- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A response to Daring Fireball’s recent thinkpieces about Fediverse admins wanting to block Meta’s new ActivityPub platform.
A response to Daring Fireball’s recent thinkpieces about Fediverse admins wanting to block Meta’s new ActivityPub platform.
This entire comment made me laugh out loud, thank you. You have a beautiful way with words.
Look, I’ve been on this network pretty much since it began 15 years ago. I did community management for Diaspora back in the day, regularly kept in contact with many people who ended up starting their own platforms, and have had a pretty good finger on the pulse of the network’s discourse during all that time.
The general attitude of people who have come here has largely been one of these:
There are a myriad of motivations behind how and why different parts of this space was built. For a lot of people, it’s a place to build their own communities, hang out with a bunch of people into niche stuff, and generally just chill out and have fun. For others, it’s a lifeline for their own marginalized groups, a way to find kindred spirits and support each other.
But, I guarantee that it sure as hell wasn’t to build pipelines back to centralized corporate silos run by people trying to maximize profits.
Blocking at the instance level at least lets communities keep that crap out of our streams, and that’s a feature of the network. Meta can implement AP all they want, and they’ll probably connect to a decent amount of servers - but a lot of people can say “Fuck this.” and choose never to connect to them in the first place.
They can go right on doing what they’re doing, and their experience will be exactly like it was before Meta showed up. Being able to see and interact with who you want to, and filter out who you want to, is a fundamental feature of the network.
Indeed as you said defederating is a built-in feature of most if not all fediverse networks. I have no opinion against that. Your server your rule. You can do whatever you want with it. Just like what Reddit does to it’s APIs.
But I suppose you are supporting a manifesto, aren’t you? I believe you want to be heard and to persuade others to follow suit. If that is really the case, you and your comrades are doing a real poor job.
The Thread thing is not out yet and we don’t know whether it will really be out or not. There is literally zero detail to discuss. And your arguments revolving Facebook aka Meta’s “bloody” history have demonstrated exactly that.
But we DO have strong precedents of previous decentralized services/communities destroyed by the presence of huge corporate networks!
This is not just people going “Meta bad! Blocked!” as you seem to be arguing, this is the only possible reaction if we want to keep what has been build alive and not be razed to the ground, many of us saw this with our own eyes, me included, either we stop Meta at the door or the Fediverse is going to die, they have zero intentions or incentive to play the good guests here.