Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
We could collectively vote to defederate them.
How does defederation work? Is it global or is it in a per instance basis?
Per instance
But just as a side note, a user can block an entire instance as well, at least on Mastodon. I haven’t checked for that functionality on Lemmy. That’s not defederation, but it prevents you from seeing things you don’t want to at the user level.
I haven’t found it but I’d love to see it if I can. As world is struggling I want to use an alt but most alternatives haven’t defederated exploding heads
What happened with exploding heads?
They’re extremely comfortable with homophobia and transphobia. When I was seeing if I could ban them for example they were talking about considering “cis” and “cisgender” a slur that’s bannable, but they don’t consider a particular word starting with an f that bad.
Thank you for the explanation.
Any instance can choose what other instances it interacts with.
So it would need to be a movement across instances, not just a single action, but given the principles of the user base here and why we’re here I think that movement would be very successful.
https://fedipact.online is already happening
It’s giving 2000s hello kitty fan site
Yes. I love it so much.
For now, in the past 30 days I’ve seen instances be very active in moderation and development and federation\defederation. They defederate even when they don’t need to. This anecdotal experience leads me to believe that most instances will defederate from Meta, but I’m certain that a few of them will not.
This!
Though the participation is needed/appreciated, can we let “This!” die with Reddit?
This! (jk this comment is an ironic statement funded by the shadow government)
deleted by user
The protocols and software are all free and open source. You can’t stop a company from running a Lemmy or Mastodon instance any more than you could stop an individual from doing so.
The nice thing is that the system allows for free choice. Your favorite instance isn’t forced to federate with a hypothetical Meta instance, and and even if it does you can choose which communities to subscribe to or avoid. Who cares if Meta runs an instance, or a hundred instances? You can simply choose not to use them.
Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn’t a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn’t hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can’t prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.
Due to the dominance of just a few companies’ big email services, it’s now almost impossible to set up an independent email server. Emails from small independent servers are just not delivered by Gmail and the like. They will only accept emails from other big email providers. In this sense it is a problem that Google owns the most popular email instance. They and a few other large companies have effectively turned a democratic and distributed system into a closed loop owned by a handful of big corporations.
Any reading on this? Seems a little outlandish. I self host an email server for both my business and personal use, and have never had issues sending or receiving mail. Not saying I don’t believe you, just that that has not been my personal experience.
Yeah, I’ve been running E-mail servers for a long time. You kind of have to get things right, like not configuring an open relay and properly setting up SPF (and maybe DMARC) but I’ve never had an issue with E-mail delivery to Gmail.
Even with all of that configured on my instance. Emails are sent to spam to gmail by default because it comes from a linode IP.
Rdns is setup. Dmarc is in reject with a simple spf record. Even went back and setup Mx records my vps uses. Still flagged.
I don’t think dkim mail matter. Since it already passes spf and dmarc.
shrugs
Maybe this guy is exaggerating. I haven’t tried running my own email server, but I have seen a few people recently complaining about problems with the big providers’ blocking policies. Here’s one I read recently:
It’s made up bullshit. It’s a pain to run email because most services require quite a few dns and other records set, as well as making sure you aren’t spamming from it. You can run an email server if you have yourself all day.
Never had any problems the last time my company self hosted our email server. Not sure what you meant by this.
I don’t think it’s the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy’s. Fact is, it’s trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.
Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn’t known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won’t let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a “prove you aren’t a spammer then we’ll whitelist you”, rather than the opposite.
But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren’t spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don’t track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that’s the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can’t talk to their members ever.
The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them
Kind of like how Facebook Messenger (and GChat, and AIM) used to federate with XMPP, and then dropped it like a bad habit once their platform took off.
I think it is really important for communities to spread out to avoid exactly this. Users can centralize, but distributed communities is what will prevent what you describe.
This “anyone is free to join any instance, you can just avoid what you don’t like” kind of thinking is perfectly reasonable in theory, but I think what OP wants to know is if this also holds up in practice. You could “defederate” Google and Microsoft by blocking emails from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but the reality is that the majority of people you will need to contact use those addresses. In most cases, your school/workplace will even make you use them for your organizational email. Yes, it is possible to avoid these companies and choose alternatives, but you’ll be isolating yourself from the majority of the network.
The question is not if it will be possible to use the future corporate-owned Fediverse without Meta (of course it will), but if it will be feasible for the majority of users.
My bigger worry is that they’ll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you’ll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they’re the backend of the entire fediverse. If they’re able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don’t know the developers personally so I can’t be sure if they’d pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.
But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they’re the backend of the entire fediverse.
ActivityPub is not a company or entity that can strike deals
BRB I’m off to to strike a deal with HTTP
Good to know. Not the most knowledgeable with tech.
You can think of it like HTTPS. It’s just rules for computers to talk to each other. If your computer follows those rules, it can talk to the other computers that adhere to those rules. These rules are necessary because otherwise the internet is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, you need rules to tell computers which 1s and 0s to send, and rules to tell computers what those 1s and 0s mean.
The World Wide Web Consortium are developing this set of rules, just as they’ve developed many other rules. They’re a non-profit organisation just kinda trying to make the web a better place.
I agree on some points, but I think it’s not fair to compare it to email. People use emails for work and are somewhat forced to use them pretty often. I don’t know anyone who browsed Reddit for work over the past 12 years I’ve had an account, and I don’t believe Lemmy will change that. People are not forced to use Lemmy, reaching the maximum amount of people is usually not the point unless you’re advertising, and if you’re targeting the Facebook crowd you can… advertise on Facebook - this wouldn’t even be anything new.
The question isn’t whether or not the majority of users can use the Fediverse without being hampered by the corpos, it’s whether or not the core users can. Unless Meta can somehow force federation unto all instances, I will be able to choose an instance that is not federated with them.
Sorry, I don’t get this argument. Is not being able to avoid corporations justified because people are forced to use email? Social media is also becoming a lot less optional these days. I know a lot of small businesses that only share location and contact information on Facebook or Instagram, because they don’t want to invest in building their own website.
I also hate this concept that there is a hierarchy of users in the Fediverse, the “core users” and I suppose, the “idiots who migrated over from a bigger social media site”. Look how well Lemmy performed from 2019 to mid-2023 with only “core users”, it was a graveyard. As long as a real person has an account on the Fediverse that they actively use, they are a Fediverse user, and they must be considered when discussing the Fediverse in general.
There will always be instances that do not federate with corporate instances, just like how you can set up an email server that blocks Gmail and Outlook. But I don’t want to see a Fediverse where these instances are dead and marginalized because corporate instances consumed most of the Fediverse.
let’s say the instance i belong too has been bought out by zuckerberg… can i transfer my data and move? or do i just lose everything like i did with reddit?
currently you lose everything. I’m hoping they add a transfer tool like how masodon(i think it was that) has with transferring accounts
That will be a great idea!
Transferring is theoretically technically possible (Mastodon does it), but Lemmy hasn’t implemented the option yet. There’s an issue for it on their GitHub.
Why would Facebook bother buying out existing instances? They have the resources to create thousands of instances, and the userbase (the idea is to migrate all Instagram accounts) to populate them.
Not to mention that they’re creating a Twitter/Mastodon clone, not a Reddit/Lemmy one.
I don’t think so, but the fediverse is an open standard that’s being actively developed, so if it’s technically possible it could be added.
That said, this kind of social network account has zero lock in for me. I don’t care about my history and none of this is connected to my real life so I wouldn’t mind switching instances. The important thing is you can still access the rest of the network after you switch.
A good analogy is Google with Gmail. They became the biggest player in email and even gained a lot of influence over for email works, but you can easily use another email provider and not be locked out of the system.
Imagine how horrible things would be if email were centralized. We really need to thank the founders of the internet for having the foresight to not let that happen.
It’s funny you bring Email as an example because everyone using the same 3-4 providers effectively centralized email. Anyone who tries to run any self-hosted email with decent volume quickly discovers this fact
You can’t keep them out, but you can choose not to Federate with them. They can’t take over. That’s the point of having independent federated servers.
The Mastodon instance I’m on has blocked all known Meta IPs as a preventative measure. So I imagine some admins will federate and some won’t, and users will be free to join the instance that they wish to.
Any admin worth their salt’s gonna defederate them and proudly wear the Misfit Loser Zealot label[1]. The only people who’ll federate with them are the naive techbros and those who only care about how much users they have, compared to, idk, being committed to creating a good community.
https://fedipact.online is already gaining steam with the Mastodon side of the fediverse.
Seriously the markdown guy couldn’t’ve picked a better description if he tried. ↩︎
Upvoting because that’s a great explanation, that’s a great term that I will wear proudly (MLZ), you used a triple contraction. I love contractions
If you’re on the fediverse at all, aren’t you already kind of a “misfit loser zealot”? Aren’t most people on federated instances here precisely as alternatives to garbage commercial social media like fb and twitter? It boggles my mind why anyone here would want to invite meta in.
They have the right to use the open protocol, just as anybody else to build their own instance. Trying to keep Facebook out only through banning of known instances/IP addresses is a losing battle of whack-a-mole.
If you really want to stop them from EEE, make a pact to refuse to federate with any instance software stack without the AGPL-3.0 license instead, no Apache, no MIT, not even regular GPL, so they simply can’t do the “Extend” bit at all.
What are those licences that you list? Please explain like I’m a non-IT.
Now Lemmy Explain: These are all open-source licenses; however, their provisions are different from each other. For this, I assume you understand what compilation is.
- MIT and Apache are “Do whatever you want with my code, just give credit with this license file”, but Apache is a bit more detailed and has a bit more on patent clause.
- GPL can be summarized into 2 provisions: “You have to share the source code alongside compiled executables” (.exe for windows), and “if your executables compile with GPL code, then the rest of the code that compiles also has to be GPL licensed” (Which is why some call it a viral license)
- However, the loophole with GPL code is that if you are running anything with GPL code running on a server, you are not distributing the executable if you are only accessing it through a web page, so you don’t have to share the source code, and AGPL closes that loophole by saying “You still have to share the source code for AGPL licensed programs if you are using it as a service”
Companies hate GPL code since they can’t legally keep modified software close sourced, which means that Facebook won’t be able to develop proprietary extensions for AGPL licensed software like Lemmy or Mastodon.
Would that solve the bullshit RH is currently pulling with RHEL?
No. RH is following the GPL: They send you the source code when you buy RHEL, but if you share that source code, then Red Hat will just refuse to sell you future versions of RHEL. What they are doing is scummy but allowed under GPL.
What would have to be added to the GPL to prevent this?
If a corporation aims to purchase an instance, all the other instances would let them know they will vote to defederate it as soon as the purchase is finalized. That ought to make them change course.
Or, they just won’t care
Maybe. But then the instance they purchase is sealed off from the rest of the federation and a large portion of the users jump ship.
That’s not how meta’s going to do it; they’ll start their own (with blackjack blah blah) that has better servers, better design, and other stuff real money can buy until theirs is the default. Then when they have the vast majority of users, they’ll start throwing their weight around and others will be pressured to comply with the ‘standard’ they set.
Other instances can always wall them out from the beginning. Sure, they might have better UI/servers, but if they’re never federated they’ve essentially just created another Facebook.
They want to create another Twitter.
I think instance admins do care
Maybe. But corporations won’t
I don’t have an issue with social media companies entering the Fediverse, at least on the surface, because it’s ultimately more users and it’s in line with the ideas of free exchange of information and content. My problem with it comes in when they try to buy instances, communities, or what have you. No one should have a monopoly on the Fediverse, and it shouldn’t be pay to win.
So, my answer is this: because no one can stop anyone from making their own instances, users decide whether to defederate their instances from Meta’s, or Twitter’s, or anyone else’s. Join an instance that doesn’t federate with Meta, or start your own if you have the know-how. Just like anywhere else on the internet, you don’t have to interact with content you don’t want to interact with.
Seems simple enough to me.
Meta: Do what we want or we’ll defederate you!
Everyone: Fuck off
Meta: Surprised pikachu
Not only that because they are federated there will be a much higher traffic, which will come with higher cost. So a possible playbook Meta could follow is say they’d help cover the cost from their user base. Then it becomes the equivalence of being bribed. You don’t do what they want they stop giving you the money and because of the growth that comes with Meta, an instance that federate with them could suddenly find themselves struggling to maintain the instance.
Here’s the most interesting take I’ve found on this question.
https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/23/project-and-the.html
Good read. Onboarding and discoverability are the weakest part of the fediverse and need to be a high priority.
Apps should go as far as assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) if it means the user wouldn’t have to know about instances, and integrating lemmyverse.net’s functionality into lemmy would both go a long way for both I feel.
Apps assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) eithout requiring the user to know about instances,
This is a terrible idea, and the defederation of Beehaw is the exact reason why this is a terrible idea. Don’t get me wrong, with the attitude of the Beehaw admins I suspect that Beehaw will constantly be defederating from a lot of instances over the course of its existence, but this comes with the consequence of people suddenly being locked out of participating in their chosen communities because “you signed up on the wrong instance.”
Which is something nobody should have to experience.
That’s why it’s important to make sure they’re good general instances that aren’t defederating everything else. Beehaw seems to be an exception in this regard.
Beehaw’s essentially walling itself off from other instances, and I think the vast majority of users would rather stay on the other instances’ side rather than one that seems to be staying small on purpose.
Instance migration is already a highly requested feature, and is a thing in Mastodon already. That will fix most remaining concern about being locked out of communities when implemented.
I feel the massive onboarding advantage of users not requiring instance knowledge by doing this vastly outweighs the few users who might not find some communities they like, most of which have alternatives in other instances anyway. And they could always just make another account until instance migration is in lemmy.
Great article! I appreciate how it addresses the commonly raised reasons and points to a way forward.
Hopefully people will remember what Google did with XMPP.
unbridled aggression
I don’t see how they can really take over in a system that’s open source and anyone willing can create their own instance. If they start taking control of a large, established base and pisses that base off, they can just collectively make and move to a new instance, walling the previous one off from the federation by blocking it.
They’re supposedly in talks with activitypub, the backend of the entire fediverse. If meta can get what they want with activitypub, they’ll effectively have control over the entire fediverse. I don’t see that happening though because the fediverse was made in opposition of major social media sites. I see them trying to take control of the software like lemmy and kbin or if that fails trying to buy popular instances or just filling the fediverse with their existing users. Luckily if the first two fail the nature of the fediverse works in our favor and the instances that want to can just defederate.
That’s like saying they’re “in talks with HTTP”. ActivityPub is a protocol. It’s an open source standard. That standard is currently under development by the World Wide Web Consortium. There is no “ActivityPub” for them to be in talks with.
I mean, I’d sell all you fuckers out for a billion dollars. So there’s a chance someone sells out somewhere along the line.
And I wouldn’t hold it against you. I’ve had friends work at Fb for as long as they could stomach
If they start taking control of a large, established base
We are not a large base. Lemmy+kbin have only a couple millions of users, and Mastodon 13 millions. Facebook is planing to migrate all Instagram accounts to P92 accounts. That means billions of users, flooding the whole fediverse.
Most of the good content I see is from here.
I think the real threat comes from the larger user base they’ll likely bring. Because they’ll certainly favor their own instance’s communities, which means those communities could then grow to the point that they have enough leverage to do the bad things.
The main strategy I’ve seen is to form a pact against federating with them. I hope it works.
They should make an instance, it would help the general public discover the fediverse. Most people I talk to at the bar don’t know about the fediverse, I’ve explained it so many times, some people show interest, some people don’t see the point, or how it’s a big deal. I probably just come off as a total geek.
Once meta opens up a channel to the fediverse, people will start to stumble upon the different instances, decide they are done with meta, and move on from meta.
There are some billionaires out there who are watching whats happening, they are noticing the patterns, the trends, what people want, and what people dont want.
All it takes is one clever billionaire, who realizes they have enough money to create the next best platform and be able to fund it by other means.
We are at the point where bots can generate ad revenue, so if we just abandon the old websites to bots, they become bot-towns that generate revenue, and that revenue goes towards funding ad free servers in the fediverse.
This may be what just happens.
Being aware of your instance admins stances and what they plan to do. Bit rich coming from my kbin account (no idea the stance), but I have two other accounts already on instances where I‘m certain the admins wouldn‘t sell out to corpos. So if kbin were to federate with Meta and their stuff invaded my feed, I would move to one of those as my primary account.
What I think is going to be important here to make this less of a pain for users who get very attached to their accounts, is some ability to export and import account data, comment history and so on. I personally don‘t care (deleted a 15 year Reddit account without a care too), but I want this to succeed and for that it would be important.
Once this influx has died down and the devs got some more room for requests, I hope they can give us this ability.
Now before anyone regales me again with “Why not give them a chance, companies are our friends” stuff, I‘m gonna link a few things to read for you instead of replying to me, cause I can‘t be bothered to argue with pro-corporate people anyway and won‘t respond:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’ll definitely be on an instance that’s not federated with Meta. Right now, I have accounts on sh.itjust.works, .world and .ee, but I’d drop any and all of them the moment I find out they’ll federate with them.
