Could we get official word on what Kbin's stance is towards federating with Meta?
Roundcat@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 0 points – I would like to know if I can feel safe here, or if I should pack it up and start looking elsewhere sooner rather than later.
If the kbin staff have already made there intentions clear, please let me know.
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I don't want to take away that choice. I personally don't have a problem with meta joining the fediverse, and in fact today I downloaded the app and created my account. I'm excited by the possibilities of being able to speak to my friends from my Mastodon account.
My point was more for the people who think that suddenly 1.2bn users are going to be showing up in this kbin instance.
That's fair, reading it again I see I misunderstood you. :)
I apologize if I seemed hostile; I just get frustrated with people wanting to block whole instances here without cause (like the instance being primarily trolls or hate speech). On Lemmy it makes sense since only the admins can block domains (and it applies to everyone), but Kbin allows domain-level blocking on an individual level so it makes a lot less sense here.
what you (and other likeminded people) haven't understood is that these 2 are 2 different topics. Defederating with meta is not because people don't want to be near the users of meta. It is because meta is a huge corp and it is not here to promote the idea of a federated network. It is here to make profit and to exploit the network. Allowing them to be part of the same network will just cause harm to the network itself in the end.
I suggest you reading this article https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html which is the story of how google killed XMPP, written by one of the XMPP core developers. I believe you will see the similarities.
@asjmcguire
I think misunderstand. I do understand that. I used XMPP. I've read that article.
My argument is that the fedipact, if executed as desired by the people running it, will defederate from Meta and anywhere that federates with Meta.
So now you have 2 fediverses, completely separated from one another. One side has Meta; the other doesn't. If I want to post something and I want people to see it and react to it, I will post it to the side with more people. If I want to scroll endlessly without needing to stop and refresh or wait because the feed is stale, I will look at the side with more people.
The other side - the fedipact side - will slowly become stale and niche. There will always be hardcore users - people still use XMPP - but it will fade into what it was in 2020 and 2021. My Lemmy account - @EnglishMobster - is from 2020. My original Mastodon account is even older. I've seen this place grow and blossom into what it is now, and the fedipact is threatening that growth. People will leave the side of the fedipact and join the side without it... which is to say, the side dominated by Meta.
Instead of a big wide fediverse with open source projects living alongside random PeerTube creators living alongside movie stars... we have 1 niche one and 1 dominated by a large corporation. It's literally the same result as if Meta went through with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... but done without the "extend" or "extinguish", a massive "own goal" by the FOSS community.
And worse - it doesn't stop Facebook from going through with "extend" or "extinguish" later. It literally just destroys communities for no reason, leaving us in the exact same situation that XMPP is in today.
I am fine with an instance saying "we won't federate with Threads". I'd rather it not be Kbin, of course, but I will move to an instance that does federate because my friends are important to me.
I am not fine with me being held hostage for that. I don't want to join Threads directly if I can avoid it; I'd rather use my Kbin account. But the fedipact is trying to make that impossible by saying "we will defederate anywhere that federates with Threads".
I'm waiting for the part where you explain the problem.
Just like today the folks who want to interact with the quality of discussion you get on facebook will be able to do so, and those who don't, won't.
I have scrolled this thread quickly so maybe I'm misattributing, but I feel like you've commented on how you and others will go to instances with "more users" more than once - as if this is some universal success metric.
I will go to the side which has quality discussion, and I'm exceptionally doubtful it's going to be the part of the fediverse that federates with meta. More users does not equal better discussion. I would argue that past a certain critical mass it almost guarantees lower quality discussion.
The fact that there CAN BE two fediverses seems to me a feature, not a bug.
If you want "quality discussion", why are you on here and not Tildes? Tildes' whole purpose is quality discussion. Shouldn't you go for the place where that's being optimized for?
Tildes is a great example, actually. They're small and quiet and want to be quiet. They don't want to take off. You can get through Tildes in an hour.
That's why I get bored of Tildes easily. I don't want to just be one-and-done with a site. I want to constantly be discovering new things. I want to see number go up (to an extent). I want to read a bunch of comments, some insightful, some dumb.
If I'm going to post something, I don't want to post it to Tildes. I'll get a slow trickle of comments and replies, people replying to a week-old post with something I've long stopped thinking about.
I worry that if defederation comes and severs the fediverse in two, engagement will go down. Mastodon.social isn't part of the fedipact, and likely won't be. Everywhere that relies on content from Mastodon.social - which is a lot of them, non-techies don't want to find a specific instance - will have a lot less content, very suddenly.
People like me who love refreshing feeds will see the torrent of posts slowly... come... to... a... stop. People like me will get bored - where are all the posts? Why can't I see the creators I really like?
"Well, they're on a server that federates with a server that federates with Meta."
So you'll just be left with those in the fedipact. People who are used to the fast-moving feed (like me) will get frustrated. There's a reason why I left Mastodon in 2019ish and why I left Lemmy in 2020 - they got boring quickly (well, Lemmy was also full of tankies). I left Tildes because it got boring quickly too.
I'm in this sort of industry. I'm not going to reveal much about what I specifically do, but I know that most people want something that is new and exciting and moves fast. It draws them in and causes them to spend most of their time there.
When that feed slows down, they spend less time on that site. When they have enough experiences of "opening the app just to close it again", they'll eventually remove it from their home screen (or bookmarks). Then it gets forgotten about.
When the user forgets about a site, it gets less content. In turn, that makes the content even slower. In turn, that drives more people away, except for the die-hards who love slow discussions (like Tildes or 2019-era Mastodon).
Where are the people who left going to go? Well, they might go to where their creators were - somewhere like Mastodon.social. Or they'll leave entirely, or they'll move to Bluesky or Threads.
A lot of those options aren't healthy for the broader fediverse, so you'll just have this one branch that is dominated by Meta and the other which slowly dies as people leave due to increasingly stale content. If they were united, they might've stood a chance against Meta if/when Meta made an anti-competitive move... but divided they're a lot easier for Meta to scoop up and slowly extinguish, XMPP-style.
Again, the fedipact is doing Meta's dirty work for them.
Well I mean first of all, it's not "most people". It's "most people in the influencer industry".
Second of all, fuck those people. They don't care about corpos running their lives. We don't need them or their content in the fediverse.
And thirdly, you're in that category too. You're a shill for big corpos but you want a veneer of respectability. Just join Facebook and get it over with.
How many times must I say that I disagree with Facebook on a moral level? How does that make me a "shill"??
My point is largely:
The fedipact is self-defeating. Nobody has refuted this point, they all seem to ignore it to focus on personal attacks. It won't stop EEE; it will simply divide the fediverse and make it a worse place when it's still new and fragile.
This is a general-purpose instance. As such, it shouldn't sign the fedipact or defederate from Threads. If you're running a niche instance - that's fine, you can sign if it's important to you and you wish to stay niche. But a loud minority shouldn't speak for the entirety of one of the largest fediverse instances out there (which is what kbin.social is).
People may have legitimate reason to communicate with people on Threads, and because they may disagree with Facebook on a moral level (like me), you shouldn't force them into Zuck's slimy fingers. I'm not going to use the service if I have to go through Zuck's gateway to do so. There's an opportunity to use FOSS stuff and stay away from Zuck, but people who ostensibly agree that Zuck is bad are telling me I can't do that? For reasons they can't even vocalize. So me not wanting to join Threads makes me a corporate shill, somehow. Okay.
By opening up the fediverse to Facebook, you're already in Zuck's slimy fingers. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. Doesn't work like that. Those who federate with them will get eaten by them.
And here's a point for you to consider:
Why don't you just host your own instance? Federate with Threads AND the rest of the Fediverse? Why are you trying to convince us to federate with Facebook at all??
Here's a point for you, then:
Why must you force your beliefs onto communities with tens of thousands of people, many of whom don't agree with you? The status quo is that kbin.social federates with basically everywhere, as it should since it's a general-purpose flagship instance. Why do you want to change the status quo because of your personal beliefs?
Instead of trying to force Kbin.social to change, maybe you should host your own instance where you can block Meta and everywhere that federates with it. Or you can join a Kbin instance that already does so: https://kglitch.social/
But there should still be places that allow for federation if that's what they desire. That's how Kbin.social is currently set up. I am defending the current status quo, and you are trying to argue for changing it. There are instances that already agree with you; you don't need to stay here and fight everyone who disagrees.