Eugen RochkoHappy to be a launch partner of the Social Web Foundation (@swf). Excited to see other organizations being built to push the fediverse forward!
Kevin Russell
Luna Lactea@Gargron @kevinrns @swf What it means is that we don't want corporations like Automattic & Facebook to touch fediverse, & Mastodon has a reputation for being overly accepting towards corporations such as those. Those companies have harmed us before, & we're worried that Mastodon will use its popularity to allow them to hurt us again. Even if Mastodon has good intentions by trying to make fediverse bigger & help more people find their way into it, our past experiences tell us that companies like these are going to abuse that. They're going to use the leverage you're giving them to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, or at least sell us & our data again or harass & silence us again.
@Gargron @kevinrns @swf I personally have had a horrific experience with Facebook singling me out for being homosexual & open about it, then hiding my Instagram account from friends, repeatedly banning me with vague or no reasoning, offering no appeal or explaination, & even going as far as to not let me back into my account once the "temporary" ban was over by giving me a labyrinth of hoops & broken UIs to jump through. That's not even counting the vast amount of my personal information & life that they sold to people I don't know who have no business seeing those things. I'm not the only one to experience this treatment & dehumanization from Facebook, & Facebook isn't the only company to do that to people. We should be more careful of who we give power in our communities & in projects like fediverse. Someone that has abused such power before should not be allowed to have it again, & that includes Facebook & Automattic.
@Gargron @kevinrns @swf Any company is more than welcome to create their own ActivityPub server & begin federating with others, even Facebook, but they should not be given power over the ActivityPub specification or given any place in an organization such as SWF. They should only have power over their own servers, which is the purpose of fediverse.
Also acknowledge that ActivityPub is not the only protocol in use in fediverse. There are also Zot, Diaspora, DFRN, OStatus (which Mastodon used to use as far as I know), & maybe even some things such as WebMentions, XMPP, & Matrix could be considered part of fediverse too despite not connecting to any of the big social networking software. SWF should recognize the other protocols & promote their use as well, they all have their purposes; even the old, outdated, & no longer in use ones can serve to educate creation of newer & better protocols.