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.
I'm not shure, there are a few good arguments against plain blocking of Meta.
This article is mostly against federating
https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/
it does highlight contra's:
counterpoint:
overall, i would say this falls into the camp of "not a thing we're realistically going to reconsider".
Ok, that's where I'm in another camp, and that's ok, we can disagree on goals.
I think that largely the fediverse has drawn people that are against corporate control and want to go back to a more community-oriented system. I also think that there is a lot of cynicism and lack of trust in corporate social media that is growing with time.
For these reasons, I don't think that Bluesky or a corporate takeover is welcome and that people will switch over to it.
How can we promote open standards like activitypub while blocking anone else entry.
On meta this is difficult, any Non disclosure Agreement is evil, Everything has to be in the open. and considering the history of FB/meta i'm verry sceptical. But still, open standards, open discussion , i am a bit of an optimist.
Promoting interoperability does not mean accepting bad actors. We can build something without bad actors. They can use ActivityPub and use it with people who are fine with Facebook, people don't need to accept it though.
Just like we can encourage the usage of HTTP and the Web without hosting and giving place to all websites on another website. For example, I have a personal website and encourage people to do so. That doesn't mean I need to link and interact with all websites that exist.
Meta are already reaching out to fediverse devs and inviting them to secret NDA covered meetings.
The goal of the fediverse was never to be "relevant" in corporate capital terms.
The goal was for us all to be able to use it.
Being embrace-extend-extinguished would not achieve what most of us are here for.
better to just keep growing slowly rather than having massive capital and quick improvements only to be killed later by Meta.
Like we're playing Team Deathmatch and have been placed on Team HashtagActivityPub so we've gotta do anything possible to beat Team Bluesky.
As someone who actually kinda likes protocols themselves, I still have to wonder why anyone would care about a protocol. Users don't use protocols. Users should not have to care about protocols, let alone fight over their "relevance" (which apparently is defined as "either it's the most popular one or it's NOTHING").
Also, why must everything be as big as humanly possible? Every single thing must be one enormous, monolithic pile of people. Can't we have a nice thing over here and just let Facebook "win" (which is kindof an asinine concept here) and be "the big one that 'everybody' uses?"
Gruber's position is somewhere between 'internally inconsistent' and 'distressingly naive'; quote:
So he agrees that the first time Facebook does anything wrong we should promptly de-federate from them, but somehow seems to think that they... won't? Facebook being allowed to federate is contingent on them being absolutely perfect model citizens, when Facebook have never been model citizens of any group they've ever participated in?
The idea that email is "truly open" demonstrates a ton of ignorance on this topic. Email is entirely controlled by like less than 20 large operators, who often completely ignore email from smaller servers.
Email is literally one of the worst examples of an open protocol. The fact that this person thinks for a second it is even comparable to ActivityPub in terms of openness should completely undermine their credibility in your mind.
I can host an email server. You can host an email server. Even if the big players choose not to accept mail from us, we can accept mail from each other.
I use sendmail notifications on every VM I host, and I use one of the "large operators" for my own email inboxes; I never have trouble getting messages from my VMs. The big players aren't blocking my little servers. Even if they did, they can only block the mailbox that they host. They don't host my VMs, and I am perfectly free to spin up my own mailbox to completely bypass their imposed limitations.
Contrast with a reddit, facebook, or twitter inboxes, which are entirely under the control of spez, zuck, and musk: they host (and thus control) both the sender and the receiver, as well as the path between them. Messages sent on their platforms are entirely at their whim.
Email is certainly an open protocol, and ActivityPub functions very similarly.
Yes, but my point was that those operators make up the vast majority of email accounts. Yes, all of your smaller servers can communicate with each other, but that doesn't matter when like 99.5% of the time, your target recipient will NOT be another small server.
Yes, email and ActivityPub are both decentralized, but that's about where the similarities end. Email, as a decentralized protocol, has been an abject failure. It is well known that big players DO actively block email from smaller servers often. Your individual experience is irrelevant. (For more details, see the thread at https://twitter.com/cfenollosa/status/1566484145446027265?lang=en)