Block Meta or "trust but verify"?

I’m changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:

Of course, it’s possible to work with companies you don’t trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don’t trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is … risky. There’s a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as “prudently defensive” in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: “block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block.” Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:

We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though

Previously, I’d thought “some block, some federate” would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:

My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:

  1. Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse

  2. Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta

Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.

People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.

But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.

Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.

And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.

  •  Teali0   ( @Teali0@kbin.social ) 
    22•1 year ago

    I think it all comes down to why does Meta do anything? Money. And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.

    I looked into Mastodon after the whole Twitter thing in November, but I didn’t really use Twitter, so an alternative at the time didn’t make sense for me. However, I was an avid Reddit user for the last nine years, so when these API changes came to light and my app (Sync) was going to cease to exist, well I took the Fediverse alternatives more seriously and realized that ActivityPub is awesome technology that is now invaluable to the internet.

    I’m here to stay.

    •  jalda   ( @jalda@kbin.social ) 
      5•1 year ago

      And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people

      Project 92 has been on the news since at least May 20, a couple of weeks before the Reddit drama, and it seems that they have been testing it with influencers for months.

      I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment about Facebook, but I think some of these takes fail to get the whole picture. Facebook isn’t interested in us, Fediverse users and our communities. As you said, they only care about money. And the money today is in creating a competitor to Twitter. Mastodon happens to have an open-source Twitter clone, and Facebook can use it without spending much in coding. Also, the federation aspect allows advertisers to defederate from problematic communities, which is why they’re leaving Twitter.

      Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.

      According to the article that I linked, every Instagram account will carry to a Project 92 account. There are like 2 million Lemmy accounts, and a few millions more of Mastodon accounts. Instagram has billions, with b, of accounts. We are anecdotal in comparison with the engagement that the migrated Instagram users will create.

      We are not Meta’s target. We are the ones that will suffer their consequences.