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.

  • Meta is not a brand new, fresh-faced corporation that maybe needs a chance to prove it’s good intentions in the fediverse. It is an established entity that has a history of killing competition and often being on the wrong side of social issues. It should be rejected from federation outright because of its track record, if nothing else.

  • Good. To quote WarGames:

    The only winning move is not to play

    Meta is at best looking to profit from the Fediverse, and more likely looking to extinguish it. I think blocking them at the borders is the only solution.

    • Well, we’ve defederated with other people in the past (and will continue to do so in the future most likely). Federated systems are not an all or nothing situation. IMO that’s the biggest draw and improvement over a distributed system for social media.

        • it’s literally Facebook. i think we’ve heard and seen more than enough to from Mark Zuckerberg and the platform which actively continues to be one of the worst vectors of online harm, misinformation, and advocacy for social and political violence (among many, many other ills). particularly with respect to our instance: their project can get fucked as far as i’m concerned.

        • The details are under NDA and Facebook has a really bad history of having a terrible moderation culture. I don’t see any reason based on their past history to believe that they will change.

          It feels kinda like giving a gun to a serial killer and just waiting it out. It’s an exaggerated analogy but I think it illustrates the point well.

        • before knowing any details?

          before? facebook is almost 20 years old, they’ve had plenty of time to show us who they are and they have. If you have any doubt about their moral fiber then I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and enter the fucking 2020s

          • Can’t find the source, but I did see a rumor they’ll be turning on federation a few months after the official release so as to not spring all of this place on a bunch of old people. So if they do that, they’ll already have their own ecosystem/culture in place. I’m also a bit worried the extended introduction is going to lull people.

            I think regardless, it always needs to be at the forefront of user’s minds that they’re not averse to playing it slow. Likely, they’ll be on their best behavior starting out, especially since having a working platform at all means making as many friends in the fediverse as they can. They’re not gonna come in swinging their junk around like spez.

            Acting the gracious benefactor will not stop them from leaving this place a haunted backwater once they gather enough standing to start poaching users via shiny toys and high engagement. The kbin dev hasn’t said anything to my knowledge yet, but being an overly reliant lapdog was XMPP’s mistake and I support defederating as honestly the best way to avoid that.

            Theirs is always going to be a numbers game, any niceties will be presumed by me to be a fakeout, and I’m pissed off that what was supposed to be a way to worm out from under the corporations semi-permanently stands to be drowned out immediately by corporations.

        • I think if this were a new player in the market, say for example a new social media platform that was going to venture into the fediverse, most people here would give them the benefit of the doubt.

          However this is meta, they shouldn’t take get the benefit of the doubt with how they’ve been operating over the last decade. There’s no good faith that they’ll be good participants

        • Corporations are motivated by profit. One of the ways Meta profits is by using your personal information for targeted advertising. For them, “community building” is a means, not an end. What else could you possibly need to know?

          If a known con artist asks you to listen to their pitch, are you going to “hear them out”, or slam the door in their face?

    • there are instances in the past where big players acquire the small ones and while at first they seem to be cooperative, it ultimately destroys the small players, one such case is XMPP the open chat protocols long before we have Matrix, killed by Google

      https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

      I guess this is a cautionary action, better to grow slower rather than be killed by Meta.

    • it’s the paradox of tolerance. We (fediverse) cannot be tolerant of the intolerant (meta in this case), lest we be destroyed by them. And do not for one second ascribe any benevolent properties to meta, they are evil through and through and have been pretty much since inception. Tolerating their presence would be akin to tolerating nazis, the second that happens I’m fucking out of here

    • The thing is that this isn’t really a marriage of equals; if Meta joins the Fediverse then Meta will swallow the Fediverse, simply by dint of having several orders of magnitude more users.

      It would be akin to India applying to become the 51st US state; if we let them in, they’d end up controlling 80% of the House and the Electoral College and the US wouldn’t really be the US anymore.

        • Oh certainly; my point was simply that in a system where population = influence, letting in a new group with several times as many people as all of your existing groups put together means that that new group effectively takes over.

          • And yet even if India did join the United States as the 51st state, It occurs to me that the billionaires and corporations would still be in charge. Which is to say, although the huge population of Meta is a concern, I fear the power of Mark Zuckerberg’s billions far more.

        • The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation. The whole idea of equal representation in the Senate was to avoid high population states running roughshod over the smaller ones. This obviously dilutes the influence of higher population states and amplifies the smaller ones at the electoral college.

          The system is not broken though. It does exactly what it was originally intended to do 240 years ago. You just don’t agree with it’s intention and results

          • The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation.

            Article 1 of the constitution very clearly lays out how electors are supposed to be chosen and establishes the need for a census to reflect the population’s growth. To say that the house is not supposed to have proportional representation while the senate represents non-proportional representation as a counterbalance is ignoring the long history of debate and the many laws passed to attempt to bring representation in the house in proportion with the population.

            The system is broken. We do not know the ‘original intent’ and anyone trying to argue for constitutional originalism is either completely ignorant of how literally everything changes with time or trying to enforce their conservative ideals through a guise of legitimacy.

            But this isn’t really the right place to have this discussion (we’re on a thread about defederating from meta) so I’m gonna withdraw now and not reply to any more responses about this.

          • Each state gets a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (senators plus representatives). If the number of representatives weren’t capped it would go a long way towards making the Electoral College more representative of the population.

      • Yeah the size is what I think is most worrying. I’ve only just got here so I’m pretty keen on the content (which seems to be the regular content that was here before + a fusion of stuff from Reddit)

        I’m really not keen on having an influx of low quality Facebook posts here.

        I’m not the one to be on my high horse, thinking that these platforms or Reddit are beacons of enlightenment, but the comments here are light-years above what I see on Facebook, so I want none of that.

    •  ngwoo   ( @ngwoo@beehaw.org ) 
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      61 year ago

      I agree this seems kneejerk. If Meta refuses to abide by the standards of interoperability and openness then lock them out, but by doing so ahead of time the fediverse is committing the crime it’s pre-punishing Meta for.

    •  TehPers   ( @TehPers@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      Regardless of how untrustworthy Meta as a company is, it also tends to hold the kinds of “mainstream” social media platforms that I have actively been avoiding for many reasons, including their communities. Beehaw has already defederated from other instances for having open sign-up and a disproportionately large number of users on them who needed moderation actions taken, and I can see a Meta-run instance posing the same kinds of problems.

      Plus, like others said, it’s not impossible to federate later if it ends up being an overreaction. It’s just that Meta and its userbase already exist, so it’s possible to make pre-emptive judgement with that knowledge and correct the judgement later, potentially avoiding a flood of unwanted content.

    •  aranym   ( @aranym@lemmy.name ) 
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      As much as I don’t think the pact will do much, it’s their right to defederate whichever instances they want. The protocol is still “open and interoperable” and this does not change that - in fact, this move is only possible because of that openness.

      Your argument only sounds kinda sane when applied to Meta, but the same could be said about instances made by bad actors (spammers, for example). Please do further research before commenting on this.

        •  aranym   ( @aranym@lemmy.name ) 
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          11 year ago

          I’m arguing the protocol was designed this way for a reason. Each instance is meant to be able to implement their own policies and defederate who they want, exactly what Beehaw is doing here. The idea that this is against the spirit of the protocol is entirely inaccurate. Hope that clears it up.

      • As much as I don’t think the pact will do much, it’s their right to defederate whichever instances they want.

        It is.

        Your argument only sounds kinda sane when applied to Meta, but the same could be said about instances made by bad actors (spammers, for example).

        But Meta is what we are talking about, here. I would expect instances from spammers (and similar actors) to be defederated. Similar to how SMTP servers (running a long lived, widely used, open, and interoperable protocol) have a variety of tools to block emails coming from bad sources.

  • Thanks for the transparency. I personally think this is the right move. Meta shouldn’t be trusted, based on their previous performance. If they do something to change that then we’ll see, but I’m not expecting them to change their stripes.

    Been catching up on all the NDA drama on Mastodon, it’s really caused a rift between some users and instance admins. Felt a bit like an ‘aww it’s all grown up’ moment to see Mastodon having a scandal.

  • I hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse.

    I suggest to rephrase with this better: “I hereby agree to block any instances owned by, governed by, supported by mostly, funded by only or affiliated with Meta, its subsidiaries, major involving partners and influenced involving affiliates should they pop up on the Fediverse.”

    LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I do not provide my suggestion “as a legal advice” but as a thought to share that may be considered or configured by legal experts. I will not be held liable for any error that any revision upon or any derivative from my suggestion may cause.

  • This is fantastic news and applaud this decision. I used to work in digital marketing and having seen how Facebook, (and Twitter, Google, etc.) makes their sausage and how they operate, I advise everyone get off Meta/FB, or really any centralized social media platform for that matter.

    •  Smk   ( @Smk@lemmy.ca ) 
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      71 year ago

      I just finished reading it. I must admit that I wasn’t blown away at the start. But the last few paragraphs, especially about the “Embrace, Extend, Exterminate” strategy really convinced me.

      I did not remember that Google chat was once a XMPP client and that they pulled the plug on this.

      Anyway, I’m totally convinced that the fediverse is most probably better off without Meta. Although, I’m not sure how the fediverse admin can really block them. At some point, some people will want to see meta’s stuff.

      It almost feel like we need a legal organization around the fediverse. Just some unorganized random people won’t save whatever we have here. If we still want this to be as free as possible, there will be a time where a giant company will fuck thing up and we may forget why we didn’t want them here in the first place.

  • I appreciate the work you all do. Im a heavier lurker than particpater and i see little fingers of you all taking care of beehaw for us all the time and it makes me smile 😁 good work everyone!