This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
Excellent article and it’s of course a very serious concern regarding Meta’s Project 92.
I want to use this thread to share one other concern that I’ve seen coming up constantly on Mastodon: overzealous instance admins that take things personally.
“You said X about me, I’ll block your whole instance”.
“I don’t like a particular nuanced view that instance staff holds, #Fediblock now”.
“Users of X instance reported me. I’ll block the whole instance”.
A few of these things happened in the last couple of days. We can’t have instance admins defederating because of trivial petty stuff. The only thing this does is drive users to larger instances, among which there might be corporate interests.
Instances with admins like that will weed themselves out, but I think you make a good point that when you join a smaller instance we should have conversations with our admins and make sure they will work together with their users to drive a better fediverse. There are going to be a massive amount of bad admins starting their own instances because they want power, so make sure you don’t waste time with those.
There are so many issues with this tech that are being exposed now that it worries me. “All” should never have been inclusive of everything just because one member of the instance subbed or viewed something for that other instance. Instances should have to reach a certain critical mass before that. There needs to be an “All” and an “Extended”.
Yeah, larger instances have a sense of stability about them, whether that’s warranted or not.
What might help is some sort of creed or manifesto that smaller instances can jointly promote, that would include “I won’t defederate for petty reasons,” “I won’t sell out to corporate,” etc. Might give people more confidence in smaller instances, and help foster a larger sense of community while keeping resources spread out.
It’s premeditated, the “Drama” is used as a scapegoat & a precursor (Divide & disintegrate).
Typical tactics with conservative & neoliberal thrive on Repression/Regression/Chaos/Disorder (We’re dealing with corrupt institutions & industry.).