FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta's ActivityPub Platform

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 768 points –
FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta's ActivityPub Platform
wedistribute.org
297

You are viewing a single comment

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

Well you can do that already. As in the spirit of federvise, host your instance and ban anyone and any instance you dun like. Your turf your rule.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It's not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

Clients are filtered out of the federated email system all the time. In fact, the major email distributors are so block-happy, it's difficult to run a private email server anymore. If you want to guarantee your email gets through, you're basically forced to use a major webmail client. If Facebook is allowed into the community, that will happen to ActivityPub too.

Allowing large corporations to leverage their resources to dominate the Fediverse goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

I agree with you on that. That's why I find this anti-Meta pact or manifesto or whatever naive and premature.

Just if there are people who insist on banning anything Meta, they are welcome to do so in their instances. Interoperability is still preserved. They are not adding anything to the protocol. Banning instances is part of the interoperability. I think this is where our opinion differs.

Just if there are people who insist on banning anything Meta, they are welcome to do so in their instances.

Isn't that what we're doing? We can't stop Meta from federating, that's not a function of the protocols. We're building a pact to defederate them from our instances.

A lot of people came to Mastodon because it was a safe space for queer and marginalized communities after being driven away by the lack of moderation and ability to keep them safe on places like Facebook and Twitter.

There's good reason to be suspicious.

How many times I've seen protonmail/tutanota/anonaddy emails not even reaching some big-ass company inbox or even spam folder.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

But that's the thing: We don't trust that Meta will be using the protocol "as intended".

4 more...
4 more...