💾 Archived View for splint.rs › meta_fed.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:12:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-10)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Facebook have proposed federating with the Fediverse, and have begun by talking secretly (with NDAs) with a few Mastodon server admins. I do not think that federation is a good idea.
All large, proprietary-software-spilling corporations have bad intentions. They intend to make money, and don't care about the after effects. And they do very well by the standards of this singular goal.
The libre-loving lot, on the other hand, do not do so well. They don't all get rich, they don't pull out devious little tricks, and they don't dominate and destroy competition. They make networking protocols, and sometimes make nice user interfaces.
While the libre-lovers wrote about how libre-software provided important abstract benefits, they did not see the details of Cambridge Analytica coming. They could never have imagined the skilful Skinner-box, which prompted just the right people to click on just the right articles, and change their perspectives.
The well-educated, and network-savvy sysadmins grew the e-mail protocols bit by bit, and then suddenly they click on a link to some site, and notice the trickery:
The link was unique! I have taken you to a unique page, then redirected you to the true page, so I now know that you clicked! I will run this experiment again, to gain a full profile of what entices you to click!
And when Microsoft supported the .doc format, it seemed like a good thing, until they extended the protocol, and blocked it off.
We have a litany of Embrance, Extend, and Extinguish games, the big corporations win every time.
Embrance, Extend, and Extinguish
And the libre-loving-lot might talk in general about algorithms, but they don't really get how these little manipulations work.
I know this all seems old news to people. But nobody knew these things before they happened, because big corporations do very well at pulling surprises, with nasty laws, a change in conditions, with legal contracts with a word-count which rivals MacBeth.
And none of the admins on the Fediverse can rival any of their abilities - their deep pockets for large legal-teams, their insights into law, their marketing spin.
When the game is 'chat with friends and make cool stuff', the libre-loving lot do well. When the game is 'destroy and dominate', the libre-loving lot won't even understand the hand dealt to them.
Google-Chat began as a copy of XMPP (or 'jabber'), but piece by piece, Google-Chat's protocol changed, and yanked the open-source folks around like a dog on a leash. You can read Ploum's Article for the specifics, but I only want to mention one broad take-away message: big companies excel at taking control by using their size. The libre-loving lot do not - they don't attempt to control people, they just make software and protocols that let people chat and work together. They have no weight to throw around.
Facebook messenger also began as something similar to XMPP. I don't know the details, but I could once use the Pidgin client to speak with people from Facebook and Google-Chat, all with a single client. When they kicked me out of that Pidgin plugin, nobody noticed.
The moment Mastodon joins Facebook, it will become a tiny fish in a massive ocean. Actually that's wrong - the little fish only worries about larger fish. Mastodon will be an uncoordinated load of individual fish with individual opinions, up against a single entity, with the ability to move as one whenever the voices from on-high dictate what they do.
Perhaps Facebook will allow people to migrate to Facebook, but not *from* Facebook. They will say 'well we implemented software to deal with *your* protocols, but it's up to you to make software which deals with *our* protocols - fair's fair!'.
Perhaps they will lobby for anti-bigotry laws which demand certain admin responses to every single racial slur stored on the server, together with a complete log of their reaction...and then make sure they can provide the requirements easily, while Gargron and the others are running around like headless chickens trying to get a Regex which ensures all messages which speak about racism are dropped before a server logs them.
Perhaps Facebook will release others' posts when they see fit, depending upon their own algorithm, which means that the Fediverse would be partly operating under Facebook's algorithm. Your posts get released to your family when Facebook decides, and you see their posts when Facebook decides. And if Zuckerberg doesn't like your #politics, then those posts will be released a little late, or less often than others. And when the trickery's finally uncovered, it'll cause a large storm...in a small area of the Fediverse where nerds can understand the methodology, grind their teeth, and find the message ignored like every other time.
Perhaps 2% of direct messages to and from Mastodon will be dropped. This will generate the idea that 'your Mastodon does not work', and prompt movement away from the platform to something that 'just works'.
Perhaps Facebook will send messages to every server on the Fediverse so fast that it pushes hosting costs up by 10%...and then by 20%. Google has already done something similar to a DDOS attack on Source Hut, with plausible deniability.
Crawling now works differently. Webcrawlers can cannot easily access a massive chunk of the Fediverse - messages sent to 'local and followers', or less. Whatever your opinions on sharing private thoughts on Mastodon, people really use the lower tiers of sharing for more personal ideas, and those ideas only swap across a few servers - not the wider federated network. But once everyone has at least a single follower on Facebook, then all posts which are not direct messages become indexed by Facebook.
And if Facebook counts as a single instance, how will we use the defederation tools? Right now, if an instance has a single user who sends out constant spam, or illegal content, or bigotry, the instance admins hear about it, and if they do nothing then that instance becomes defederated. We already know Facebook has a tonne of bad actors. We already know it aided a genocide. So if we have to treat it as a single instance, what then? How does this work in practical terms? I don't know the answer, but Facebook will have made plans already.
Or perhaps they'll think up something more sinister, more subtle, more clever, more destructive.
Giving up Facebook felt hard. I lived alone in a foreign country, so I lost connection to most of my extended family. I lost connections to about 100 people that I knew well enough that I like hearing about when they got married, and would 'like' their memes, but not well enough to send each one a letter each month to catch up on big events. I lost a lot of connection with family, because giving a general status report to the world takes far less time than writing individual e-mails. I love hearing from the Fediverse, but of course they can't substitute for family and friends.
But obstinately saying 'no', and using none of the walled gardens meant that all of my closest friends eventually moved over to Signal. We now have Signal groups, and some of them now use Signal to speak with others they know. Signal may not be great, but it's clearly an improvement over Facebook messenger.
But I regret nothing, and if it takes ten more years to double the Fediverse again, from 5 million to 10 million, and another 10 years to get to 20 million, I will consider this a good deal, in the grand scheme of things.
So I won't blame anyone for wanting to re-connect to people they've lost, but I will say that in the long run, Facebook will use those connections as pawns in a game that we will lose.