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.

  • dcormier@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m disappointed.

    “The fediverse is open and interoperable!”

    “No, not them.”

    • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Melpomene@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

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

        • fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          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

          • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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 gradually poaching users via shiny toys and high engagement.

            This includes any new users. Most noobs are probably going to the big name or staying away entirely because they associate the fediverse with Zuckerberg. We stand a real chance of withering because no non-corporate instance can compete with the kind of time and money they have.

            As a corporation, their aim is always going to be numbers. They know they can’t physically buy the entire fediverse out, so their only recourse is to make any competition playing keep away irrelevant. Any niceties will be presumed by me to be a fakeout.

        • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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

        • magnetosphere@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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?

          • debounced@kbin.run
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            1 year ago

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

        • mobyduck648@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

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

    • bear_delune@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ikantolol@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Retronautickz@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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?

    • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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      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.

      • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

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

        • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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          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.

        • Bdking158@kbin.social
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          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

          • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            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 and establishes the need for a census to reflect the population’s growth. To say that the house is not supposed to have 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.

          • blivet@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Maeve@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

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

        • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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          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.

    • fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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

    • Maeve@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

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

    • aranym@lemmy.name
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      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.

        • aranym@lemmy.name
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          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.

    • TehPers@beehaw.org
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      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.

    • ngwoo@beehaw.org
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      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.