although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we’ve signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here’s a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
More instances should consider this pact.
Really pleased to hear this. I will be staying on Beehaw for the foreseeable future, I’m on the same page as the admins.
I guess I’m the odd one out when I say I fully support this decision. I do not trust Meta, I Do not trust their intentions, and they have given me no reason to trust them.
Thanks Beehaw.
Good call from the instance admins. Meta’s been a known actor for over 10 years at this point, which is more than enough time to observe their behavior (including up to a few weeks ago when they got fined for violating the GDPR). They’re not going to be participating in good faith and we don’t need to give them a chance to shit up the Fediverse.
As a user of the fediverse, I appreciate you for doing this.
Fuck meta and fuck Facebook. No one wants this place to become like that dogshit site. Fully support defederating from any meta owned instances
Meta is not a brand new, fresh-faced corporation that maybe needs a chance to prove it’s good intentions in the fediverse. It is an established entity that has a history of killing competition and often being on the wrong side of social issues. It should be rejected from federation outright because of its track record, if nothing else.
I 100% agree with this decision. At first I wanted to give Meta a chance, just to get a big player in the Fediverse, but after reading this article it totally changed my views.
I just finished reading it. I must admit that I wasn’t blown away at the start. But the last few paragraphs, especially about the “Embrace, Extend, Exterminate” strategy really convinced me.
I did not remember that Google chat was once a XMPP client and that they pulled the plug on this.
Anyway, I’m totally convinced that the fediverse is most probably better off without Meta. Although, I’m not sure how the fediverse admin can really block them. At some point, some people will want to see meta’s stuff.
It almost feel like we need a legal organization around the fediverse. Just some unorganized random people won’t save whatever we have here. If we still want this to be as free as possible, there will be a time where a giant company will fuck thing up and we may forget why we didn’t want them here in the first place.
Good move. Fuck Zuck.
Good. To quote WarGames:
The only winning move is not to play
Meta is at best looking to profit from the Fediverse, and more likely looking to extinguish it. I think blocking them at the borders is the only solution.
This is fantastic news and applaud this decision. I used to work in digital marketing and having seen how Facebook, (and Twitter, Google, etc.) makes their sausage and how they operate, I advise everyone get off Meta/FB, or really any centralized social media platform for that matter.
Well hell man, give us the details.
I’m disappointed.
“The fediverse is open and interoperable!”
“No, not them.”
Well, we’ve defederated with other people in the past (and will continue to do so in the future most likely). Federated systems are not an all or nothing situation. IMO that’s the biggest draw and improvement over a distributed system for social media.
I agree, but why defederate before knowing any details? What is the harm in hearing them out
it’s literally Facebook. i think we’ve heard and seen more than enough to from Mark Zuckerberg and the platform which actively continues to be one of the worst vectors of online harm, misinformation, and advocacy for social and political violence (among many, many other ills). particularly with respect to our instance: their project can get fucked as far as i’m concerned.
Anyone here into cross stitching? I’d like to send the Zuck a cross stitch that just says, “Get Fucked”
ahhh, now i think it’d be a funny collaborative idea to send him a fediverse communal “Fuck Off!” blanket
I’d also add that they have, in the past, conducted unethical experiments on their users to attempt to manipulate said users’ emotional state. I’m just a cross poster here, but I respect the stance.
Yea, i’m not sure how much benefit of doubt we should be handing Mark Zuck of all people. There’s few people in the world who make their intentions more clear than him. Not that i’m trying to paint him as evil, i’m not and i don’t think he is, but i also see no reason to expect self-run instances to offer an olive branch to him.
We should be vary paranoid about Embrace Extend Extinguish in these communities.
The details are under NDA and Facebook has a really bad history of having a terrible moderation culture. I don’t see any reason based on their past history to believe that they will change.
It feels kinda like giving a gun to a serial killer and just waiting it out. It’s an exaggerated analogy but I think it illustrates the point well.
because history
before knowing any details?
before? facebook is almost 20 years old, they’ve had plenty of time to show us who they are and they have. If you have any doubt about their moral fiber then I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and enter the fucking 2020s
there are instances in the past where big players acquire the small ones and while at first they seem to be cooperative, it ultimately destroys the small players, one such case is XMPP the open chat protocols long before we have Matrix, killed by Google
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I guess this is a cautionary action, better to grow slower rather than be killed by Meta.
Regardless of how untrustworthy Meta as a company is, it also tends to hold the kinds of “mainstream” social media platforms that I have actively been avoiding for many reasons, including their communities. Beehaw has already defederated from other instances for having open sign-up and a disproportionately large number of users on them who needed moderation actions taken, and I can see a Meta-run instance posing the same kinds of problems.
Plus, like others said, it’s not impossible to federate later if it ends up being an overreaction. It’s just that Meta and its userbase already exist, so it’s possible to make pre-emptive judgement with that knowledge and correct the judgement later, potentially avoiding a flood of unwanted content.
Do you really think Meta wants to be “one of us”, that they plan to be on equal ground as the rest of the already existing instances managed by individuals and not by corporations? Are you that naive?
it’s the paradox of tolerance. We (fediverse) cannot be tolerant of the intolerant (meta in this case), lest we be destroyed by them. And do not for one second ascribe any benevolent properties to meta, they are evil through and through and have been pretty much since inception. Tolerating their presence would be akin to tolerating nazis, the second that happens I’m fucking out of here
This talk of tolerance reminds me of something I read[1]: Tolerance is a peace treaty, not a moral obligation. With this line of thought, the intolerance of intolerance stops being a paradox and makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. Intolerance broke that peace treaty before it even entered into it, IMO.
It may have been this opinion piece: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376 ↩︎
Best instance 🙏
Your pfp is really cool
Thank you!!! Shout out to the amazing https://twitter.com/AWolfhardt who did it!
@alyaza I am conflicted on this. While I feel like it’s probably the right thing to do as Meta would just destroy the fediverse if it entered it, it makes me uncomfortable that this network that is supposed to be so open and connected with each other can be so easily and glibly made into what is essentially yet another privately controlled website.
Who says it’s “supposed to be [fully] connected?” Who gets to decide for everyone that no one is allowed to block, no instance is permitted to separate or shape its own view of the network? What’s the difference between what you want and Reddit? One solid mass of “everyone must be mashed together at all times and nothing may be done to protect against harmful parts of the network” seems to betray the point of federation far more than some instance(s) blocking others or just straight-up forming their own clique (in the graph theory sense) or separate network.
Basically my thought here is: defederation is the point of federation or else it would just be distributed hosting.
This has always been the reason I don’t believe in distributed models of social media. Federation also means defederation and that’s good.
You are on kbin, your experience will not be affected by this.
As someone else on kbin I’m really hoping Ernest will enter this pact too.
Meta’s “embrace extend extinguish” is a threat to us all.
Quoting the FediPact:
Openness for the sake of openness is meaningless. Two things that are very valued on fedi are consent and freedom of association. The whole point of the fediverse is that instances are free to choose who they talk to. We don’t have to federate with the likes of gab, for example. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, chasing a capitalist pipe dream
I’m not shure, there are a few good arguments against plain blocking of Meta.
This article is mostly against federating
https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/it does highlight contra’s:
John Gruber describes the Anti-Meta Pact as “petty and deliberately insular” and suggests that the whole point of ActivityPub is to turn social networking into something more akin to email, which he describes as "truly open."1
Tristan Louis says "The anti-Meta #Fedipact can only achieve one thing: make sure that #ActivityPub loses to the Bluesky protocol."2
Dan Gillmor suggests that “preemptively blocking them – and the people already using them – from your instance guarantees less relevance for the fediverse.”
counterpoint:
- we don’t like Meta
- we have very specific goals on this instance that Meta is totally antithetical to
- we’re quite open about not being open-fed with everyone and this is not out of character nor a contradiction of previous blocks we’ve made
- our priorities are not “fediverse first” or “ActivityPub first”, they’re Beehaw first. the fediverse and ActivityPub are mostly tools for us to an end, and we don’t accept some obligation to prioritize the greater health of those over our own thing.
- even if you don’t care about the rest of that simple logistics prevail here–we absolutely don’t want to be responsible for potentially tens or hundreds of millions of additional users. that is not a thing we can ever commit to, and we will almost certainly sooner shut down the instance or completely defederate than eat that influx (particularly with Lemmy’s limitations right now).
overall, i would say this falls into the camp of “not a thing we’re realistically going to reconsider”.
