this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Let them! There's nothing saying other instances have to federate with them. Kind of the beauty of the whole thing, really.
Not exactly. What Facebook is expected to attempt here is an embrace, extend and extinguish strategy.
That only works if we care about the bells and whistles they add. Nobody here does or else we'd still be on those platforms. That strategy just doesn't work with a federated network that doesn't connect to your instance.
They'll have their own instance with bells and whistles that nobody connects to and we'll have our federated network. It'll be exactly like the current structure but they'll have an instance instead of a dedicated platform.
Meta has a monetary interest in divering from the activity hub standard. They will use it to stand out from all other federated instances with cool features you can only use on meta instances.
New people will join metas instances because they are "clearly better" and it will be difficult to deny. Sure there will be ads, privacy concerns etc. but most people don't care about that.
The rest of the federated network will over time lose users to meta because people want to stay connected and that's difficult to do when two instances don't share the same features.
The end result is meta oficially forking activity hub and disconnecting from the rest of the federated network.
It's the death of activity hub and what we are trying to build here.
The only way to prevent it is by preventing meta instances from taking off. The main way to do that is to not allow their instances to benefit from the rest of the federated network and to inform meta users of better alternatives. It's impossible for a disorganized opensource project to keep up with the features that 1000's of meta developers are paid to do.
Those people that would join that instance and care about that are already on Meta platforms, they can continue to stay on them if they wish it doesn't affect our communities that we're building here.
Good. The people that leave these communities for the Meta ones are probably not people that I would want to be communicating with already, this is a positive, not a negative. You're acting like we need billions of users for healthy communities, a few hundred to a few thousand (what we currently have) is more than adequate.
You mean what most instances are planning to do already? Again, the logic doesn't add up. We're planning to defederate from their instances right out of the gate, so them having a fork of activitypub makes no difference to our communities.
No it's not, stop being ridiculous.
Again, you're acting like we care about those features. If we did, we wouldn't be on this janky alpha software. I love Lemmy, but it's got a lot of growing pains.
I can't stand all this doomer talk, it's so exhausting.
This is the rebuttal i needed to hear 🥲 i want to have faith we can withstand meta's tar-like ooze seeping into the fediverse
It just doesn't make sense.
"They're going to have the vast majority of users with more features and be defederated from us!"
... You mean the EXACT structure we have now? That's where 99% of people are already, those platforms already have more features than we do, and we're not connected to them already. Them doing what is being described has literally zero impact on our communities. This is all so annoying and I'm tired of having the conversation.
/rant
Like accessibility features? Moderation tools? Profile migration? It may be different in beehaw.org, but here on kbin.social those are features we're lacking. To my knowledge, moderation is explicitly undefined by the entire ActivityPub spec.
Just in case it wasn't clear, I hate Meta. I hate them with a burning passion. I don't want to see them burn down the fediverse like they've done to online privacy and democracy as a whole. But they're not something we can afford to scoff at and ignore.
They won't be offering bells and whistles we want, they'll be offering features we need. They'll run their own troll farms, brigading their way across the fediverse, and say "look at all these trolls! We're gonna create moderation tools to stop these ne'erdowells! And we'll integrate them into the spec, and give them to you! For free!"
We're all proud to say we wouldn't fall for such a Trojan horse, but we need to be ready to recognize whatever that Trojan horse looks like.
Which are already being developed as the r/blind community has migrated to Lemmy and is getting those taken care of or at least getting the ball rolling. I'm sorry Kbin doesn't have that traction yet, but it too will get there. Again, we're still in alpha/beta stages of these platforms. These things take time.
It is something we can ignore because it literally can't happen unless nobody defederates them when they get it going. Which, looking at all the community discussion isn't going to happen. You can relax.
They're all attached to Meta still, it's a moot point. Nobody who deliberately moved to decentralized platforms is going to go back to a centralized instance to use tools they haven't been using all this time, it doesn't make sense.
Let them make instances and hundreds of bots on them, we'll defederate those too. Which is the beauty of the fediverse design, we get to keep control of our communities and keep them safe. Just like beehaw defederated from lemmy.world (temporarily) until moderation tools get more powerful.
Oh, I get that theory, though I'm not sure I completely agree. Either way, unless I completely misunderstand how ActivityPub works, their instance can effectively be isolated to its own little sandbox depending on how many other instances decide to share with them. Further, if you're on an instance that decides to share w/ Meta's, you can skip over to another one that doesn't. So Meta can be isolated by instance owners and/or users.
Exactly. That strategy doesn't work with this structure, I think a lot of people are still trying to understand that the fediverse is not like other platforms/networks.
I'm no ActivityPub expert, but what people more knowledgeable than me have pointed out is that this results in fragmenting the Fediverse, which ends up hurting it on the long run. I'd definitely not want to be on an instance that federates with Facebook, but I also wish none of the larger ones choose to do so.
Not really. If they created a reddit or twitter alternative without ActivityPub support, it would have the same effect but without the ability to join them. A big player creating competition is a huge acceptance barrier for the fediverse outside of their huge influence.