"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
@thenexusofprivacy@fediverse@fediversenews Simply blocking Threads won't actually accomplish anything, except leave people stuck on Threads. If we want to actually help people, we need to take active actions beyond boycotts. We need to bleed users off of Threads, and we cannot do that if we block them outright.
404's everywhere, "we're working on it" signs everywhere else.
Like sure, not being able to find my response in the pile of thread sounds like Linux problems, but how is this not loading faster and better than reddit?
So, how is #ActivityPub implementation in #GitLab going? Steadily, if a bit slowly!
In the last four months, we've been working on implementing the first ActivityPub actor, the one allowing to subscribe to projects releases. The ActivityPub part is already written, but there will still be a couple month before it's fully merged. Turns out that the most time consuming part is code review : there is no dedicated team to this (but there is a dedicated developer assisting me, thanks Patrick!), so people reviewing code discover ActivityPub at the time they have to review it (and, by the way, it's incredible how they get out of their way to help a contributor on such a complex subject, they rock). For that reason, we have to make smaller than usual merge requests, splitting the feature as much as possible, and then some again, to make it as easy to understand as possible. And even then it usually takes about a month to get one chunk merged.
Hey #fediverse. Not to brag or anything but #Friendica now has its own versions of #Tiktok and #pixelfed where you can filter just video, just audio or just pictures. A few bugs need to be hammered out with images in the css department but the hard part is all done.
I'm interested in hearing from #ActivityPub developers who've successfully mapped #OpenGraph properties from <meta> tags in Web pages onto the Page type and its properties in AS2.
@evan yes, and it creates a sort of "thundering herd" unintentional ddos for web sites on underpowered providers. there have been ideas on how to solve the trust issue, like randomly verifying some small subset and tracking reputation, or like deferring to a semi-centralized pre-trusted "link preview provider" that is shared between several instances, or even simply ignoring the issue and depending on people to report misleading links. (i prefer the provider approach)
@trwnh another option is accepting the sender-provided metadata to start, and then verifying on a schedule that recognizes that thundering herd problem -- say, a randomized delay between 1 and 300 seconds, with an exponential backoff. And I definitely think having a trusted shared caching server can help immensely.
Confession: I still don't know what boost does here. It must do something bad because so rare do I see on a post "boost(1)" or "boost(anyothernumber)" for that matter. Should I also avoid "boost"? Or does the interface only show when our individual boosts?
I still keep losing comments.
Stuff pointing from notifications lead to no such comment - cannot find anything with Ctrl+F and I see no page numbers or any other indicators of any other pages existing.
@datacequia@evan is currently working on one now and there have been a few published in Japanese over the years and one was published in Catalan last year
@dansup Wished we could sort them after "last active", too, bcs some of the big accounts - of course - left again right after creating their accounts in 2022.
All self-aware communities on #Fediverse should suspend #Threads just as @aral has done. There's no need for a toxic corporate experiment with the aim to expand the monetisation of #HumanRights violations. #Privacy
Mars experiences moments where its moons cast shadows on its surface. But "eclipses" on the Red Planet are very different from those on Earth, and the footage is surreal: More from Science Alert: https://flip.it/zWSO8l #Science#Space#Mars#Eclipse
I'm super excited about the #Fediverse. I've been online since the 90s, been through most evolution stages of the internet, and it feels like we're changing it once again - and this time in a good way.
Quoting this post anonymously because I don’t want to be the one to burst their newly reformed bubble. However I believe the honeymoon’s almost over with Threads entering the space, regardless of their intentions. They’re just too massive of a player not to shift the power dynamics in their favor.
People have long been angry at Gargron for sucking most of the Fediverse attention towards Mastodon through no particular fault of their own, and I believe it’s about to change, and not necessarily for the better.
For fringe projects like #Friendica, it won’t change much though, we never were prominent in the space and Threads’ arrival will not change that. @heluecht ’s willing, we’ll start supporting the new API quirks Threads will inevitably put forth and leave the decision to interact with Threads or not to Friendica administrators and individual users.
@anubis2814 the global feed is already filled by Mastodon posts fwiw (at least on my end). When Reddit had the crisis in summer, Lemmy threads came to fill the space. I would certainly not be surprised to see Threads taking the place of both when their federation will go live.
@petrescatraian@hypolite@heluecht I don't mind the rest of the fediverse filing the global feed, that's kind of the point. Threads is just so much more massive we will never find anyone from the fediverse if you fully federate with threads
@tomasekeli So true. It's the main reason I struggle to get in to it (as a viewer, never record anything myself). If you find any nuts-free instances I'd love to see 'em!
