duringoverflow

This will greatly enhance the intelligence of future generations and make education accessible to almost everyone on earth at a similar high level.

I don’t think that accessibility in AI somehow correlates with the intelligence of the subjects using it. It can actually work in the completely opposite way where people blindly trust it or people get used to using it in a degree that they’re unable to do anything without the help from the technology. Like people who are unable to navigate 2 blocks from their house if they don’t use google maps navigation even though they do the same route every day.

If large companies and influential people move to Mastodon […] and no ads.

large companies and influential people are in the commercial platforms because of the ads. There is literally no reason for them to move in a place without ads.

while I would say I belong to the dark-theme cult, there are some applications/websites that I cannot get used to them in dark mode. Like github or slack for example in which everything else than they light theme looks strange in my eyes.

I agree. The mass influx of users from reddit have brought here people who are not familiar with the core principles behind such projects. They literally see it as a free social media that could potentially be in the place of lets say facebook. They don’t understand that the mainstream social media are what they are today because of decisions that have been taken based only on their profit. And this is something that we don’t want to copy here

sure. But reddit was very far from what FB and instagram are. The culture that FB and/or instagram bring with them, is something that if I liked, I would had been there already

meta (threads) will not support fediverse already. They said they will do in some later version. So for the completely practical part, you don’t need to do anything right now.

i’m not here for the ton of content that meta will produce. If I wanted this content I would had been there in the first place. It looks like somebody else is in the wrong place and is dreaming of a fediverse full of brands trying to promote their products and the influencers pretending they are real life advertisements.

its funny that you measure value by that metric.

it depends what you consider as consequence. For me, setting up a clear boundary between what is now known as fediverse and whatever it is this that meta will create is not consequence but choice.

the defederation has nothing to do with “reducing meta’s number”. The reason to defederate is so you’re not playing their game with their own rules. Fediverse will gain absolutely nothing by playing meta’s game.

in this case we don’t talk about users who want to block users of another instance. The problem is not the users of meta. The problem is meta itself and all the problems it will bring to the federated network. Whoever cannot see that their intentions are not to promote federated networks but to exploit and extinguish them, is just naive.

@asjmcguire

I struggle to continue conversations when the argument is “if you’re doing X to Y you are also Y”. No, if you want to ostracise the biggest greediest corporation that we all know are here for different reasons than the reasons that the fediverse was created, no, you’re not a dictator. You are just trying to protect your own values.

Same as when you don’t allow hate speech, you’re not a fascist who oPposEs tO fReE SpEeCh

Using words with very clear, historically set meaning, to describe the exact opposite thing is a very weird path to take.

@EnglishMobster

If Meta has plans to go through with EEE, they will do it no matter what. Even if everyone defederated from them, they’d still build on ActivityPub in weird ways and break the protocol over time.

if no one is federated with them, then open source projects don’t care if they break activity pub because nobody will be in a race to adapt in order not to break the federation. They will live happily in their own custom fediverse without affecting the community. I don’t get why you struggle to understand this concept. I think it is because of

But we know that not everywhere will defederate with them. So what will happen is you’re going to have a splinter group defederated anywhere that federates with Meta (or federates with somewhere that federates with Meta) and you’re going to have… well, everyone else.

where you clearly struggle to understand that the one who is causing the issue here are the ones that opt to follow meta’s path. The ones that will try to adapt. Not the ones that want no connection with the big corp. Instead of realising that meta has no good intentions, you side with them saying “it is what it is” and you just want to wait patiently till they actively start causing issues.

Then again, I think we’re having the conversation in a wrong basis. Your biggest argument is that you want to be in the same platform as your friends. Yes, if for you the reason of existence of the federated network is to enable you reaching your friends who don’t want to leave from their corporate networks, yes, then federation with meta is necessary. However the idea behind such network is not only to provide another UI to join a corporate network. Its much more than that.

I know I haven’t replied/addressed all your points, most probably I’ll come back later.

I don’t get it. Nobody dictated anyone. People want absolutely none relation with meta and they want to be on a different network than meta. By federating with instances that federate with meta, everyone ends up in the same federated network while some pretend that they don’t see each other. Meta is not here for the same values they are. Meta is not here for the values of the fediverse. Ostracizing meta is the only healthy solution if we agree that they have ulterior motives.

By doing so - that part of the fediverse is behaving in exactly the same way that they fear that meta will behave eventually.

by not doing so, is like accepting meta as friend while at the same time you’re waiting for the moment they’ll stab you. Fediverse and activity pub have absolutely nothing to gain by allowing this.

@asjmcguire

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Am I just misunderstanding this?

yes

i’m sorry but you’re naive.

If I want to post something and I want people to see it and react to it, I will post it to the side with more people.

do you know how FB or instagram work? Do you think that when you post, your post reaches your whole audience? I believe you know how they work but for some reason you chose to ignore now.

My argument is that the fedipact, if executed as desired by the people running it, will defederate from Meta and anywhere that federates with Meta.
So now you have 2 fediverses, completely separated from one another.

So, you’ve read the history of XMPP. Did you understand what google practically did? Simply put, meta will create new features on top of activity pub. Open source activity pub developers will be in a constant race to adapt their own projects in a way that will be compatible with meta’s project. They will have no voice but to follow whatever meta decides. Users will start getting fed up that their open source instance is not behaving as well as their friend’s meta instance. People will jump project and/or when users are polarised, meta will decide that they had enough with activity pub. It doesn’t cover their needs and they move to another completely closed project. Users again are forces to choose side and the open source community is just left with the project which they adapted in favour of meta, but now meta is gone because they were never in the same boat actually.

Staying away from meta is a decision in the basis of protecting the whole project. It is not because people don’t want to be close to the users of meta. It is because meta is not here to promote the federated networks. It is here to make profit of it and they may even destroy it if they believe that this is the way to make profit. Siding with them is naive and will never bring value in the network itself.

what you (and other likeminded people) haven’t understood is that these 2 are 2 different topics. Defederating with meta is not because people don’t want to be near the users of meta. It is because meta is a huge corp and it is not here to promote the idea of a federated network. It is here to make profit and to exploit the network. Allowing them to be part of the same network will just cause harm to the network itself in the end.

I suggest you reading this article https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html which is the story of how google killed XMPP, written by one of the XMPP core developers. I believe you will see the similarities.

@asjmcguire

this argument makes sense only if you’re talking about defederating instances. It doesn’t make sense here. The problem is not whether we want the users of meta’s instances. The problem is whether we want a huge corp be part of the fediverse. And why are we talking about it? Because people are trying not being naive and believing that meta is here because they liked the ideas of a federated network and want to participate. Meta will cause more harm than good as it has already happened in the past in different technologies/projects.

I think it would be possible to keep a central database containing only the information which username has already been registered within the Fediverse - a bit like domain registrars. When a new user joins, the operators of an instance could look up whether the desired username is already occupied on another instance. This would certainly mean losing some autonomy, since the instances would no longer have sovereignty over available usernames. But I think it would be beneficial overall if usernames were only assigned once within the Fediverse.

I don’t think this is realistic at all. It breaks the current philosophy of the fediverse where each instance can be both autonomous and federated. What would happen if for example an instance wanted to federate after they already had a couple accounts. Would they need to delete these users because the username exists? This is the reason that the second part (after the “@”) exists.

Also look at the email. Ofcourse it is possible to have the same name with users in other email services. It would be very weird not to be allowed to get the yourname@yourfavoriteservice.com because the yourname@anotherservice.com already exists.

What you are suggesting introduces and requires a central authority that would be responsible for that, but this again, breaks the philosophy of the fediverse itself.

meta is not here to promote open networks. They will do more harm than good. If you want to learn more about how google achieved it with the XMPP you can read the story here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html written by one of the core developers.