Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
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.
What are those licences that you list? Please explain like I’m a non-IT.
Now Lemmy Explain: These are all open-source licenses; however, their provisions are different from each other. For this, I assume you understand what compilation is.
- MIT and Apache are “Do whatever you want with my code, just give credit with this license file”, but Apache is a bit more detailed and has a bit more on patent clause.
- GPL can be summarized into 2 provisions: “You have to share the source code alongside compiled executables” (.exe for windows), and “if your executables compile with GPL code, then the rest of the code that compiles also has to be GPL licensed” (Which is why some call it a viral license)
- However, the loophole with GPL code is that if you are running anything with GPL code running on a server, you are not distributing the executable if you are only accessing it through a web page, so you don’t have to share the source code, and AGPL closes that loophole by saying “You still have to share the source code for AGPL licensed programs if you are using it as a service”
Companies hate GPL code since they can’t legally keep modified software close sourced, which means that Facebook won’t be able to develop proprietary extensions for AGPL licensed software like Lemmy or Mastodon.
Would that solve the bullshit RH is currently pulling with RHEL?
No. RH is following the GPL: They send you the source code when you buy RHEL, but if you share that source code, then Red Hat will just refuse to sell you future versions of RHEL. What they are doing is scummy but allowed under GPL.
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.
We could collectively vote to defederate them.
How does defederation work? Is it global or is it in a per instance basis?
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.
I haven’t found it but I’d love to see it if I can. As world is struggling I want to use an alt but most alternatives haven’t defederated exploding heads
What happened with exploding heads?
They’re extremely comfortable with homophobia and transphobia. When I was seeing if I could ban them for example they were talking about considering “cis” and “cisgender” a slur that’s bannable, but they don’t consider a particular word starting with an f that bad.
Thank you for the explanation.
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.
https://fedipact.online is already happening
It’s giving 2000s hello kitty fan site
Yes. I love it so much.
that is already being done
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
I think instance admins do care
Maybe. But corporations won’t
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.
Other instances can always wall them out from the beginning. Sure, they might have better UI/servers, but if they’re never federated they’ve essentially just created another Facebook.
They want to create another Twitter.
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.
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
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.
I don’t think it’s the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy’s. Fact is, it’s trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.
Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn’t known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won’t let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a “prove you aren’t a spammer then we’ll whitelist you”, rather than the opposite.
But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren’t spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don’t track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that’s the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can’t talk to their members ever.
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.
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:
On what planet can this be true when there are tons of companies and organizations that operate their own email systems? Have you ever spun up an email server and see what happens?
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.
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
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.
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.
Seems simple enough to me.
Meta: Do what we want or we’ll defederate you!
Everyone: Fuck off
Meta: Surprised pikachu
Not only that because they are federated there will be a much higher traffic, which will come with higher cost. So a possible playbook Meta could follow is say they’d help cover the cost from their user base. Then it becomes the equivalence of being bribed. You don’t do what they want they stop giving you the money and because of the growth that comes with Meta, an instance that federate with them could suddenly find themselves struggling to maintain the instance.
Most of the good content I see is from here.
Here’s the most interesting take I’ve found on this question.
https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/06/23/project-and-the.html
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) if 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.
Apps assigning new users randomly to a good general instance (vlemmy.net, lemmy.one, lemm.ee etc) eithout requiring the user to know about instances,
This is a terrible idea, and the defederation of Beehaw is the exact reason why this is a terrible idea. Don’t get me wrong, with the attitude of the Beehaw admins I suspect that Beehaw will constantly be defederating from a lot of instances over the course of its existence, but this comes with the consequence of people suddenly being locked out of participating in their chosen communities because “you signed up on the wrong instance.”
Which is something nobody should have to experience.
That’s why it’s important to make sure they’re good general instances that aren’t defederating everything else. Beehaw seems to be an exception in this regard.
Beehaw’s essentially walling itself off from other instances, and I think the vast majority of users would rather stay on the other instances’ side rather than one that seems to be staying small on purpose.
Instance migration is already a highly requested feature, and is a thing in Mastodon already. That will fix most remaining concern about being locked out of communities when implemented.
I feel the massive onboarding advantage of users not requiring instance knowledge by doing this vastly outweighs the few users who might not find some communities they like, most of which have alternatives in other instances anyway. And they could always just make another account until instance migration is in lemmy.
unbridled aggression
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.
Seriously the markdown guy couldn’t’ve picked a better description if he tried. ↩︎
Upvoting because that’s a great explanation, that’s a great term that I will wear proudly (MLZ), you used a triple contraction. I love contractions
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.
You sign up on (or create) an instance that defederates from them.
Hopefully people will remember what Google did with XMPP.
I’d have to imagine that Meta would be locked within their own little bubble. I find it hard to believe that many of the current instances out there wouldn’t immediately opt to defederate from Meta out of principle. I don’t think it’d be difficult to find a community that’s blocked all interaction with Meta.
Meta plans to fedi with activitypub so I doubt that they’re trying to be a closed island. They are probably trying to come into this space to disrupt and destroy. All of fedi needs to cut them out right away.
.
the phrase is embrace, extend, extinguish, and Microsoft has been doing it for years
So has facebook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms
AT&T is the best known example. They supressed innovation for decades, buying up or squashing anything that posed a threat to their monopoly. A phone bought in 1920 wasn’t that different to a phone used in 1980. Judging by what happened when their monopoly was abolished, if it hadn’t been for AT&T we’d have had the internet in 1960.
People have no clue about how detrimental these (quasi-)monopolies are for technogical innovation.
Companies like facebook, microsoft and google are actively preventing innovation not furthering it. They’ve become so big, they no longer have a vested interest in things changing too much, so they squash anything new.
Corporate vampires, undermining democracy, hurting the planet, and actively hindering progress. Fuck 'em.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is a very particular kind of monopolistic behavior. you’re just listing people buying out their competitors. which to be clear, is also bad.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is when you have an open standard, which a company nominally embraces, and then adds unique features to their version that only interoperates with those using their product. Apple and SMS is a current example, since their reactions only work on iPhone. the Wikipedia article has plenty of examples from Microsoft. it’s also quite likely that it’s exactly what Facebook plans to do with activitypub.
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.
ActivityPub is a W3C standard. I’m not sure how one can be “in talks” with a standard.
They can bribe their way into the standards commitee and then define their own standard in a way that they benefit while the rest suffers. So just like most web standards have been changed to benefit the large corporations instead of the users.
