Facebook is planning to join the Fediverse by releasing a Twitter-like service that runs on ActivityPub. This would flood the Fediverse with content (and trolls) from Facebook, allow Facebook to mine data from the Fediverse, and would do irreparable damage to this small part of the internet which has not yet been marred by corporate greed.
Will the admins of this instance agree to block any instance that is set up by Facebook?
Facebook used XMPP to entice users to befriend Facebook users, then when they had enough market share they killed support for XMPP, forcing everyone who hadn’t yet joined facebook to join or lose their contacts who were on Facebook. There used to be times where you could just use Trillian to talk to people on multiple platforms (including MSN and Facebook) at the same time, and that died off as the walls grew taller.
ActivityPub is a competitor to Facebooks walled garden. I would not doubt they would try to try and cannibalize it.
I miss when trillian or a well configured Pidgin client was all you needed to talk to EVERYONE. Now half my friends have telegram, three have Facebook, the normies insist on sending me exploding videos on Snapchat that start playing muted so I can’t even hear what they are trying to say, then work wants me to use the crew app, friends want me on discord, I just want to use session.
Is a mess
At this point in time, I’m leaning towards limiting rather than blocking on the main blahaj.zone. Lemmy and kbin don’t allow silencing, but are also unlikely to federate with meta instances in the first place, so I’m not sure what we’re going to do about them.
Removed by mod
- Whatsapp started on XMPP
- Facebook used to have XMPP
- Google used to have XMPP
It’s foolish to think they won’t try to put their users back behind a wall once they think they can make more money that way.
My real worry though is with moderation. Will monolith like Meta be willing to respond to complaints from small instance admins? Or will they think that more flamewars = more pageviews = more ads served?
I’m neutral on the whole question, but AFAIK everything you post on the fediverse stays on the internet forever (even if you delete it from your instance, it doesn’t necessarily get deleted from all instances) and is indexed by search engines and the like.
While I don’t particularly want content from Friendface cluttering my feed, I’m not sure what (if any) effect defederating from hypothetical future Meta instances would have. Perhaps someone who’s been around here longer than me could chime in please? :)
Defederation cuts off the connection between two servers both ways. In this case, it would actually prevent facebook from harvesting data from these servers, and the server would not get any of the facebook server traffic.
That all being said, the objection to facebook joining the fediverse is partly a moral one, and a fear that facebook will try to EEE the fediverse (as in, embrace, extend, extinguish) like they did with other protocols.
There are obviously lots of reasons to be skeptical of meta, and to consider not federating with them, but
it would actually prevent facebook from harvesting data from these servers
isn’t the case. They can already mine data it if they really want – lots of folk set up bots to scrape mastodon data.
If the consequences you speak of are correct, then this would be a big issue.
If Lemmy/Kbin become big in any way, for profit mega-corporations will be here. I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
Yeah, you’re probably right, though by then hopefully it should be relatively easy to defedrate from them.
Meta, being the bloodsucking mega-corp it is, has so much money it can throw oodles of cash at anyhing that looks interesting or that has promise to suck it up.
I could see how the mods of instances may be tempted with cash to buy capacius servers instead of fighting month to month for funds, and many if not all of them have real jobs.
Still, it’s meta. The worst of the worst, just in front of google as our future overlords.
Lemmy will probably always be a niche thing and that’s okay. I don’t see it as a threat to Meta. Facebook has close to 3b users.
Meta likely see everyone as a potential threat, and since reddit is pretty big but mail fall, they are looking at whom might succeed them and become a new competitor to meta and taking away eyes from meta and ad profit.
I wouldn’t underestimate their “buy 'em out” mentality. There’s a reason they’re huge.
They buy out threats. Lemmy is not a threat. Lemmy will never be a threat. They’re big because during their start, they bought out anyone who could be a threat to them and now they have the network effect on their side.
