Mastodawn

Kit Rhett Aultman Jun 19, 2023

So, @epilanthanomai and the #SignsAndCodes family, I figure we should have a conversation about this and out-in-the-open is best. This place was originally created in response to Meta's (then Facebook's) anti-sex-work and, briefly, anti-queer policies. Now it seems that Meta is looking into Fediverse-related projects, and has been meeting with major instance admins under NDA. If/when Meta arrives here, what sould our policy towards them be? All thoughts and opinions welcome, public or private.

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I Forget Jun 19, 2023

@roadriverrail Personally I'd rather not have my content from here feeding their shitty site. I've just finally required follow requests, and I'll be denying requests from them.

I'm unclear whether we should instance-block them. I'm initially inclined slightly against it. We block for scraping and abuse. IMO Meta is both, but if a user here wants to talk to a relative who's only on IG, do I want to refuse them that because of my anti-corporate politics? Meh, sounds like a week case.

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I Forget Jun 19, 2023

@roadriverrail Personally I think the bigger risk is if they make a deal under NDA for large instances to start bulk-feeding content (including from other instances) to Meta. I haven't heard any claims that they're looking for that, but it seems like the sort of thing Meta would do. Now I sorta want to hear big instance admins to start explicitly saying they wouldn't participate in such a scheme.

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Kit Rhett Aultman

@epilanthanomai This really gets to my bigger concern, which is the pass-through effects. If there are ways for Meta to exploit the transitive effects of federation, then the only curative is to defederate from the mega-instances, which would be a serious blow. I'm not sure what other protections there would be, though.