If Meta federates with the Fediverse, do my Mastodon posts (e.g.) show up on FaceBook?
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?
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: ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne…
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 remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we're happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.
The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that's cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.
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.
Willard Herman
vatlark
RQG