Mastodawn

booty_flexx Jul 8, 2023

Were lemmy.word admins invited by Meta to the P92/Threads "off the record" meeting?

https://lemmy.world/post/1216080

Were lemmy.word admins invited by Meta to the P92/Threads "off the record" meeting? - Lemmy.world

So I saw a recent post on lemmy from admins of another instance, forgive me for not remembering which, where they posted a full transparency update on Meta requesting a meeting with the admins of that instance. The admins declined, and then shared the correspondence with their community via screenshots of the original email from meta and their response. My question is did @[email protected] or any other lemmy.world admins get a similar invite, and if so, did you accept/attend? I’m curious, because as far as I know lemmy.world has not made their stance on defederation from meta/threads very clear, not even to say that they weren’t sure or didn’t have a stance yet. So, lemmy.world admins, If you did attend this off the record meeting, I’m sure they have some sort of agreement with you that the discussion stays off the record… But could you at least confirm or deny if you were invited to and/or attended such a meeting?

Candelestine Jul 8, 2023

I would also be interested in hearing what ruud’s position is these days. Opinions on the topic can certainly change over time, as arguments are hashed and refined. But it would be negligent to fail to acknowledge that if Zuck wanted to buy anyone, he’d be high on the list.

Though I also understand his reluctance to wade into the debate personally. Shitstorms are not particularly fun when you’re the one in the middle, and there is no answer that would completely avoid one.

The admin(s) of mastodon.world have made a post about their official stance, and since (to my knowledge) the same folks also run lemmy.world, it’s probably reasonable to assume a similar stance applies here as well.

mastodon.world/@mwadmin/110654590632768079

Mastodon.world admins (@[email protected])

Update regarding Meta/Threads: We hear that the Threads app is coming July 6th. It will at first not support ActivityPub, so it can't talk to Mastodon yet. That will be added later. We're very much in agreement with @[email protected] , see https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/07/03/instagram-threads-and.html As he said: ““Watching Like A hawk, with our fingers on the block button.” We will NOT be pre-emptively taking a “Fediblock as a Frist Strike” position.” 1/2

Mastodon

Candelestine Jul 8, 2023

I’ve read it, and I do find the position concerning. They focus heavily on technical threats to the system, but nobody discusses how a skilled businessman can outmaneuver them it what is fundamentally a competitive commercial environment.

nekat_emanresu Jul 8, 2023

Exactly! Almost every time I’ve tried to talk with people they only bring up those same technical aspects and ignore the other aspects, like cultural destruction and manufactured outrage and hatred against LGBTQs etc that comes with meta/facebook. The whole internet doesn’t need to be a homogenized mess :(

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

How much have you read because, believe it or not, they’ve thought about that.

Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web

Threads and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web

With the #meta #Project92 or #Threads Fediverse offering, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining … However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the Fediverse public social graph today - Want proof? See here: is.gd/q8U2pv But what if they merge that Fediverse data with their own internal data from IG isn’t that worse than just scraped data?

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

Those are all more techy stuff. Let me know when someone addresses bribery, using their legal system as a weapon or countering marketing campaigns.

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

You didn’t read it then. Cool, cool.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

I’ve read it twice now. Bribery? Not once. Lawsuits? Not in there. Marketing strategy? Also not in there.

You want to actually explain what I’m supposed to be seeing? EEE is just more techy bullshit.

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

The 3rd argument for defederation:

➡️ To defend against being “Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished.”

This is a real risk, and others point to Google and Facebook and XMPP, or Google and RSS Google reader. Where a big entity takes over, then rug pulls or extends an open standard slowly into a non-standard, non-interoperable functionally siloed service.

This is a real risk. But you don’t - and can’t - defend against this by defederation.

Why not? Because even if the entire existing Fedi pre-blocked them. Instagram has 1.6 BILLION users. If they push this, in one day just on their own they will be the size of the current Fedi’s monthly user base, and then grow from there.

Virtually Instantly, they become the biggest ActivityPub entity on the planet. With or without a mass block.

Some instances defederating is precisely what should happen. But all instances defederating is committing suicide to avoid being murdered.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

… that is not one of the three things I was describing.

And how does everyone pre-emptively defederating lead to our death anyway? How does it kill us?

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

By making the huge network available only by handing your data to Zuckerberg.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

I still don’t see where suicide enters the picture. How does our death happen?

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

XMPP, famously, died when Google dominated the network and then defederated. Leaving XMPP users no choice but to sign up with Google to keep in touch with the bulk of google users who were no longer there.

Threads does not need to embrace to extinguish, it has 1.6b accounts ready to activate and now over 100m activated in the first three days. Universal defederation will drive a lot of Fedi-users to Threads simply because, if you’ve come from sites with hundreds of millions of users (Twitter and Reddit), it’s going to be very difficult for many to recreate the breadth and depth of content here, and certainly not as quickly.

The Fediverse would technically survive, as XMPP did. But it would likely shrink, not grow.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

Bout time someone engaged with intelligent arguments. Thank you, I was starting to worry we were going downhill faster than I thought.

Where I disagree is that mass defederation will drive our users away. I draw a line in the sand between quality work and average work. Most of Zuck’s offerings are the garbage of the planet. Same appeal as McDonalds and reality television and Trump. Simple, quick, cheap.

We are, frankly, better than that. I think our quality will protect us from heavy loss of users so long as we maintain enough independent identity to actually be something different.

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

I don’t disagree with that. Threads’ biggest strength is also it’s biggest weakness: we’ve never seen a huge network establish overnight before and it will struggle to define a culture outside of what Meta serves up via algorithm.

But my niche subs on Reddit had a few thousand users, still only just enough to keep them useful. And it required Reddit’s 50 million users to provide that many.

There will be a lot of people who want the smaller network. But many of the Twitter/Reddit refugees don’t, really. And that’s where Fedi-growth is coming from right now.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

Our best actual growth strategy from here on out is something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to. I think we need to rely on how niche, but also how connected we are.

Once the Federation is more interoperable, which should improve as we develop and scale up, we can pull steady, but small, numbers of users from a broad range of services.

Mastodon can’t compete with Twitter. What we need is basically the Fediverse to become a competitor of the whole internet, in a manner of speaking.

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

There are several potentially very large corporate instances in the works. My hope is that they can hold each other hostage because it’ll be so easy for their users to jump ship. They can embrace but they might not be able to extinguish.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

I’m mainly worried about basically being slandered and suppressed. If I was Zuck, my main focus would be on controlling public opinion.

Doing SEO, running ads, doing whatever he can to make the popular perception of the Fediverse as a thing only virgin tech nerds should like. “Cool” people need to use his product.

Marketing, he’s going to beat us with marketing.

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

Well, that’s my other hope. That the Fediverse will steal a steady trickle of Threads users (and Twitter->Threads users) when they find out that they can have better control on an independent instance.

But it’s up to us to make sure that’s both true and that it happens.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

If we’re actually separate. If it’s all one big Federation, there’ll be no incentive for them to come here from there. They gain nothing from doing so.

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

Being part of one big Federation doesn’t prevent Zuckerberg from making their feeds shit.

I want to get Meta’s data without Meta getting my data and also deciding what I see. That’s a proposition a lot of people will like the sound of. But only if we’re around to tell them.

Candelestine Jul 10, 2023

They get our data either way though. If they stay there, and they federate, they’re no different from us.

The only way to create difference is to defederate. Unless I misunderstand something?

jocanib Jul 10, 2023

The Fediverse does not have any of my data.