We could collectively vote to defederate them.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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How does defederation work? Is it global or is it in a per instance basis?
Any instance can choose what other instances it interacts with.
So it would need to be a movement across instances, not just a single action, but given the principles of the user base here and why we're here I think that movement would be very successful.
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Per instance
But just as a side note, a user can block an entire instance as well, at least on Mastodon. I haven't checked for that functionality on Lemmy. That's not defederation, but it prevents you from seeing things you don't want to at the user level.
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The protocols and software are all free and open source. You can't stop a company from running a Lemmy or Mastodon instance any more than you could stop an individual from doing so.
The nice thing is that the system allows for free choice. Your favorite instance isn't forced to federate with a hypothetical Meta instance, and and even if it does you can choose which communities to subscribe to or avoid. Who cares if Meta runs an instance, or a hundred instances? You can simply choose not to use them.
Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn't a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn't hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can't prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.
Due to the dominance of just a few companies' big email services, it's now almost impossible to set up an independent email server. Emails from small independent servers are just not delivered by Gmail and the like. They will only accept emails from other big email providers. In this sense it is a problem that Google owns the most popular email instance. They and a few other large companies have effectively turned a democratic and distributed system into a closed loop owned by a handful of big corporations.
Any reading on this? Seems a little outlandish. I self host an email server for both my business and personal use, and have never had issues sending or receiving mail. Not saying I don't believe you, just that that has not been my personal experience.
Yeah, I've been running E-mail servers for a long time. You kind of have to get things right, like not configuring an open relay and properly setting up SPF (and maybe DMARC) but I've never had an issue with E-mail delivery to Gmail.
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Maybe this guy is exaggerating. I haven't tried running my own email server, but I have seen a few people recently complaining about problems with the big providers' blocking policies. Here's one I read recently:
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Never had any problems the last time my company self hosted our email server. Not sure what you meant by this.
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The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them
Kind of like how Facebook Messenger (and GChat, and AIM) used to federate with XMPP, and then dropped it like a bad habit once their platform took off.
I think it is really important for communities to spread out to avoid exactly this. Users can centralize, but distributed communities is what will prevent what you describe.
This "anyone is free to join any instance, you can just avoid what you don't like" kind of thinking is perfectly reasonable in theory, but I think what OP wants to know is if this also holds up in practice. You could "defederate" Google and Microsoft by blocking emails from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but the reality is that the majority of people you will need to contact use those addresses. In most cases, your school/workplace will even make you use them for your organizational email. Yes, it is possible to avoid these companies and choose alternatives, but you'll be isolating yourself from the majority of the network.
The question is not if it will be possible to use the future corporate-owned Fediverse without Meta (of course it will), but if it will be feasible for the majority of users.
My bigger worry is that they'll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you'll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they're the backend of the entire fediverse. If they're able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don't know the developers personally so I can't be sure if they'd pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.
But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they’re the backend of the entire fediverse.
ActivityPub is not a company or entity that can strike deals
BRB I'm off to to strike a deal with HTTP
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A good analogy is Google with Gmail. They became the biggest player in email and even gained a lot of influence over for email works, but you can easily use another email provider and not be locked out of the system.
Imagine how horrible things would be if email were centralized. We really need to thank the founders of the internet for having the foresight to not let that happen.
It's funny you bring Email as an example because everyone using the same 3-4 providers effectively centralized email. Anyone who tries to run any self-hosted email with decent volume quickly discovers this fact
let's say the instance i belong too has been bought out by zuckerberg... can i transfer my data and move? or do i just lose everything like i did with reddit?
currently you lose everything. I'm hoping they add a transfer tool like how masodon(i think it was that) has with transferring accounts
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Transferring is theoretically technically possible (Mastodon does it), but Lemmy hasn't implemented the option yet. There's an issue for it on their GitHub.
Why would Facebook bother buying out existing instances? They have the resources to create thousands of instances, and the userbase (the idea is to migrate all Instagram accounts) to populate them.
Not to mention that they're creating a Twitter/Mastodon clone, not a Reddit/Lemmy one.
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You can't keep them out, but you can choose not to Federate with them. They can't take over. That's the point of having independent federated servers.
The Mastodon instance I'm on has blocked all known Meta IPs as a preventative measure. So I imagine some admins will federate and some won't, and users will be free to join the instance that they wish to.
Any admin worth their salt's gonna defederate them and proudly wear the Misfit Loser Zealot label[^1]. The only people who'll federate with them are the naive techbros and those who only care about how much users they have, compared to, idk, being committed to creating a good community.
https://fedipact.online is already gaining steam with the Mastodon side of the fediverse.
[^1]: Seriously the markdown guy couldn't've picked a better description if he tried.
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They have the right to use the open protocol, just as anybody else to build their own instance. Trying to keep Facebook out only through banning of known instances/IP addresses is a losing battle of whack-a-mole.
If you really want to stop them from EEE, make a pact to refuse to federate with any instance software stack without the AGPL-3.0 license instead, no Apache, no MIT, not even regular GPL, so they simply can't do the "Extend" bit at all.
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If a corporation aims to purchase an instance, all the other instances would let them know they will vote to defederate it as soon as the purchase is finalized. That ought to make them change course.
Or, they just won’t care
Maybe. But then the instance they purchase is sealed off from the rest of the federation and a large portion of the users jump ship.
That's not how meta's going to do it; they'll start their own (with blackjack blah blah) that has better servers, better design, and other stuff real money can buy until theirs is the default. Then when they have the vast majority of users, they'll start throwing their weight around and others will be pressured to comply with the 'standard' they set.
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I think instance admins do care
Maybe. But corporations won’t
I don’t have an issue with social media companies entering the Fediverse, at least on the surface, because it’s ultimately more users and it’s in line with the ideas of free exchange of information and content. My problem with it comes in when they try to buy instances, communities, or what have you. No one should have a monopoly on the Fediverse, and it shouldn’t be pay to win.
So, my answer is this: because no one can stop anyone from making their own instances, users decide whether to defederate their instances from Meta’s, or Twitter’s, or anyone else’s. Join an instance that doesn’t federate with Meta, or start your own if you have the know-how. Just like anywhere else on the internet, you don’t have to interact with content you don’t want to interact with.
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Here's the most interesting take I've found on this question.
https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/23/project-and-the.html
Great article! I appreciate how it addresses the commonly raised reasons and points to a way forward.
Good read. Onboarding and discoverability are the weakest part of the fediverse and need to be a high priority.
Apps should go as far as assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) since it means the user wouldn't have to know about instances, and integrating lemmyverse.net's functionality into lemmy would both go a long way for both I feel.
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Hopefully people will remember what Google did with XMPP.
unbridled aggression
I don't see how they can really take over in a system that's open source and anyone willing can create their own instance. If they start taking control of a large, established base and pisses that base off, they can just collectively make and move to a new instance, walling the previous one off from the federation by blocking it.
They're supposedly in talks with activitypub, the backend of the entire fediverse. If meta can get what they want with activitypub, they'll effectively have control over the entire fediverse. I don't see that happening though because the fediverse was made in opposition of major social media sites. I see them trying to take control of the software like lemmy and kbin or if that fails trying to buy popular instances or just filling the fediverse with their existing users. Luckily if the first two fail the nature of the fediverse works in our favor and the instances that want to can just defederate.
That's like saying they're "in talks with HTTP". ActivityPub is a protocol. It's an open source standard. That standard is currently under development by the World Wide Web Consortium. There is no "ActivityPub" for them to be in talks with.
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If they start taking control of a large, established base
We are not a large base. Lemmy+kbin have only a couple millions of users, and Mastodon 13 millions. Facebook is planing to migrate all Instagram accounts to P92 accounts. That means billions of users, flooding the whole fediverse.
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