FediBlock Meta's new Threads domain
mastodon.moule.world
mastodon.moule.world
No not like that!
A person going by Bloonface (https://mastodon.social/@Bloonface/110605013435138542#.) put it perfectly. People complain more people should dump centralization and move to Mastodon, but every time they try they get shouted at for doing it wrong.
Posting too much. Using hashtags. Not using hashtags. Not adding alt descriptions. Not using content warnings. Using content warnings. Using them, but for the wrong thing. Joining the big servers. Joining the bad servers. Talking about Twitter. Not calling it ‘the bird site’. Not being pro-(whatever) enough. Demanding people do any of the above.
A number of people I like went to Mastodon, I enjoy I can keep reading their stuff. And I get the problems with Bluesky. But boy do I wish I had an invite, it sounds so much less contentious and more fun.
And there is nothing stopping servers from defederating at the drop of a hat. We already know that, it happens constantly for some reason.
It seems 100% reasonable to suspect the motives of a company with two massive walled-garden social networks under their belt. The fediverse doesn't need them, and there's no obvious upside of federation for them.
Besides, on my list of issues with Facebook and Instagram, "not being accessible from the wider internet" isn't even on my top 10. If I wanted to read posts from those networks, I know where to find them.
I 100% disagree. If the goal of the fediverse is to generally decentralize social networks, then this sort of thing is exactly what the fediverse needs to do in order to reach more people. On the other hand, if the fediverse wants to be a niche community that only lets the "right" people in, then they should come out and say so, and stop recommending Mastodon as an alternative to FB/Twitter.
Why? The only reason I use Mastodon is because it was recommended to me.
And you're right that Mastodon isn't an alternative to Facebook or Twitter. My timeline actually works correctly on the fediverse, I don't have obnoxious ads shoved in my face, and I can use a single app to easily use multiple accounts across multiple servers and straddle federation walls if I so choose.
Come to think of it, will Meta even allow outside clients on Threads? Or will they allow it initially and then stop supporting it later? One of the two is an almost-certainty.
The Fediverse has been successful at attracting techies with time and money, but instead of them using it to help a mid size general public instance they use it to make their own server where they can be the ones imposing the bullshit bans.
I've found Bluesky to be uninteresting, and my feed is also pretty dead now. People sign up and then abandon it. I don't bother checking much anymore or handing out the invite codes that I'm accumulating.
Ironically, even the people who say that Mastodon is a dead end and Bluesky is more promising are posting more on Mastodon than on Blueksy. ;-)
Poster A posts, sees interaction is low, and stops posting. Viewer A sees P-A stops posting, checks less. P-B sees posts and interactions decline, focuses on higher interaction platforms, meaning V-A has even less reason to check. When new people join, they find no one using the platform and abandon it shortly after, leading to a wasteland.
Why, exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-act...
Since that’s a legal requirement, it’s not something they can yank in the future.
Also a Twitter clone where everything is public is easier than something like Facebook with complex privacy and sharing settings.
In a world where mobile matters first and foremost xmpp just kinda died. And facebook wasn’t unique in this, google killed their s2s support around the time they transitioned to hangouts as well. Fact is facebook probably still runs one of the largest ejabberd instances (but I’m not certain what runs WhatsApp these days actually).
They are also well-known for tracking users across the entire internet and maintaining "shadow profiles" of people who don't even use their services. Anyone with privacy concerns[1] would not want them on the same network as themselves.
Their moderation is shit, they are happy to encourage arguments as long as they get ad views out of it. The Fediverse is generally supported by funds donated by site admins and users, who often would rather not have a place full of arguments. [2]
1: arguably anyone with privacy concerns might do well to avoid ActivityPub anyway but... 2: call it a "filter bubble" if you like, I'd rather be in one curated by myself and/or a friend than one curated by an amoral corporation
That said there's totally plugins for rss in Firefox and the likes but no one uses them because why would anyone
The AP, for example, uses it as a technical means to facilitate content syndication to thousands of their affiliates and customers.
There’s an extant and modern native/mobile and web app ecosystem and no shortage of libraries to leverage it.
https://techcrunch.com/2007/08/14/facebook-opens-up-their-da..., http://scripting.com/stories/2007/08/14/facebookIsOpeningUp....
Meta already has their social networks. The fediverse doesn't need them, and I don't see why they "need" the fediverse either - unless their plan is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I can connect to multiple places on the fediverse with a single app. The app also works pretty consistently between servers and doesn't go out of its way to drive engagement with dark patterns or serve me ads.
The next level tech would prevent the type of preferential monopoly.
Some federated bubbles will want to, but plenty of others won't. And they can continue on just fine.
And this is exactly why the current idea of "fediverse" was not only dead on arrival but is just as dead 7 years down the (counting from Mastodon's release date which is the most popular implementation).
People just want to communicate, they don't know nor care about the technical details. They know that if they ask the person they just met at the bar for their Instagram they will find them on Instagram. Same deal for Twitter, Snapchat & TikTok.
For the fediverse however, the water gets murkier and the outcome isn't guaranteed because of the above (and many other technical details). (the only guaranteed outcome is that nobody is going to embarrass themselves mentioning "Mastodon" outside of a tech conference)
If you need other reasons why I consider Mastodon and the current implementation of "fediverse" DOA, see my previous posts: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Btw, I say this as a nerd & tech guy that hates ad-supported social media and wishes for a better alternative, but the current iteration "fediverse" is not it, for many different reasons besides branding which I've written about previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I don't think Mastodon even makes the top 25 of most cringeworthy social media parlance when "tweet" continues to be the reigning champion since 2006.
Adoption as in getting more and more interesting people posting and talking? Probably yes, because if it's not then I suppose I don't get what the heck this could be all about.
The beauty of distributed digital landscapes (as opposed to corporate-ran walled gardens) is that you're in more control of how it works and what you see. When there's no central hub, there is no land to fight for - I don't have to see the giant concrete anthills of dense cities, the space I see is configured to my preferences. And of course I would like to have more options of what to read and whom to talk to, than less. Even though I'm unlikely to consume any of this Instagram content (it's just not my thing).
So, I don't quite get this "barbarians at the gate!" thing. But then I don't get the idea of Fediverse servers as some sort of communities either - to me having a shared server is just an unfortunate consequence of technical limitations making it's highly impractical a true distributed system. I really don't want to care what server something or someone is on.
I'm not clear on what, exactly, Meta's AP offering might be (is it a separate user base from their other products, or an integration into them?) or how it will interact with other fediverse instances (FB/Insta users can follow users in the Fediverse without Meta enabling the reverse?).
If, on the other hand, there's full, two-way federation with Meta's services, that could be a huge boon to the fediverse, as it would share their "network effect" with a bunch of other players. Which, I guess, is possible.
But given Meta's track record of the lengths that they'll go to in pursuit of growth and profit, I'd be shocked if they actually did so.
As such, it doesn't surprise me that the fediverse is suspicious and skeptical of Meta's entrance.
As a fediverse host you can probably make custom spam like filters, and I'm sure there will be some distributed tools to fight this kind of thing... But right now a lot of the fediverse is assuming that moderation of external hosts is pretty straight forward and not actively adversarial. If you disagree with the policies or the populace that is attracted to a particular instance block the instance. That doesn't work with something at this scale.
I don't agree with instances proactively blocking Meta before they've shown their true colors, but I also don't think they're wrong. I just think we should let the monsters take off their mask and allow the social consequences to come when the blocks happen for a good reason.
Ummm...Isn't that what TFA is all about? Blocking bad actor instances? Or are you asserting that "What if each ad has its own user ID and is returned inline with any remote query for content? What if they take it a step further and inject ads using desired user's own IDs to show them when you follow your grandmother's content who would be very difficult to move off FB?" are the actions of a good citizen of the Fediverse?
I'd say those would be the actions of a profoundly bad actor who shouldn't be allowed to interact with my fediverse instance.
>If you disagree with the policies or the populace that is attracted to a particular instance block the instance. That doesn't work with something at this scale.
I'm not sure why you don't think blocking would be workable. You can block hosts and entire IP ranges in admin UIs for AP instances, or you can just block all of Meta's AS'[0] at the network level. How is that unworkable?
>I don't agree with instances proactively blocking Meta before they've shown their true colors, but I also don't think they're wrong. I just think we should let the monsters take off their mask and allow the social consequences to come when the blocks happen for a good reason.
I don't necessarily disagree, but given Meta's past disrespect for their product (that'd be you, by the way), it's not surprising that many folks don't want anything to do with them -- before or after they show their true colors.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%...
Besides, if I wanted to see posts from Facebook or Instagram users, I know where to find them.
This is like if some mail host decided to block all mail from gmail domains.
Look, I don't like or trust Facebook. But how many customers would Fastmail have if they defederated from Gmail? For that matter, how much would Gmail have grown if they had decided not to federate with Hotmail and Yahoo? If people can't use your service to talk to or follow friends & family on other services, they'll just use the services their friends & family use. Sure, they could use both, but why bother? The one that isn't huge has little or nothing to offer them.
I'm all for letting users of federated networks set up their own personal blocks of users, nodes, entire services, whatever. But when admins defederate, it blocks all good communication, too. And turns the federated network into an unfederated non-network.
> Don’t like it? Make your own fediverse node.
Sure. And when you do set up your own fediverse node with the intent of actually staying federated, you will quickly find yourself with a de-fediverse node, as admins punish you for daring to let your computer talk to the computer of someone they don't like.
Edit: To be more clear, I am NOT saying that fediverse nodes want or need to be huge like Gmail or Facebook. I'm saying that convincing people to escape the walled garden into the fediverse is mostly not gonna be possible without a demonstrated commitment to keeping the network connected. It'd be like trying to convince someone to set up their own email server, when nobody they know will ever see their emails because Gmail dumps it all into the spam bucket. What Gmail has done to the idea of a personal email server, the fediverse is doing to itself, self-inflicted.
The fediverse is about creating a more decentralized internet. Facebook is about centralizing as much of the internet on its servers and sucking up as much data as possible. These things simply aren't compatible. We've seen over, and over again what happens when you allow big tech companies into your open standards. Whether it was Google destroying the XMPP network, or Microsoft deliberately trying to cripple Open Office, we know how this will end. Facebook may play nice for a day or two, but one day some product manager will decide they have most of the users, so why play nice? They'll introduce a new (proprietary) feature to try and get their users to complain to their friends that messages aren't as cool when they're not on Facebook, suck up most of the users, then defederate. Or they'll just refuse to follow the standard properly because they know best (ala Google refusing to implement TLS for server to server connections with XMPP, making many smaller servers choose to defederate for their users safety).
Also, we've seen how bad their behavior can be in terms of moderation, being party to genocide, allowing nazis, etc. so why would we allow them to bring all that too our users? Blocking entire servers until they change their behavior, or permanently if they refuse to, has been an extremely effective moderation solution that has kept the fediverse safe. This only works if server sizes stay relatively small (where the crossover point is, I don't know, but I know facebook is way beyond it).
Literally almost all of their internal domains are still Facebook, and now they dumped the mertaverse and switched to AI, just call it Facebook!
Using Nginx to block Meta, Twitter and ChatGPT access to your sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36476243
Meta: Sure. Let's get 2B into the Fediverse with Instagram Threads.
Fediverse: No! Not that sort of adoption! Block Meta from the Fediverse now!
As expected and predicted in [0]: 'Instagram's success on ActivityPub is also Mastodon's nightmare and it tends to more centralization.'
Looks like Threads is going to be the biggest Mastodon-compatible network on the Fediverse and the other admins of larger instances who signed those NDAs won't block them anyway, with the smaller ones making themselves irrelevant if they do.
Meta once again is winning.
> with the smaller ones making themselves irrelevant if they do
I don't think this is true. The fediverse started out as a way to specifically have small services where users (mostly trans and queer users early on) wouldn't be harassed all day. "Irrelevant" only makes sense if you're thinking from the perspective of "get as many users as possible", but the fediverse isn't really about that. Small servers of marginalized people talking in private spaces where no one is harassing them is still extremely relevant.
Irrelevant to who and/or what?
I'd expect that most instances aren't interested in the stuff going on over on Meta's services, most likely because they're on the fediverse to get away from them.
What's more, not every site wants to monetize their users or maximize engagement. Rather, they aim to be a community.
If your[0] goal is to "increase your reach" to improve your economic prospects, then small instances will likely be irrelevant -- to you.
If that's your goal, I don't want you on my AP instance anyway. There's way too much of that elsewhere.
[0] That's a general "you," not rvz specifically.
wasn't this Pawoo.net? I remember Gab switching to mastodon but they weren't really big, unlike Pawoo which was by far the biggest instance at one time.