Technology

The protocol itself isn't secure, so if anyone is worried about data harvesting, better log off now and never return

I'm more concerned about tracking tbh. But it's good to know they're planning to get a piece of the cake. I'm ready to block them.

Each instance admin decides which servers to block for themselves. If you visit the info pages of some systems they will list blocked systems, and there are a lot of them.

There are some very unsavoury communities out there. Blocking usually revolves around how effective moderation is.

As an example you can see a list of servers blocked by mastodonapp.uk on the About page.

https://mastodonapp.uk/about

"Meta and met with them after signing an NDA"

This should tell quite enough.

I'd guess they were made an offer they couldn't refuse, ie money.

I will remove myself from any servers that federate with Meta.

They will drown us out even if they don't want in that case. Them just using the service normally will flood all our feeds with posts from their service based on the sheer number of them.

...and then a couple years down the line when people have come to depend on it and the code base has become simpler due to the platform capabilities that their hosting provides (nobody is self-hosting anymore anyway, because Meta hosting is so simple, easy, and cheap/free), they'll start exercising more control anyway. "Come into compliance with our corporate terms of service and Community Server Guidelines™ or you'll lose our hosting. Oh shit, there's nowhere else for you to go for hosting anymore? Gosh, gee, shucks! What a shame."

Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don't have the power you think we do.

What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They'll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn't even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it's Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It's like an absolute wet dream for them. They don't even have to coax people to use their own platform!

Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you've ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.

Edit: And it's even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.

I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach

I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.

EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…

Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.

The bad news aside, I think "privacy bill of rights" is the right way of thinking to get people and tech to a happier place.

One issue with emails is that it's actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam

Pretty much the entire bdsm community everywhere was outed on Facebook because folks carried cellphones to events and Facebook started suggesting friends to one another. Fifteen years ago privacy was sacrosanct and no one shared real life names unless they were very close. Now there is no point to trying to keep your identity secret and it sounds silly to introduce yourself as "Master Darkness" or whatever. I mean it sounded silly then, too, but everyone understood the necessity and it was situationally appropriate.

That is the danger of these large corporations. They aren't looking to serve the broad community - they are looking to exploit our social graph for profit regardless of the destruction in their wake.

I'm not against corporations wanting to set up their own instance for their own employees for them to interact with the Fediverse. I'm against data-collection, targeted advertisements, and corporate control.

The fact that W3C defines the protocol doesn't stop large companies from doing whatever they want. Have a look at Google: their web browser has become so widely adopted that Google effectively controls what is considered part of the spec, not W3C.

If Meta's platform grows to become the biggest fediverse project, they will control the spec and others will either have to follow, or risk dropping out. This is just like how Firefox is forced to follow Google to ensure all websites work properly on Firefox, even if these sites don't comply with the spec.

I think the major issue that people might be concerned about is they might try to use a carrot to get people reliant on their instances.

Then they start making breaking changes and integrating proprietary stuff into it so that it's all much more closed source; and unless you're on an instance that they control, now suddenly a lot of the people who you used to be able to talk to on the Fediverse just can't be interacted with from your instance.

Like, the "World Wide Web" is the primary way people use to access the internet (we're using it now!); but despite the W3C you'll have commercial browsers that just don't play nice with the standards and some websites that wind up, because of that, only working in commercial browsers (Internet Explorer was infamous for this, and apparently Chromium has its issues with this as well). You further see websites that'll attract a huge userbase - using that open standard - and then kind of try to push everyone into using a non-WWW (but still internet!) app; meaning that what once you could have accessed from any web software you're now restricted to one single option that's beholden to the whims of that corporation. That's not to say that any of these is what Facebook will do (I'm not actually concerned that they're going to try to lock it behind an app; it's just an example that I can think of, especially given the recent Reddit drama - Reddit is also trying to kill their mobile site and effectively move people on mobile from the open WWW standard to an app, and have made mobile painful for awhile; and they're not the first site to add a "This site is better in our app" banner to mobile)

Of course, with the Fediverse they'd have a lot harder of a time doing that quickly without the cooperation of a few big instances. We aren't really sure what the people who spoke to them have agreed to, but we do know that they signed NDAs meaning there's something that Facebook doesn't want them to talk about.

Personally if this really was something good that we shouldn't be worried about? They should be able to be transparent about it. They're not, and that's concerning.

Honestly at the end of the day I'm just tired of people trying to make every single cent they can off of me. I want to live my life and have hobbies and talk to people and I'm tired of some greedy asshole taking a look at the tech and creativity that enables it and going "But how can I make money off of that?"

Some things shouldn't be about money.