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Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

>Blocking one of the biggest on-ramps will surely work wonders for adoption.

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.

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Just a guess but I think they're going to do a full two-way federation with injected ad content. This could be very sneaky in how it works with the existing fediverse protocols. You really only have the power to block an instance or a user. 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 of FB?

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.

>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.

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%...

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