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I havenāt made my mind up and Iāll keep editing this page until I have.
Iām leaning towards ānoā on the block, but itās not an easy call and I havenāt made up my mind yet. The block side has two big arguments in their favor:
1. Google federated to XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) and we were like āOK coolā and I and many others federated with them. Then they shut off federation and moved all their users to their own closed network.
2. Meta had a big part to play in the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Not only is Meta the enemy (although I generally prefer to follow the Kumbaya Doctrine ā if I truly believed they were reformed), theyāre scary to deal with in case theyāll start data mining Fedi stuff.
Thatās in addition to the argument that others brought up: that the toxic culture on Facebook might place undue burden on moderators.
Wim wrote in, asking:
What are your arguments in favour of not blocking a Facebook/Meta-owned instance?
My arguments against blocking are weaker than the arguments for blocking so maybe I should block after all. Iām on the fence over here š¤·š»āāļø
But for clarityās sake, here are my arguments against blocking:
Iām lazy and not super eager to keep up with all the fediblocklists. I do block a couple of dozen instances, and more as I run into bad ones (Iām not in the free speech extremism camp), but Iām not being super diligent with keeping up with the larger convo around this.
I value a heterogenous block landscape (i.e. I donāt like a āthese are the good sites, and we all allow each other and we have the exact same block listā world) for three reasons:
1. If some āgoodā sites can manage to keep up the convo with the asshole sites, like how Torvalds clearly and plainly spoke out against āantiwokeā the other day, thatās an overall good for society and can help deradicalize āem. Insert Paul Baranās classic ādistributed networkā image here. Itās not all good because it also somewhat legitimizes the asshole sites, but there are good aspects to it.
2. Some instances are extra vulnerable and need an extra harsh instance block list (many even blocking mastodon.social). Since thatās legit, then the converse is also true: some instances can handle a less harsh instance block list.
3. Even the āgood sideā has values it hasnāt sorted out yet, and never will because discourse is never-ending and the arc of the moral universe is a wild and unruly rock-tumbler of chaos. As Pratchett put it: āPulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.ā Iāve blocked people other āgoodā sites have allowed (for example Assange supporters) and Iām sure vice versa too (such as mastodon.social).
I especially think that a site is responsible for its own users conduct only. social.kernel.org federates with many sites I have blocked. Thatās up to s.k.o. and their mods to the extent their own users want or need that protection. I donāt block āby associationā, I only block sites that are directly bad.
I lost a lot of friends as the pandemic hit, and disproportionally (but not exclusively) those lost friends were other women. People I was hanging out with IRL and whose online interface is Facebook and other silo sites. Since I donāt have, and never have had, a Facebook account, we drifted apart pretty much instantly when we couldnāt meet IRL. If I could have some of them back by the silo sites going ActivityPub, thatās a huge boon. When Google Talk went XMPP, I reconnected with friends I hadnāt talked to for a few years. (And lost them abruptly when they defederated.)
The following argument is a super-weak argument. Itās stupid. But itās still a factor: Itās flattering on an emotional level that the silo sites want to become part of Fediverse, part of the social network that we built on rock and roll. Itās tempting to go along with that.
And, as per my aforementioned Kumbaya Doctrine, federation going to be the ultimate outcome for them once they are truly reformed. (But I donāt think they ever will be or can be reformed given how much damage they have done, and probablyl itās better that Metaās sites just go away and wither.)
While I do think servers should be FOSS and I do agree with the Franklin Street Statement, I was still reading Twitter and Tumblr and Blogspot and Angelfire and Geocities over RSS as if they were any other server. I think there is a mile of difference between those kinds of proprietary-backend, open-protocolāfrontend sites vs a ālog-in onlyā site like Instagram or Facebook or Google Plus.
They could be a boon for Fediās problem with scaling and resource use. Thatās not super likely since theyāre so evil, but they have contributed to server stack development so they might. š¤·š»āāļø
Ultimately a network on thousands of servers eating up the Earthās precious resources is not more efficient because itās labeled āthe peopleās stickā.
I came up with another argument, or rather, an analogous situation.
I run an email server. I have not defederated with Apple, Google, and Hotmail. And most other services, like Proton Mail and Posteo, donāt either.
Even though we know for sure that Google and Hotmail on a massive, site-wide, systematic level actually literally reads, scans, indexes the contents of peopleās personal email and has used that data for ads (Google says they stopped doing that in 2017).
That is the sick and twisted reality we live in.
On the email side, most instances (probably better known as āemail service providersā) current practice is that we can ask and beg and plead our users to ask their friends & fam to sober the heck up and switch away from these untrustworthy giants, or to turn on e2ee (I know e2ee is not a solution for the Fediverse since it's world-readable. Even though we're learning over and over and over again that world-readable, casual, off-the-cuff conversation has problems and I don't think we can solve 'em. š¤·š»āāļø) , but we donāt block email coming to and from them. Thatās been my mentality too, as an admin.
As a user, I love that most people do have email, even if itās āevilā email. I donāt have iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook etc and I rarely text since I donāt have a smartphone. I use email to keep in touch with my friends. I can low-key promote non-āevilā email (with mediocre success) but in the end I still reply even when itās from a gmail or hotmail address. (And a lot of my peeps on even those services are on e2ee, PGP specifically.)
Thatās not meant as a line-in-the-sand, glove-tossing war cry running up that hill to die on. Far from it.
Iām on the fence about blocking meta. I think some of the pro-federating-with-meta people have used super weak arguments, bad-faith reasoning, false info etc.
I donāt know yet which of these three are right:
I have a slight lean towards the first of those three but thatās just preliminary. I wanna think more about it. And hear more good arguments about it (Iāve heard enough bad ones).
Computers and Blues wrote in, suggesting:
we could this time just listen to the people raising these concerns, and maybe future reality will be a bit less sick and twisted.
Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail, from 2004
The time for listening back then wouldāve been before gmail was widely adopted and before Facebook & Instagram were widely adopted. Iāve been refusing & protesting Facebook for fifteen years or more but now they are widely adopted and there are already millions of people on there.
We want people off of Meta (and off of Gmail). Thatās a given. Question is: does defederating help or hurt with that?
In addition, I šÆ donāt fault, blame, scold specific instances from defederating. That has been one of the most sickening arguments from the pro-federating crowd. I think the blocking instances are doing the best for their users locally šš»
I guess my main concern is thatā¦ fedi is like inherently problematic. By design. Not sure how humanity can recover from it or adapt to it.
The timeline management issueā¦ I wanna break it down to three parts:
1. Toxic content. That is a huge issue. Itās pure poison over there.
2. Overwhelm on a protocol / s2s level. Yes. Already with Lemmy weāre seeing dropped posts and API misfires.
3. Overwhelm on a human level. IDK, I donāt have a problem with that. I get like three or four posts per day on here. Itās crickets. Although you follow ten times as many people as I do so maybe you have more experience with the potential issues. Yeah, client side list tools are needed. Thatās not a protocol issue. (I mean, above it being an inherent flaw of the mental ice age caused by world-readable casual conversations that I beg every waking moment to wake up from and it was just a dream and weāre a handful of friends with a pot of tea, a deck of cards, and rhubarb pie and we are not just a life flickering quickly past on a punch card in mother computerās offloading central š)
Iām not onboard with the unified policy thing (the "pact" part of blocking) since I value the heterogenous blocking landscape so much. I donāt support scabs so I hope the āstrikeā analogy doesnāt hold up (i.e. if I think about it more, and come to the conclusion that "no, this is exactly analogous to a strike", then I'd have to change my position and join the "pact" š°).
I think the whole idea of āall of fedi needs to do the same thing and follow the will of the council and be on the secret admin Discordā is bad. Different instances has different needs is a good thing; we can and should help each other, of course, but thereās a difference between helping each other and becoming each other.
At the end of the day fedi would ultimately be a super dumb idea with tons of overhead and climate-wrecking clunkiness compared to a centralized site so if we were to throw away our heterogenity which is the one supposed merit of decentralization, what are we even doing? Why does the council then donāt get together and start a centralized site that we all sign up for and obey? ā The counter-point to what I just wrote is my own existentialist ethics, probably better known as āya gotta case-by-case itā, a.k.a. some issues are different than others; some can be handled heterogenously and others concern all of fedi and needs to be handled collectively. As an analogy, in union work itās fine if one workplace fights for the right to go home from work early and another fights for the right to work nights, while they both need to get together to stop climate change since that is a looming disaster thatās gonna ruin it for everybody.
So thatās why the larger philosophical question of āis blocking good or badā is vital; is it an unambiguous disaster like climate change or is it an opportunity for fedi to break down the wall and liberate our aunts and uncles from their silos? If you defeat the empire you become the empire, the say, and if the silo sites that I hate so much are becoming like us, isnāt that a good thing? The iron curtain is coming down. Are we the side that locks our people in or are we the side that the people are running to and longing for?
Going back to the email analogy. Hotmail launched in the summer of 1996 as one of the first webmail sites. It got millions of users quickly. It was many peopleās first or only personal email account. It wasnāt compatible with pop3 or imap back then, but you could email with other people (and mailing lists) over SMTP.
Imagine if they hadnāt been compatible with email at first but still somehow had amassed millions of users (which to me sounds dumb and impossible but that's just what has happened with other sites like Discord, Instagram, Facebook, TikTokāpeople love to sign up š¤¦š»āāļø). That more people were on Hotmailās own proprietary network than on normal email. (What Tutanota wishes could happen for them and their own fake email "network". š¤¬)
And then letās say that if after almost twenty years decided to open up so that other people could email their users and their users could email other people. By then, in this alternative universe, email is a tiny retro alt cult utopia and Hotmail juggernaut with ten times more users. Is them opening up a good thing or a bad thing? Itās a difficult question, right?
Thatās a hypothetical, but there are some real-world things like the death of Shockwave Flash and the death of ActiveX web stuff, and we rightly celebrated and welcomed those horror shows getting replaced by open standards.
Yāall who seem to have made up your minds: good for you! I donāt keep up with tech stuff and I didnāt see this coming. To me it sounds, at first, like a mind-blowing dream. Facebook are finally tearing down their own silo wall, the wall Iāve been throwing rocks at for two decades, this is what I wanted and wished forāand then some very wise peeps on our side is saying āhold your wooden horses for three seconds, maybe this is a poison in a pretty pill, theyāre trying to destroy usā, and some foolish peeps on our side is trying to cling on to some sense of power or I-dunno-what, to keep the status quo as if it was an acceptable or good or OK status quo, and I am having a hard time telling wisdom from foolery right now.
If Twitter federated, Iād rejoice! And then promptly instance block them because the current Twitter as it exists today is a messed up place when it comes to values and culture. And maybe itās the same with Facebook.
I guess I donāt have the underlying warm love and hope for fedi as some of yāall do since I know there are so many bad actors and harassment sites out there. I donāt see fedi as this successful, wonderful thing. I see it as a smoldering mess already, a post-apocalyptic wasteland of small enclaves who are trying to band together in the face of wave after wave of radiationāand the radiation is using the very same tools themselves. Weāre already in a mess. Things are already bad. The order and harmony is illusory and flimsy.
The harasser-and-troll sites can easily see everything we post. Itās just fuel to their fire. There is no normal, casual, kitchen-conversation here. Itās all glass walls where weāre the human zoo animals.
Csepp wrote in, saying:
And if the rumors are true, they are not even going to federate with small instances, only a few big ones
That would be insanely messed up if so. That would cement my opinion šÆ against them and for the block instantly if that turns out to be true and I hope that plenty of the anti-block people would, too. I hadnāt seen that rumor.
Instagram specifically has had a history of āembrace and extendā, to come out the gate all campfire songs and RSS and then once they had critical mass they slammed the locks down tight. Thatās a pattern that many of these proprietary services follow. When they are upstarts, they are all ādonāt be evil, look at our awesome API, check out our protocols, here is a repoā and once the gorilla has reached 800 pounds itās all EULA and handcuffs gand a boot stamping on a human faceāfor ever.
Iāve mentioned the pro-block sideās moderation argument in passing five or six times and I think itās a great argument and I donāt dispute it. Fediās model of small instances work well.
But unlike the other arguments (embrace/extend; crash/DoS levels of scale issues; tracking/tracing/ads/datamining), the moderation argument doesnāt merit a pact.
Small instances that want to protect their users are ļæ½ļæ½ļæ½ allowed to block and itās a great idea from them. Promising your users that you wonāt federate is a good idea for some instances, and I get that itās also a kind of āpactā, but for the sake of clear semiotics Iāll reserve the word āpactā in this discussion for the fedipact, i.e. admins promising each other that theyāll block.
So weāre kind of discussing two things here:
The moderation argument is great in the block question but a lot weaker in the pact question. Itās not non-zeroāknowing that you have your fellow admins with you is valuableābut itās not as much of a be-allāend-all in the pact question as it is in the block question.
In addition, the other arguments have a much stronger claim for pre-emptive caution with a block; moderation is a āwould-be-niceā to block ahead of time but blocking after giving it a few months (or days or seconds or whatever it takes until the rotten eggs start overwhelming the good ones).
Repeating thoese two last points for clarity: the case for homogenous āpactā-style blocking and for pre-emptive āday zeroā blocking is a lot stronger with the other arguments than with the moderation argument.
Thatās not discounting the merit of the moderation argument in sich at all. Itās huge and itās many peopleās biggest and most urgent concernābut in the block question, not in the pact question.
Thatās why I want to spend much more of my own focus on the other arguments. The moderation argument can be summed up with āif you have an instance with a low mod/user ratio, and you wanna protect those uses, of course blockā.
I also want to mention in passing the whole ad hominem spiel from the anti-block side. The whole ānot that kind of openā, āseems like these people donāt wanna be part of normal society after allā super tired and unāthought-through spiel. That line of thinking is misguided. Instead, Iād say we on the fedi/foss side take our responsibility to not make society even worse than it already is, is all. We fight against our own complicity in the banality of evil with mediocre results but to the best of our ability and with, for the most part, good intentions.
Hereās where I am right now.
There are cases historically when open standards have won over embrace / extend / extinguish. PNG won over gif. CC won over OGL. JavaScript won over ActiveX. Even in the face of (or sometimes even with the support of) some pretty dang evil corporations. Itās not hopeless.
Meta does have a particularly bad track record in that regard, so Iām gonna try to stay wide awake. Iām usually not great at keeping in the loop (I'm less of a "finger on the pulse" writer and more of a "uh, hold on, let's think this through" writer) so letās help each other out here.
And as Iāve already said, if Meta is allowlisting and only federating with a couple of specific big instances like .social, (as opposed to blocklisting problematic instances) that is messed up and a crime against the World of Ends.
Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services
A few months later, tinyrabbit wrote:
Instances often de-federate with other instances that are toxic because of bad moderation or CoC.
I think this is very good and should continue and is much more necessary on Fedi than on, say, email or XMPP, since (de facto, not de jure) most convos here on Fedi are world-readable which brings out the sealions in droves.
They often de-federate from those who federate with those. This second degree de-federation is a stop gap to truly be insulated from the crap
I think this is something to be much more careful about. I mean, those who federate with the toxic-est intances often themselves have bad moderation and bad-actors, but then thatās in and of itself a good reason to deferate from them. It can suck when an instance about a topic I thought I was into turns out to be federating with adn schmoozing up to some bad apples but then the schmoozing is the problem, not the federation.
What does Threads moderation and CoC look like? Do they live up to fediverse standards (as you perceive them)? Do their incentives for running an instance matter?
Theyāre bad. Dot social also is bad but still there are plenty of really really good people on dot social among all the bad. So what to do vs a popular server like that? If youāre running a āthis is very expressedly a safe spaceā like dot art then defederation is part of the mandate, but itās less of a clear cut for other servers. I still havenāt decided.
As Iāve also said before:
For those running a medium or big server, federating with a big and poorly moderated server like dot social or threads is a huge burden.
For those on single user instances, or instances with only a few users, itās more possible because then you can get more milage out of blocking specific bad posters.