Being federated can allow us to encourage users to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one (ex. Mastodon, Firefish, etc.)
What you fail to mention here is that this goes both ways; it also allows Facebook to “encourage” users to switch to Threads.
“All your friends are on Threads, why do you keep using that weird Mastodon thing?”
“Oh, Threads has this cool new feature where you can use (insert current NFT AI tech bro grift here) but it doesn’t work with Mastodon.”
But yeah you’re right, the last time a tech giant embraced an open federated protocol, everyone and their mom started using the open platform instead. No wait, XMPP is fucking dead after Google did the third E.
Don’t let them have a monopoly over the use of ActivityPub. Grow the other platforms: The extend stage only works when the platform gets a near monopoly over use of the standard. That brings up the first action. If there are enough users, services and resources on things like Mastodon/Lemmy, then Meta (or any other company) can’t just extend the spec without causing their users to ditch Threads to stay connected to the content they want to see.
How tf do you expect that to work when they will start out with a 98.5% “market share” in the entire AP network?
Might aswell call it “Facebookverse” at that point because the entire rest of the Fediverse as we know it would be a drop in the bucket.
That’s right, in a world where the broader Fediverse federates with Facebook, Facebook’s starting conditions would be market dominance; a monopoly you might call it.
As long as there is a healthy community away from Meta (ex. what we have right now), then they can’t extend & extinguish.
Good luck having a decent conversation with two people when there are hundreds of people screaming about irrelevant trifles in the same room.
Protect the Standards and share why it is important
Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy (interoperability requirements > etc.), and educate other users about the risks.
Facebook: We will muddy the waters around this upcoming competitor that could destroy our entire business model and drown it in noise. Users: Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy
Facebook: Oh no, not the expert posts! Ok, we will stop.
the way that activitypub works, the outgoing data is publicly available. Defederating with Meta doesn’t prevent that, and federating doesn’t give them any more data than they could get otherwise.
It is not. It is only available to federated instances and even to those it’s almost always a subset because not every user/community is followed. Due to Facebook’s sheer size, they would probably receive pretty much everything from any instance federated with them.
If they were defederated, they’d have to scrape every instance’s API to actually export everything. Not a real blocker but much more difficult, expensive and legally questionable. (See the recent popularity in imitative statistical algorithms aka. “”“AI”“” or “Copyright condoms” as I like to call them.)
Additionally, this opens up Fediverse users to Facebook tracking in things like DMs. I’m aware they’re not E2EE and you should therefore not expect secrecy from them but putting them into a known bad actor’s hands is quite a lot worse.
It’s more of an issue when data start coming IN to Lemmy from Mastodon and Meta’s Threads.
…that’s precisely what defederation is about. You can’t stop someone from scraping your API but you can stop their toxic waste from flowing into your healthy platform.
All Fediverse platforms will have to work on content moderation and misinformation. Platforms like Meta, focussed on profit and advertising, will likely moderate in a way that protects their income. Those moderation decisions will be federated around.
Moderation is a problem with our Fediverse platforms already, how tf do you expect us to do the work for Facebook’s platform in addition to that when it’s like 100x the size of the entire Fediverse?
develop USEFUL but safe and open algorithms for the feeds
There is no such thing. The only reason our current feeds aren’t full of shit is because the general signal to noise ratio is still quite high. Refer to the conversation in the room example above.