I’m changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:
Of course, it’s possible to work with companies you don’t trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don’t trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is … risky. There’s a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as “prudently defensive” in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: “block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block.” Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:
We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though
Previously, I’d thought “some block, some federate” would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:
My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:
Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse
Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta
Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.
People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.
But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.
Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.
And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.
The more I read, the more I am in the camp of “let’s not.” Meta has rarely acted in the best interests of its own users; from their unethical experiments into causing depression to their privacy issue to… well, everything, they are classic examples of bad actors. The fediverse is not secure enough or big enough to counter Meta’s takeover if we open that door… there’s a reason we’re in the fediverse and not the metaverse, after all.
The decision of whether to federate is up to the individual instances, and I’d not want it any other way. But I do think we should be encouraging instances to hold off on Meta-fying. Else, we’ll be fighting Meta in a game that they’re much better at than any of us are ever likely to be.
Meta has shown repeatedly that they aren’t trustworthy. This is like watching a wolf eat every one of your chickens in the coop and then swearing up and down that if you let it in the hen house, it won’t touch the chickens in there. Absolutely zero chance that they aren’t going to try to take over and steal data and control it. Why else are they trying to come in? These corporations don’t make moves like this unless they see a potential profit. I vote block.
Bingo. If Meta get their foot in the door, then the writing will be on the wall and the Fediverse as we know it today will slowly disappear. These huge corporations have extremely covert and efficient methods of influencing change and instilling their evil values which aren’t fully-apparent until it’s already too late.
If Meta get involved, personally, I’ll be leaving, and will just accept that the internet will never again be allowed to exist in a free state; the system won.
EDIT: I also left all social media over two years ago, and this was largely because Facebook was making me remarkably unhappy and angry. I don’t want them in my life full stop and have gone out of my way to rid my digital identity of any ties to corporate proprietary bullshit. I like it here precisely because it has no corporate overlord, and it makes me sick to think that Meta can just waltz back into my life in a space users largely want to be left alone in.
For anyone “willing to give Meta a chance”, ask yourself:
Q: Why is Meta doing this?
A: To make money.Q: How is Meta going to make money out of this?
A: By having as many users on their instance as they can, so they can sell their data and advertise to them (that is Meta’s modus operandi, after all).This is already antithetical to the entire fediverse concept, where you want users to be as spread out over instances as possible.
Having most of the users on one instance means the “community cost” of defederating from that instance is enormous to the point of being inadvisable for an instance admin. This brings us to a scenario where the ‘federation’ is essentially useless, as everyone is producing/consuming content on the one instance.
Therefore, the idea of a commercial entity using the fediverse, by itself, mutilates what the fediverse is all about.
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Fediverse should be free and no one should rule over it.
What Meta should be defederated or not is owed by every instances.
By the way, Meta has a lot of scam accounts now, so it should be defederated from my instance.deleted by creator
Fuck Meta. We need to vehemently oppose their presence in the Fediverse.
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