this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.

Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper's quote in the wiki article above:

... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive ...

Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

I'll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation's historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it's future actions.

I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • WeChat
  • TikTok
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • etc
[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …

If we can't convince people of our point of view, then that's our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we're saying "we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to". That doesn't seem appropriate.

corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.

If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it's hosted. If we don't do that, we're not really a fediverse.

I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they'd all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become "too big". The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don't agree that defederating with Meta is against the definition of Fediverse.

This is the header on fediverse.to:

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics. Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.

Meta-owned instances go directly against every one of those points. For me, Fediverse should always be run by people not doing it for monetary gains. The main advantage of fediverse is not that you can and should connect with anyone, but that it's a community that is not ran for profit, and the servers are run for the people with good and self-less intentions, instead of users being heavily monetized and their behavior fed into algorithms to manipulate them even further with the content they are shown. And the federation is there mostly to alleviate a problem that usually happens in such comunities - people move on, servers die, admins can't run an instance any more. With fediverse, this is not that big of an issue, thanks to the way it's designed.

Allowing Meta, or any large company in that regard, in will destroy this idea of community run and privacy-centric social network for everyone, and only result in Meta profiting from it and the content the users create.