration of tech giants with this fledgling infant of a democratic social network. Time and again corporations have shown that they will inevitably ruin a good thing for their profits. It happens all the time, your food gets more expensive while quality and quantity only decline. Everyday goods are now subscriptions, everything becomes a commodity. Buying a home is a fever dream for the average citizen because commercial entities buy anything and everything even over market rate just to corner the market. And to use some more recent tech examples, look at streaming services. Piracy was a thing, then Netflix came and made it obsolete through convenience and a fair price. Now greed has not only ruined Netflix but also spawned a dozen subpar clones because everyone makes their content exclusive out of greed, devaluing each other. And just these last weeks we can watch what short sighted bullshit happens to social media when billionaires (or spez) feel their fortune is in danger.
Fuck right off with yet another corporation quasi monopolizing internet communities. Any instance that associates with corporations is an immediate quit and block for me.
I agree. I want nothing to do with corporations.
I have been working hard to delete all my corporate social media accounts. Reddit and Twitter is gone. This next week is FaceBook. I just can’t take they way corporations ruin things just to make billionaires more money. I don’t want to add to that.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale.
Why do you think donation based doesn’t scale? If x percent of users donate and the server cost per user scales linearly it does. Also as large User numbers are reached you will find some power users which free to play games call whales. I don’t see how it doesn’t scale financially.
It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don’t think we are in a hurry here. I’m not on the building a little garden side of things. It’d be great if eventually all social would be open source and decentralized. It’s a must to keep our societies and democracies intact even. You can’t enormously powerful tools of mass communication and mass manipulation in the hands of companies and closed source algorithms nobody knows what they do.
I do like your counterbalance argument. If multiple tech companies come in competition might reduce the risk of EEE. And I do hope decentralization reduces the risk of them putting their own sorting algorithm on things and then killing other apps by not adhering to certain standards or something.
I think my belief that donation-supported instances won’t scale comes from the assumption that the users donating today are those that do so for ideological reasons, they want to see the Fediverse succeed, they are anti-capitalists etc. Most of these type of users are already on the Fediverse, as you move towards “the average user” that propensity to donating gets rarer and rarer, because they just want a social media platform that works and are perfectly fine with ad-supported models of alternatives, so I assume that percentage of users willing to donate does not stay steady with growth.
But a good example of a project that has managed to get even the average person to donate is Wikipedia, so maybe with enough nag-bars and the appropriate messaging Fedi instances will manage to do so as well. I certainly hope so! I also hope to see other non-commercial entities like not-for-profit institutions and government bodies on the Fediverse but again I believe these tend to move slowly and only adopt things that have sufficient momentum, momentum that might come from the Meta move.
It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don’t think we are in a hurry here.
In my opinion there is some hurry, we’ve already seen Mastodon user count slumping before the latest Twitter fiasco and alternatives like Bluesky and Threads are coming online, whether they federate or not. Social media relies on network effects, and the current collapse of Twitter is a golden opportunity for the Fediverse to get that critical mass necessary for widespread adoption. Slow steady growth might not be possible, as people don’t tend to stick around if most of their (para-)social circle is consolidating on another platform.
Wikipedia was the example I had in mind as well for donation based large scale funding that works. Especially if you consider how over funded the project is as they divert money into tons of side projects while still having enough money in the bank to keep up the site for decades. It makes me hopeful this can work.
I see a danger in too explosive growth. It could lead to an unhealthy rapid change of the user base. This is why I would prefer a somewhat steady growth. But you are absolutely right in that there are big opportunity costs to not making use of the collapse of other platforms. Which with the continued enshittification of social media will likely continue.
Lastly I just want to say how happy I am that healthy discussion like this one are possible around here.
I am also not sure how EEE is supposed to work with decentralized platforms. In the end, everyone can say “that it’s all too much for me and I’ll build my own network with like-minded people, just like at the beginning of the fediverse.”
The article linked above describes how Google killed a federated service by EEE. If you are interested how it can work I’d recommend it.
After EEE is done the fediverse would be irrelevant and lack users. But course it doesn’t stop people from making their own servers and federating into small communities. But the vast majority of users would use the meta version which was eventually made incompatible with the fediverse. That made 99% of users go there. And I if you ask someone to join your fediverse groups they’ll wonder why you are not on the meta thing instead.
As I stated in another comment it is not impossible that they may leech the fediverse to death but I think its highly unlikely. The fediverse is much more than just a decentralised platform. It is an amalgamation of many platforms with different userbases and different goals. In order for the fediverse to collapse, everything would have to be replaced together as well as the flexibility to continuously integrate new services, as is the case here now.
In the case of XMPP, the community became a passive spectator of google’s advance and was eventually replaced by it. But as long as the community does not become dependent on the big corpos in any way and regards their contributions more as a nice bonus, something like this will not happen. It is this self-sufficiency that allows the freedom to go one’s own way and to keep the power decentralised in the community. I have to admit, however, that this can be a big challenge, but one that is nevertheless manageable.
I see some merit in Ploum’s argument that the same way the Google monolith slowed down XMPP development, Meta could slow down ActivityPub development or steer it in a certain direction by forcing others to implement their extensions if they want to keep interoperability, before finally dumping it. But yes the “extinguish” situation would then be a return to the current status-quo, Fediverse as a tiny niche of like-minded people doing their own thing.
