this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
345 points (99.1% liked)
Fediverse
17686 readers
13 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe it was their refusal to take a stance on Meta and Threads? The admins of .ml said it took them 2 minutes to decide to preemptively defederate. .World on the other hand came to an anti-corporate platform and publicly took a position that they would wait and see about federation with Meta.
It's like saying "power to the people and viva revolution but we are also remaining open to licking boot depending on the circumstances."
I do not believe that the Fediverse is an exclusively anti-corporate platform. It's nature is open to all, even corporations, at a technical level.
Granted, many anti-corporate people came here, but that doesn't make this a fundamently anti-corporate place. Just their specific communities.
I also doubt many serious Fediverse types are that petty and childish. That's generally a trait of more short-sighted people. Not a lot of native trolls here, we came here in many cases to escape that behavior.
Is it so strange to think some assholes might just chase us down and bring it to us? What would you do if you were a hate-fueled asshole that wanted to watch the world burn? I'd find nice things and fuck them up, personally. That would be both fun and potentially effective.
The FOSS alternative to the big corporate controlled social media corps that swallow up smaller social media alternatives is not anti-corporate? Ok.
Linux runs on something like 90% of corporate servers. Amazon's AWS runs its own version of Linux and is the largest cloud provider in existence.
This means, by and large, the labor done on a volunteer basis by random internet nerds to create Linux and all its tools has unintentionally been the largest transfer of wealth created by labor from the working class to the corporate class in fucking history.
FOSS means anyone can use it for any reason. Including organizations you reasonably fucking hate using it for reasons you fucking hate.
It's literally why in the last few years you had maintainers of open source projects sabotaging their own projects when learning what it is being used for, or trying to make "new rules" that don't allow certain organizations to use their code (pro-tip, if they can access your code, they can use it).
Only now is the FOSS community waking up to the fact that corporations are using their open ideals to profit off of their labor very handsomely.
If there's one thing that capitalism is excellent at, it's taking valid critiques of capitalism, and then repackaging those critique and selling them back to the very public that is critiquing them. There's a reason Meta has already jumped in on ActivityPub, because its a new market to exploit.
The early internet was nothing but counterculture and lack of corporations. Corporations showed up because it was a new market to exploit and they used their largess to dominate the conversation. It happened before, it will happen again.
Depressing, but I can't disagree.
Fully agree with all of that. The difference I see with ActivityPub is that we can say they can use it all they want but we won't be connecting with them or interacting with their users at all.
And they honestly probably won't care, but it makes it clear where the rest of us stand and communicates to current Fediverse users a commitment to stay as free as possible from corporate influence. I felt like there was no room for milquetoast answers to that question.
The whole point of lemmy.world is that it's a general, welcome-to-all instance.
If you want server admins who take overtly political stances and actions on behalf of their users, you have instances like lemmy.ml to choose from.
I literally left Lemmy.world and stopped recurring donations to switch to Lemmy.ml
But you're muddying the waters with a disingenuous argument. They can be open to all individual users without being open to connection with possibly the worst actor in the social media space.
You're also mischaracterizing staying free of giant corporate influence as "taking overtly political actions blah blah on behalf of its users" and starting to sound 100% like a corporate shill with absolutely dogshit arguments that only a moron wouldn't see through.
Who is worse, Meta or the people who want nothing to do with Meta?
The answer to that is extremely easy.
Protecting their users from bad actors is exactly what server admins should be doing as good admins. That's not political, and go lick boot somewhere else.
Sounds like you made the right choice for yourself.
I wish you the best.
Thank you and you too. I apologize that I didn't make my point more civilly. I'm an old-ass techie that has seen enshitification ruin just about every new frontier and being noncommittal about keeping them out while we have a chance is, to me, a surefire recipe to have big capital ruin this little experiment in freedom. I think that you just have to study Meta's history to assure yourself that their intentions are always self-serving and never in the public interest. My incivility is purely because of how strongly I loathe them, not you. Take care.
You seem nice
I genuinely am. Part of why I hate Meta, Reddit, and Twitter is how callously they treat their users. The reason that I have very little patience for people that stick up for them is that I don't like bullies or the enabling of bullies. Go take a look at the app permissions required to use Threads and tell me that any "nice" person would think it's ok to harvest that much data. We are livestock to them.
They explained the situation very well, and it's not exactly as you described it.
Thread is outside the fediverse now, so there is literally nothing to defederate.
And they already basically admitted that in case of threads federating, they would defederate.
It was one of the few instances (if not the only one) to put down exactly what practical problems federating would cause instead of simply taking an ethical stance or regurgitating the usual nonsense EEE argument.
But people wanted an immediate, strong and ethical stance (which is also understandable), so they didn't like the wait and they didn't care about an objective analysis of pro and cons
Yeah, to quote the Joker here "it's about sending a message." Doesn't matter about the technical reality, it just would've determined the wording. "If they try to federate with us, we won't have any of it."
I didn't see them say that though, saw a Mastodon post and an admin thread on .world that specifically said they would wait and see.
Yeah, but the admin clarified in some replies that the moderation problems and possibility of receiving ads are already enough to choose to defederate. They didn't give the absolute certainty but basically made their intentions clear.
But I agree with you, most people wanted to get a clear message against it and not just a "if that happens we will very likely defederate".
I still think both approaches are fine, it's good to decide by ethics and it's good to wait and decide by rationality too. No wrong choices, it's just a matter of preference