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.
There are over 70 kbin instances. If kbin.social is not to your liking, you can find another. https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
https://kglitch.social has defederated from Meta (well, blocked the domains that meta is expected to use). Registrations are open.
Exactly. Keep this flagship instance general-purpose. If federation with Meta means you can't "feel safe here", then "pack it up" as you say and choose a place with a moderation style that fits you.
Don't try intimidating everywhere else into adopting your beliefs, like many people here are doing.
If you have privacy concerns, you should probably not post here for time being.
It is prototype software. Doesn't remove EXIF geotags from photos, for example and posts here are public (and indexed by webcrawlers). Treat this as "open Internet" for your safety/privacy purposes.
It's not much of privacy I'm concerned about as much as community and visibility.
Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users, meanwhile from what I have seen from kbin and lemmy, there is a lot more nuance and maturity in the communities here (for the most part) that I would hate to see overun by Thread users.
Secondly, it's one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me. The fact that the fediverse is a prototype with vulnerabilities makes the likelihood of a company like Meta, who intentionally exploits vulnerabilities to harvest data, all the more likely.
Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks, and I have no reason to believe Facebook won't do this. If I'm going to invest time and effort into making a community grow, I would rather not waste my time on a platform that is doomed to be consumed.
With this I agree. 1.2bn users is way more noise than I want to experience and I will, personally block the domain. As a kbin user, you'll have the tools available for that as well.
To think that the big companies that base their business models solely on datamining users already haven't been mining the shit out of our data is a bit naive, I think. They don't have to exploit vulnerabilities, make their presence known or launch huge products for it. All they (or anyone!) need is a $20/month linux VPS and a Mastodon installation. The fediverse does not have data privacy controls for content (beyond masking account e-mails/originator IPs).
I agree. Threads got 10M signups yesterday and they haven't even launched officially yet. They're already larger than the entire fediverse.
Many people will switch to their app. And at some point, they will most likely make interoperability hard (so we have to adapt to their "bugs" instead of it being the other way around).
I just want to make clear that I'm in the "Defederate the shit out of them"-camp, but I also don't think the fediverse is a place that puts privacy first - if privacy is your concern, then my advice is to stay away from fedi. For now.
Right....
BUT -
You aren't going to see ANY of those 1.2bn users, until someone on THIS server follows someone on THAT server. That's the point of federation. It isn't like Twitter - you don't just see everything that everyone over there posts. It's no different on Mastodon - there has to be a social connection before posts start showing up here.
Put another way, if hateful stuff starts showing up on the Fediverse from meta users, it is because someone on the Fediverse is following the people posting hateful stuff.
When meta eventually starts federating - you aren't going to see posts from @asjmcguire until someone here is following my account.
As for if meta makes changes that makes federating hard, that's not our problem. If they make changes that make federating with THEM hard, that's their problem. There is no reason the rest of the fediverse needs to follow what changes meta make. It doesn't hurt us if they break federation with the rest of the fediverse. Meta is in reality no different to mastodon in that regard, it's just another platform - but for example Pixelfed isn't going to bend over backward to make life easier for meta.
But if you go to https://kbin.social/d/threads.net (obviously doesn't work yet), then you can block the whole instance, yourself, for your own account. It has the same effect as the server defederating, but it only affects you.
The only reason why that solution wouldn't be acceptable is if you believe so strongly against the very concept of Threads that you want to make that choice for everyone else. You want to forcibly hit that button on everyone's account and push your beliefs and opinions onto others.
If you simply don't like Meta, that's fine - I get it. I want to use FOSS stuff to see my friends. I want my friends to appear in my feed, and I want their hashtags to be sorted into my magazines. My wish to see my friends is just as valid as your wish to not see anyone from Threads. While Threads has some questionable people, they aren't the majority. It's much better for me to block the individual accounts that cause problems than it is for me to lose the ability to talk to all my friends.
Kbin gives you the power to go to the domain and block it yourself; this isn't Lemmy. Why do you want to take that choice away from everyone who is okay with people from Threads in their feed?
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.
If you're truly worried about federating with Meta, you should probably also avoid all the other products they have their fingers in.
This includes all their web properties:
But this also includes many web technologies that are ubiquitous around the web. Meta has either created or contributes code and resources to:
I suspect you'll have a hard time finding any website on earth that doesn't use at least one of these technologies.
Sorry if tbis is dumb of me but why should we avoid ever using any web tech that has been associated with Meta, just because we are worried about E-E-E affecting Activity Pub?
Are you worried about EEE coming for those techs?
It's the same thing. Why are people treating them differently?
A more likely explanation for Meta's actions is that the Digital Markets Act is forcing them to adopt the fediverse: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets\_en
The interoperability is the big one. The fediverse gives a way for Meta to be in compliance. EEE that breaks the wider fediverse will cause the EU to come down on them.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'm not as worried about the ubiquitous technologies because I'm ignorant about whether/how they could shut down the aps and sites I use.
I don't go anywhere near the list of websites and aps if I can help it. I do have to use WhatsAp sometimes and it really bothers me that Meta has hold of it now. I wish my wider society would adopt something else instead.
React is a JavaScript library that was created by Facebook.
It makes webpages pretty, basically. It makes things load really really fast while still looking clean and modern.
Dropbox, Paypal, Discord, Slack, Netflix, AirBnB all use React.
Facebook didn't create MySQL, but they have contributed to it.
MySQL is a way of efficiently storing large amounts of data. Users, passwords, credit card info, anything that needs to store a lot of things will have at least considered MySQL.
Other places that use MySQL are Twitter, Pinterest, GitHub, YouTube, Spotify, and so on.
Memcached was originally developed for LiveJournal, but Facebook has contributed to it.
It's a way to quickly store arbitrary data, and reduces how many API calls you need to make. This in turn makes running a large website cheaper, since you can just look up the data in your own memory rather than needing to make an API call.
YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest all use Memcached.
HHVM was created by Facebook.
HHVM is what executes the Hack programming language (also made by Facebook). Hack is based on PHP (the same thing Kbin runs on), but is optimized in a different way and is more flexible than traditional PHP.
Slack and Wikipedia are the biggest users of HHVM.
Cassandra was created by Facebook.
Cassandra works basically as an alternative to NoSQL (mentioned above). It does much of the same job, but works a bit better making sure there's no single point of failure.
Uber, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter all use Cassandra.
Scribe was created by Facebook.
Scribe aggregates logs from many many servers and helps engineers find problems in large networks.
The name is a little generic so it's hard to find examples, but I know that Dropbox uses Scribe internally and other large companies probably do too.
Facebook did not create Hadoop, but has contributed to it.
Hadoop is meant for solving problems that take a lot of data. Machine learning (ChatGPT etc.) is the classical example, but really it works well any time you need to process a lot of data.
Uber, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Slack all use Hadoop.
Facebook created Hive.
Hive lets you query the results of work done by Hadoop (above). It provides an interface that is similar to MySQL but lets you access Hadoop data.
Uber, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Slack all used to use Hive. It's largely dying out now because it can't keep up with modern data sets.
Thrift was created by Facebook.
It connects programs that were created using different programming languages. They can all share a data format through Thrift, which lets them talk to each other.
Thrift is used by Netflix, Evernote, Twitter, Uber, and reCAPTCHA.
Facebook did not create Varnish, but has contributed to it.
It dynamically figures out what to load when you're on a website, so you can have a lot of stuff on one webpage but have it still load quickly.
GitLab, Pinterest, Twitch, and Udemy all use Varnish.
Literally you could not use the modern web without using these technologies. Meta has a loud voice in most of those techs, and outright controls a handful of them. That's been the case for most of the 2010s into the 2020s.
While I don't think Facebook necessarily has good intentions - they're a corpo, corpos are never your friends, Facebook especially has proven to be evil - they have proven to be good stewards of open-source technologies for over a decade now.
I wouldn't say I trust them with the fediverse. But I'm also not so quick to jump to EEE because they do have a fairly solid track record when it comes to web tech.
Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.
However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.
I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.
As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:
Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.
Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.
Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.
Not that it was ever going to be any different, but it's very funny how a userbase that so clearly sees itself as so much smarter and more mature than the average rando is obviously using the downvote as a "I disagree" button on your comment here.
I can see thinking that this is a naïve perspective, and I'd probably agree with that really, but you clearly have a position, have thought about it, and tried to explain it. This isn't what downvotes are supposed to be for.
It's almost as if people here are just as emotionally driven as the normies they detest so much.
We (meaning the whole fediverse, all instances) need to be de-federating that crap immediately.
Nothing good will come from having Facebook streaming into here in anyway whatsoever.
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
Also, if Facebook is allowed to "work with" the development of the fediverse at all, they absolutely will eventually destroy it for profit. And "working with" it absolutely includes them federating with it.
When their vast resources are taken into account, and their existing userbase also, they would rapidly become the main instance (or collection of, but probably just one) of the whole fediverse. Once that's them, they can use that position to dictate terms pretty hard.
Before you know it, everyone that would eventually have come here are there instead, and they're now the fediverse. They can also fork the software and leverage their Dev teams to make their fediverse vastly more polished... No donations needed on their fediverse, less bugs, everyone you know is already over there... Seem familiar?
How does that effect us who aren't there, how isn't it just the same thing as now? Our fediverse dies off because the users leave, instances close down through lack of population/need, before you know it there's nobody here and the idea just dies.
Literally been done before. The playbook is absolutely common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,\_extend,\_and\_extinguish
The beauty of the fediverse is precisely that it is not monolithic. Each instance can be different, have different policies and decide who it wants to federate with. Some instances will federate with anyone, some with most, some with a few, some with none.
The claim that that the fediverse needs to be a monolithic whole, where all instances walk in lock-step with each other is entirely at odds with the fediverse philosophy.
this argument makes sense only if you're talking about defederating instances. It doesn't make sense here. The problem is not whether we want the users of meta's instances. The problem is whether we want a huge corp be part of the fediverse. And why are we talking about it? Because people are trying not being naive and believing that meta is here because they liked the ideas of a federated network and want to participate. Meta will cause more harm than good as it has already happened in the past in different technologies/projects.
The only thing naiive is the people in here thinking that defederating from Meta accomplishes anything whatsoever.
Oh boo hoo, meta's instance is shinier than ours, doesn't that mean users will leave? Yeah, look around, they already will and are leaving for Meta's platforms, they have more users on Threads in 24hrs than the Fediverse has had in it's entire life.
Nothing about defederating changes that.
the defederation has nothing to do with "reducing meta's number". The reason to defederate is so you're not playing their game with their own rules. Fediverse will gain absolutely nothing by playing meta's game.
Everyone keeps talking in analogies like "playing their game" because if you said "we gain nothing by getting a ton of free content from Threads users" it would sound ridiculous.
i'm not here for the ton of content that meta will produce. If I wanted this content I would had been there in the first place. It looks like somebody else is in the wrong place and is dreaming of a fediverse full of brands trying to promote their products and the influencers pretending they are real life advertisements.
its funny that you measure value by that metric.
No, I'm just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn't great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.