I am not one for policies restricting choice but I fear the situation where Meta sets up instances that become big, say like Lemmy.world. Then one day when their instance is popular, they decide to charge other instances to federate with Meta’s instances.
Big corps like YouTube, twitter, Meta, etc are known to offer services at a loss to grow their service and then drop the hammer and demand payment to use what people already rely on.
I feel a policy that prevents federated corp instance from profiting early on from FOSS, self hosted, and volunteer federated servers is something to think about - though I do not know the best approach.
I like what Open Source software does with their licensing approach where you are free to view, use, and contribute but if you take you must distribute the source code to others. Some outright ban usage for profit without a license.
Obviously licensing applies well for software to prevent abuse, and I would like a discussion about what Terms of Use policies can prevent volunteer work from being abused - if any are desired.
see the following cross-post from: https://programming.dev/post/427323
Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
I’m not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.
Here is a link if someone don’t know what Meta’s Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
In my opinion, “watch and see” is a good approach towards potentially hostile entities. Meta is not “potentially” hostile - it is a hostile entity already, due to its backstory of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), and it should be told to fuck off right off the bat. It will not contribute with the Fediverse in the long run.
Their strategy is potentially along those lines:
- Create its own instance (let’s call it “Metadon”). Play by the rules at the start. Get a rather large userbase.
- Introduce policy, code, and monetary changes to Metadon; things that don’t piss off the users, but make it harder for admins of other instances, that’ll need to either play along or defederate Metadon. Over time smaller instances will bleed to death, with Metadon absorbing their userbases.
- Once Metadon controls a good chunk of the Fediverse, it pulls off the plug, because it’s now in a position to piss off the userbase to further Meta’s goals. “We’re going to defederate everyone else for protection of the users. Think on the children!” Then it starts reintegrating into Facebook and WhatsApp, including crap like “you need a Faecesbook account to use Metadon”.
And we can’t really rely on “everyone doing the right thing”, because most people won’t. Cue to the users still using Reddit because they don’t care about things in the long run; it would be the same here, plenty users will use Metadon if it throws them a big enough of a bone.
In my opinion, “watch and see” is a good approach towards potentially hostile entities. Meta is not “potentially” hostile - it is a hostile entity already,
This is a very valid point. We don’t need to wait to see if Meta, the company that created tracking pixels, will behave as a good actor. They are already proven to be a bad actor and should be treated as such.
agreed!
And with Meta’s resources and reach, they could stand up a
Lemmy.worldequivalent easily. Play nice, break their arms jerking each off the Fediverse. And once enough of the instances are reliant on the Meta instance, cut off everyone who won’t pay to federate.
simple, don’t federate with meta
Meta: you have to give us money to federate with us.
Every other instance owner: coolio, don’t care. Fuckity bye
I absolutely hope it will be exactly like this. And then they lower the prizes and eventually make it free but then no-one wants that anymore.
Are there already domains available to add on my defederation list?
Not yet. The rumors are confirmed by Meta reaching out to a Mastadon admin, Kev, from fosstadon.org. He kindly made public the email.
Not everyone has strength of conviction he does. Companies look for the weak link, how can they buy off or stroke the ego of.
Adding some T&C’s in as OP suggested could be a good idea. Sure they can ignore it, but it’d be good to put in as many road blocks as possible to prevent the enshitification attacks that will eventually come in the distant future.
I love that mail. Everyone should answer like that.
Pwnt
I think that is threads.net, no?
Copyleft should absolutely work. Not sure what we are currently doing, but nearly every toot or reply in the fediverse is copyrighted content. You must explicitly or implicitly give a license to every instance to use and redistribute that content. I could imagine a field in ActivityPub that declares the license, for example using Creative Commons licenses. If this license forbids commercial use, Meta can’t use it. Also nobody else, such as journalists? Probably needs more thought on how a license should work. It is definitely a sharp sword!
I’m concerned enough to message the admins of my instance if I knew how. I came here to get away from corpos, not to have them follow us here. They need to go back to their walled gardens and stay there.
I personally think the proper approach is to limit them to one instance. If they suddenly start trying to distribute a Meta “easy setup” variant of their server or something such that anyone can set up a Fediverse Meta-based server, that’s where the line should be drawn. That does have the potential to run an EEE play.
However, if everyone from FB wants to be able to subscribe to Mastodon or Lemmy content from their FB account, that’s not nearly as big a deal to me assuming they all come from @facebook.com or whatever. Because worst case, people just block that one server and their embrace is over.
I agree with the second part of your comment, and have concerns with the first part of your comment.
I’m all for allowing others to subscribe to Lemmy or Mastadon content, which is why simply defederating isn’t as attractive as ToS. I want others to see that their communities/intrests/heros/what have you/ exist outside of Meta. I want the average person to contribute even if they don’t know how to set up an instance. What I don’t want is Meta hosting content then paywalling it, cutting off others.
For the first part about limiting to one instance… Well FB is technically one instance from a “domain” perspective. They have load balancers and tons of servers hosting their “instance”.
like I said before, I’m not a policy guy, I don’t know how to solve this. But it would be nice for those who are to spear head this and rally up volunteers so we can get in front of it. If there are no solutions, defederating would be the easiest.
I’m not a techie guy either, so I may be way off base on my expectations of how things work too.
Mostly I just meant that as long as the domain is a single one (@facebook.com) or whatever, then it’s quite easy to defederate from for any server, or for an individual user to block completely if they want. (Or at least it is on Mastodon.) But yes, I support Meta being able to link up as long as they do it on an equal footing with the rest of the Fediverse and in a way that isn’t a blatant attempt to run some sort of EEE op.
I see what you mean now, that makes sense.
being on equal footing
agreed. Now how can we level the playing field with a multi billion dollar corp lol
This is not the issue you should be scared of.
You should be scared because every terminally online non-technical person you know ALREADY has a Thread account.
Here’s the way it will go down:
- Thread federates
- Users complain it’s too hard to remember the @mastodon.social vs @thread.meta or whatever
- Meta removes requirement for Thread users to have to do that within Thread when mentioning for searching other Thread users
- Thread users complain to users outside Thread that it’s annoying they have to “be that way” and they should “just use Thread to make it easy, dude”
- at the same time Many instances defederate with Thread
- Thread adds “Megaheart” superlike feature that adds a sticker with an animation to someone’s “prick” (what do they call posts over at Thread anyway?)
- Users on Thread complain that they can’t superlike users from other instances
- Users from other instances get sick of their complaining and move to Thread’s instance
- Important business and service accounts move to Thread to “ensure comparability and availability”
- Thread defederates from the larger network, having captured all the important content that people find useful
- The rest of the fediverse remains mostly people posting about the fediverse, how to host their own instance, and arguing about how to move forward on an increasingly fruitless-seeming open source project.
( - in 2032, Thread decides to charge for API access, citing “freeloading app developers who have been profiteering off their hard work”)
if I could pin this comment I would
Policies won’t stop them.
But they’ll give legal ground to potential retribution.
