Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!
cacheson@kbin.social to 
Fediverse@kbin.social – 55 points – 
I'm changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:
Of course, it's possible to work with companies you don't trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don't trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is ... risky. There's a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as "prudently defensive" in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: "block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block." Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:
We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though
Previously, I'd thought "some block, some federate" would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:
My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:
Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse
Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta
Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.
People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.
But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.
Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.
And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.
I‘m here because corporations are a collection of moldy, parasitic assholes who enshittify platforms, how anyone can be on here and still have this naive trust in them is what truly confounds me.
If they were willing to participate in good faith and share traffic, or anything at all, why not just go ahead and spin up their little instance? Why the sketchy NDA shit? Why come for the admins and devs?
All they want is a monopoly on our data and on how the fediverse works, this move by them is nothing but an attempt to snuff out this blossoming community (aka competition).
They dress it up in doublespeak to make it seem beneficial to us, but if they get enough admins and devs on their side, those people will come to regret it in a few years when their community has no activity stemming from itself anymore and is overshadowed by some proprietary Meta nonsense they foolishly (or greedily if money is involved) signed up for.
Having meta join doesn't change shit here other than have a huge corporation break the wall down on what federation means to the average joe - and that's a good thing.
Meta will meta no matter what they do - but if we can break the walled garden down and make it easy for users to move that would be great.
Ty for providing the prime example of user I was talking about, "Let‘s embrace the corporation, they extend our service!" Oops we got extinguished, who could have seen it coming? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,\_extend,\_and\_extinguish
I sure hope the devs and admins of the major instances think differently, but if they don‘t and the entire protocol turns to some halfway proprietary shitshow forcing us to use Meta to access most of it, I‘ll come and find you to write "I told you so." Or I guess I won‘t, cause I‘ll be hiding on some abandoned part of the fediverse which can‘t communicate with you anymore cause Meta won‘t let me without signing up for their ads.
I disagree with you 100% :)
What i'm saying is people like you will never be convinced of anything so it doesn't matter what Meta does.
But for the rest of us, I'll enjoy following people i haven't followed because i refuse to have meta apps installed but will soon be able to connect without them.
Activitypub is going to be here no matter what.
I'll make it so awesome the people I like on Meta will move over
And i'll continue to ignore the people who are just espousing hate and vitriol because they don't matter anyway.
It's about the people - not the protocol. the protocol helps us break the walled gardens down - but we have to welcome the people or it won't matter.
You do realize that Meta will likely implement incentives to stay on their platform, and weed out other federations over time, right?
They're absolutely planning to grab Fediverse members, and will make efforts to prevent the other way around. Your friends will stay with the meta product because it's more convenient for them to do so.
You honestly seem to be more rooting for meta than the fediverse, since you seem certain that "anyone who disagrees could never be convinced otherwise"...but you seem to have only taken into account fediverse users doing this, not meta users. Like you're arguing very one-sidedly.
If you can't convince them to jump ship now, I just don't see what changes when Meta provides them (as meta users) more options, not less.
Y'all seriously don't think any of this through do you?
Right now, if they jump ship - they lose their network.
In the future, if they jump ship - they can do so and still maintain their network.
My enthusiasm for the fediverse is there because i see this as opportunity to shine.
Y'all see it as opportunity to run and lock your doors.
You're like the Trump of the fediverse. "Build a wall"
I say fuck that.
They wouldn't even try to interact with fediverse, if they couldn't make hooks to keep people from jumping ship. They're not stupid, and they know nobody in their network would jump ship just because they chose not to federate.
You argue that people who argue against you are "trump of the fediverse"? You sound like you're the kind of person who would give Trump a chance. What's the worst he could do?
Turns out he practically redefined what a President could do. And none of it good.
Don‘t act as if you‘d have listened to me if I had dressed it up in pretty words for you, plenty of journalists have done that already anyway. I‘ll spew my opinions as long as I still can cause believe it or not, I also care about this platform, as I see it as the last ditch effort at having a corporate free space and an online community which isn‘t entirely focused on selling us and selling things to us.