Join or ignore the anti-meta fedi pact

my plan is to block facebook because they abused my trust and have done nothing to deserve even attempting to earn it back. I don't care if this happens at the instance level or for myself, because at least I have the tools to do so

@crashdoom @brodokk

From an outcome-oriented perspective, federating has little effect, positive or negative. Meta does not care about furry.engineer. furry.engineer is unlikely to receive not receive horrible content from Meta. Meta will benefit in small ways from being federated with furry.engineer and pawb.social because furry.engineer and pawb.social have very good content.

But on a more universal level -- that is, if you imagine that everyone bridges to Meta -- Meta benefits massively from being allowed to connect to the existing good content across the Fediverse. From this point of view, allowing Meta to bridge to furry.engineer is a bit like littering -- yes, you're not killing the planet yourself, and other people are responsible for far greater harm, but in aggregate people who do what you are making the planet a worse place to live in.

If you do not see that as an ethical problem, then blocking them would be a performative gesture. Even if you see blocking them as a performative gesture, I still think pawb.social and furry.engineer should do so.

Being federated with them implies that furry.engineer tolerates their online conduct. IMHO, furry.engineer has no exit from this: when you endorse someone while also disclaiming that you do not _really_ endorse them, you are still endorsing them. An individual real person with a track record like Meta's would not be allowed to interact with furry.engineer.

On the other hand, not federating with Meta would make furry.engineer part of a collective action that sends the explicit message is that Meta is intolerable. The impact is still negligible, but in the same sense that the impact of eating less beef is negligible: by taking the action you are embodying positive characteristics and if the action was universalized, everyone's lives would be improved. Unlike "eating less beef," taking this action has no real cost to you.

I'll add that the only real solution to the coordination problem in organized action is for people to take actions even when they can't guarantee they will get the outcome they want. It's very important for groups with rational, apolitical branding to take actions like this because otherwise people won't act like this in daily life. This is the kind of moral thinking people need to be babystepped into if you want them to refuse to do unethical things just because their bosses told them to, or if you want them to demand raises that are commensurate to inflation.

Not only is it ethical to think this way, but people actually benefit personally by going beyond what they can justify with a mere cost/benefit analysis and taking a leap of faith when their moral compass tells them what to do, and what they deserve.

I cannot imagine federating with Meta given these tradeoffs and given what I know about the kind of social consciousness good engineers must develop to be effective in their careers.

@crashdoom @brodokk I'm against the idea of connecting with Meta in any way, for reasons others have started far more eloquently than I can.
Please just block them. Meta is a company that's entirely based on selling user data. The more they branch out, the more data they have to sell.
This new platform is merely another way to get data to sell.
(Edited to remove redundant redundancy)

@crashdoom all facebook instances should be preemptively defederated – throughout their existence fb has been malicious in an uncountable amount of utterly horrible ways, and should not be offered a clean slate

spaces with corporations aren't safe spaces

@crashdoom @brodokk

I very much agree with the wording on the pact's page: I believe that a Facebook fedi project, and for that matter corporate influence in general, is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity.

Fedi has been my escape from corporate machinations, and I don't want to see that erode over time. A corporate fedi project will draw a large userbase to itself, and that will make it very difficult for instances to maintain independence without cutting theirselves off from large sections of the fedi community. Corporations will try to shape fedi to fit their bottom line, and that will not be in the best interest of community members. I very much expect corporate footholds to be the start of embrace, extend, extinguish campaigns.

So I say make it as hard as possible for them to even try -- and send a unified message that there are no profits to be found here.

I stand on the same kind of stance... I agree. I am not a fan of the company, and I am not a fan of the way they do business. I am unsure if I will like what they try to do in this space, but I think blocking them outright would be a considerable disservice before giving it a chance. I think having a big player in the ring, people will give it more of a chance than they have in the past with the complaints of "It just seemed too complicated" or "I don't understand the concept of servers" It will be a good gateway for people to try the platform with "An Evil You Know" mindset.

Do I think it could eventually turn into Embrace Extend Extinguish... maybe, but I think it is still worth it to get more people into giving it a shot. Just look at the at protocol that people are playing with; tons of users are so excited about how they can use their own domain and such... when they see you from a different instance and actually see it working. It might drive a percentage to move off the Meta-operated instance and onto instances operated by individuals or even try to host their own instance.

@brodokk @crashdoom - I have zero tolerance for #META tom foolery. If they federate, it’s a block for me. I had high hopes for lemmy, but recent revelations on the platform, META and code developers has me significantly disappointed in the long term outlook for this project. So, count me as a 👎🏻

I'm a bit skeptical of Facebook/Meta's tactic; it feels like the start of an embrace/extend/extinguish campaign (to get people fleeing Twitter onto a Facebook-controlled service, and subsequently remove the ability to federate/migrate accounts from their instance in order to try and lock people into their own service rather than let them find their way to the Fediverse). Arguably, they (and Google) did the same thing with XMPP by breaking federation in their own implementations.

I have to agree, I just wrote a longer post on the main thread about it, but as a TL;DR I don't support defederating from them, nor do I support some sort of "Anti-Meta" pact. I actually think having Meta introduce people to the Fediverse in a "soft-landing" sorta of way might be beneficial to us all. Rather than the hard-landing that many people had after Twitter began imploding.

My personal view is we should be reactive in our approach to such things, not proactive. Judge things by actions taken, not by what they might do. ActivityPub is a W3 consortium standard, so Meta really can't "control" or "own" it. They can either play by the game of the Fediverse standard, or not. That's on them, with little harm to us overall.

@crashdoom @brodokk I think just blocking them is a good idea, but I think we should be fair to the users & wait to see how it is before blocking them.

But with what I know of what Facebook users tolerate from Facebook, they might not deserve that fairness, they gave it up to Facebook to make an account!

From a general standpoint, I don't think that any Mastodon community stands much to lose for taking a neutral stance on Project 92. Meta isn't a threat to us because of how the fediverse works. It's not even guaranteed that their app will be 100% intercompatible with Mastodon. It might end up being another kind of halfway there integration that affords them and for that matter, us no benefit. The whole thing might not be something worth caring about, but it might not be great to take an actively positive stance on it, because of the amount of the fediverse moving against it.

From a community standpoint, it's possible we stand to lose more if the fediverse splinters into anti-Meta spaces, and Meta-neutral or pro-Meta spaces. What Meta coming to fedi has done is show that there is so much potential to divide up all these separated spaces into people disagreeing on points that might be irrelevant to the functionality of the platform. I personally see this nature of Meta as more dangerous than any threat they pose to the protocol. Divide and conquer. How many people are going to be upset when they end up on the "wrong" instance, for whatever their personal opinion is, and how is that going to effect smaller instances that people will learn not to trust, compared to large ones, run by corporations or large organizations. They are not taking over the fediverse, but attempting to divide it and corporatize it, along with any other large organization that wants to take advantage of it.

Either way, I don't believe that joining any pact is the way to go. Signing onto such a thing is a community commitment whose terms may change over time, to the dissatisfaction of at least one party involved. I believe any decision should be made by this individual instance without the active association with any other. Moving as a group is what Meta and every other corporation expects us to do, leaving us in a compromised state, and though for the past decade or so, it's how all online communities work, distributed networks allow us to question that status quo. I say no to the pact, but neutral on general defederating or silencing.

@crashdoom @brodokk I don't think Zuck's company has a credible track record at all. His company has been a malicious actor throughout the past decade or more, and I believe preemptively blocking them is not uncalled for at all.

can honestly say that i am not against meta on fedi, mainly because i don't see what's the issue with, because like, the fediverse can't be controlled by meta, it controls itself, and as such if project 92 becomes an invasive platform, users can just switch to mastodon or calckey and still have the same interactions as before

tbh, project 92's idea is weird, like what's the point for facebook to make a decentralized platform?

Facebook is already a bad actor on its own platform. They are not going to be any different with the Fediverse. The meeting under NDA for a select few instance admin is already pretty fucking sus. Not just because it looks similar to union-busting tactics, but because that's exactly how it started with XMPP before they crippled it.

And even in the unlikely event that I end up wrong, what benefit would federating with Facebook bring us? We don't need them, and as a company their only purpose is to make profits, not to make Fedi better. There is no positive outcome possible for us, no matter how you slice it. We need to defederate before they even get a chance to do anything.

@crashdoom @brodokk
I saw a fairly long post that summarizes my personal thoughts on this subject pretty clearly:

https://calckey.social/notes/9g6q2a37hu9kt84t

the short bit:

> What's important to acknowledge here is that it's not we, the Fediverse, who have conceded. It's Meta.
> It's Meta who have given up ownership of their own corporate-owned network effect in order to join the Fediverse.

I mean, do we even know if Meta's plan involves federation? As others have stated, ActivityPub is an open standard that allows for federation, but services don't have to federate just to use ActivityPub. We could be getting into a fit right now just to find out they have no plans to federate - of course, they could change that at any time, but we just don't know yet.

Of course, Meta meeting with big instance admins is concerning, especially since they're under NDA so we don't know what was discussed. Maybe it was the possibility of federation, maybe it was just logistics of ActivityPub. They only started this in January, they could have figured they're at a point they should talk to the people who run this stuff.

IMO, we just don't have enough information to act yet, at least beyond "we are actively monitoring and prepared to make XYZ actions in response to ABC behaviors." Make it clear to the community what you're looking for and what you'll do in response to expected actions that are clear to all why they'd be acted on. I think a pre-emptive silence could be justified, but I think a full defederate is just really hard to argue for when we don't know a lot just yet.

Plus, love it or hate it, even if they do federate, Meta is a trusted entity by big names and organizations. A lot of people might give it a go, and it feels unfair to them. Especially for anyone interested in federation from the comfort of a known thing just to find out half the fediverse decided they want nothing to do with Meta's platform without seeing how it actually goes.

A small part of why I keep Twitter around (outside of artists and streamers who haven't made a presence here, at least as far as I know) is because I follow some local government orgs. I would love to get that on my local timeline so I have another reason to cut back on Twitter more, and Meta's platform might be the best way I can get that right now.

@crashdoom @brodokk would say we should probably avoid the new zuck platform considering what facebook (the content and the people, not even mentioning other concerns related to the company itself) would bring, i got a negative approach on this but still would leave it to the time while avoiding

@crashdoom @brodokk

I'm a bit late but: strongly against pre-emptive blocking

defederation should be a poweful & last-resort moderation tool (since it's taking agency away from users). obviously it is justified in some cases (gab, truthsocial etc), but we're nowhere near the point at which blocking meta seems justifiable.

the data-harvesting justification just seems confused (meta care about building profiles of people they can show adverts to, they dgaf about people on other fedi instances)

@crashdoom I have no interest in using any Facebook services but also see no reason to fediblock.

Give them the opportunity to be good neighbor and only take actions if they are having moderation problems. Defederating should be kept as a last resort.

@crashdoom @brodokk

Commenting with this as context: https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/110555014534253768

Project 92 wouldn't fit in with the Networked Communities philosophy that I use Fedi for. Normally that would just call for a silence, but given Meta's extremely poor stewardship of people's data in the past, especially those who didn't opt into the data collection in the first place, I think a preemptive full-defederation is warranted rather than a silence. It seems like a Rule 6 matter, too.

@crashdoom This will be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think a defederation / block is warranted - yet. I’m of “a certain age” when I was on the internet when AOL joined in and thus started the slur of AOLers who were considered subhuman. Completely unwarranted, and sure some were noobs, but weren’t we all?

Not everyone has access to the same level of technology, and for them, using a service like FB is the simple way to interact.

Let them join, participate, and let’s see what happens.

@crashdoom I would prefer my data not to be collected and sold, hence why I'm prominently in the fedi. I'm in favor of preemptively blocking, because data is their business model to make money and I'm not for sale. Them integrating is not for the human or social aspect, it's purely for the profits.

@crashdoom @brodokk I don't think a discussion of whether or not they will attempt to/successfully EEE the fediverse even matters. We already know what Meta's track record is for moderation - I came here to avoid that, and I think that's going to end up being reason enough to cut them off. It just seems like it's going to be impossible to manage otherwise. I suspect that at the very least silencing them will be necessary.

@crashdoom @brodokk

On principle, I think that if they are allowed at all, that a an annual review of their policy compatibility be conducted (or whenever they change their policies). Honestly though, a profit-driven platform is going to behave differently than the federated community that you've nurtured here.

Are there some questions as to the role of businesses participating and communicating in this community? Of course! Is Meta one of them? Of course not! They have a horrible record.