non-stickied PSA: Beehaw has signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Chat@beehaw.org – 657 points –

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Given the number of competitors they've killed or absorbed, you're not far off. Heck, they even stomped Google.

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

If there's no issues then we can refederate at any later time.

What is the harm in waiting?

Can't find the source, but I did see a rumor they'll be turning on federation a few months after the official release so as to not spring all of this place on a bunch of old people. So if they do that, they'll already have their own ecosystem/culture in place. I'm also a bit worried the extended introduction is going to lull people.

I think regardless, it always needs to be at the forefront of user's minds that they're not averse to playing it slow. Likely, they'll be on their best behavior starting out, especially since having a working platform at all means making as many friends in the fediverse as they can. They're not gonna come in swinging their junk around like spez.

Acting the gracious benefactor will not stop them from leaving this place a haunted backwater once they gather enough standing to start poaching users via shiny toys and high engagement. The kbin dev hasn't said anything to my knowledge yet, but being an overly reliant lapdog was XMPP's mistake and I support defederating as honestly the best way to avoid that.

Theirs is always going to be a numbers game, any niceties will be presumed by me to be a fakeout, and I'm pissed off that what was supposed to be a way to worm out from under the corporations semi-permanently stands to be drowned out immediately by corporations.

I think if this were a new player in the market, say for example a new social media platform that was going to venture into the fediverse, most people here would give them the benefit of the doubt.

However this is meta, they shouldn't take get the benefit of the doubt with how they've been operating over the last decade. There's no good faith that they'll be good participants

Corporations are motivated by profit. One of the ways Meta profits is by using your personal information for targeted advertising. For them, “community building” is a means, not an end. What else could you possibly need to know?

If a known con artist asks you to listen to their pitch, are you going to “hear them out”, or slam the door in their face?

because history

And just so happens to be the same pesky thing people refuse to read, color me surprised. 🙄

The same harm the inhabitants of the henhouse would come to if they decided to hear the fox out.

Don’t pretend like Meta is going to be open and interoperable.

You can’t look at their history and think letting the fox sleep in the hen house is a good idea. The house is for hens.

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.

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.

[^1]: It may have been this opinion piece: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376

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?

The thing is that this isn't really a marriage of equals; if Meta joins the Fediverse then Meta will swallow the Fediverse, simply by dint of having several orders of magnitude more users.

It would be akin to India applying to become the 51st US state; if we let them in, they'd end up controlling 80% of the House and the Electoral College and the US wouldn't really be the US anymore.

While I appreciate the analogy, the electoral college is a seriously broken system which hasn't protected proportional representation in a long, long time.

Oh certainly; my point was simply that in a system where population = influence, letting in a new group with several times as many people as all of your existing groups put together means that that new group effectively takes over.

And yet Even if India did join the United States as the 51st state, It occurs to me that The billionaires incorporations would still be in charge. Which is to say, although the huge population of Meta is a concern, I fear the power of Mark Zuckerberg's billions far more.

The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation. The whole idea of equal representation in the Senate was to avoid high population states running roughshod over the smaller ones. This obviously dilutes the influence of higher population states and amplifies the smaller ones at the electoral college.

The system is not broken though. It does exactly what it was originally intended to do 240 years ago. You just don't agree with it's intention and results

The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation.

Article 1 of the constitution very clearly lays out how electors are supposed to be chosen based on the census. To say that the house is not supposed to represent proportional representation while the senate represents non-proportional representation as a counterbalance is ignoring the long history of debate and the many laws passed to attempt to bring representation in the house in proportion with the population.

The system is broken. We do not know the 'original intent' and anyone trying to argue for constitutional originalism is either completely ignorant of how literally everything changes with time or trying to enforce their conservative ideals through a guise of legitimacy.

But this isn't really the right place to have this discussion (we're on a thread about defederating from meta) so I'm gonna withdraw now and not reply to any more responses about this.

Each state gets a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (senators plus representatives). If the number of representatives weren’t capped it would go a long way towards making the Electoral College more representative of the population.

Yeah the size is what I think is most worrying. I've only just got here so I'm pretty keen on the content (which seems to be the regular content that was here before + a fusion of stuff from Reddit)

I'm really not keen on having an influx of low quality Facebook posts here.

I'm not the one to be on my high horse, thinking that these platforms or Reddit are beacons of enlightenment, but the comments here are light-years above what I see on Facebook, so I want none of that.

@AnonymousLlama

@alyaza @dcormier @Ertebolle

75% of the posts I see on kbin are the worst low quality meme bullshit, significantly dumber and worse than the horrible stuff on Facebook.

You’re worried that, what? Itll get in the way of the trash everywhere already?

You need to curate your feed. That's not what I'm seeing.

It’s basically what happened after the revolutionary war, and reparations were even paid: to slave owners.

Well yeah, and the 3/5 clause was essentially a compromise whereby the disproportionately populous areas agreed to accept partial credit for the share of their population that was enslaved.

It’s ok to not tolerate algorithms that promote intolerance for clicks and advertising.

As much as I don't think the pact will do much, it's their right to defederate whichever instances they want. The protocol is still "open and interoperable" and this does not change that - in fact, this move is only possible because of that openness.

Your argument only sounds kinda sane when applied to Meta, but the same could be said about instances made by bad actors (spammers, for example). Please do further research before commenting on this.

What? Are you arguing tolerance of intolerance?

I'm arguing the protocol was designed this way for a reason. Each instance is meant to be able to implement their own policies and defederate who they want, exactly what Beehaw is doing here. The idea that this is against the spirit of the protocol is entirely inaccurate. Hope that clears it up.

I agree this seems kneejerk. If Meta refuses to abide by the standards of interoperability and openness then lock them out, but by doing so ahead of time the fediverse is committing the crime it's pre-punishing Meta for.

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.