Ian Betteridge (of the “Betteridge’s Law of Headlines”) opines on the recent Meta (Facebook) / Fediverse controversy.
Goddamn i needed to read that. Very infuriating to read the quotes saying “Youre going against the point of federation guys. Were supposed to be open for big corporations to harvest our data”. Glad to know someone refutes those claims and explains why we are wary of meta
It is the ability of communities to choose not to federate with anyone else which gives Mastodon its strength.
There are zero mature federated ecosystems where this statement is true. While the freedom to (dis)associate is foundational to federated systems as an abuse management tool, it’s existentially dangerous when deployed as an idealogical weapon or negotiating lever.
- The internet is federated, but you don’t see tier 1 ISPs de-peering each other over arguments on social media.
- Email (which IS a great analogy… exactly because of the precedent for combatting abuse at scale) is federated, and you don’t see major providers blackholing major providers.
- Telephone networks and the banking system are both federated, and generally major players don’t de-peer other major players within established ecosystems.
In all these cases, there were phases where the network was immature and these squabbles did happen. But players who isolated themselves lost relevance, and eventually the value of connecting to the wider network (with all of the challenges and opportunities that brings), became greater than the value of winning any other dispute.
This idea that de-peering everyone you don’t like is normal and how marginalized communities get protected is only popular right now for a short while because the fediverse only just barely matters at all, and almost everyone is willing to disrupt the health of the network is truly painful ways for any reason or no reason. If the fediverse doesn’t kill itself with infighting, the groups that find ways to address their disputes while remaining connected will come to form the fediverse that matters.
Of course, anyone who disagrees can defederate with anyone and everyone if they wish. But in so doing, they limit their own reach and relevance until eventually they’re left alone talking to themselves on a fedi-desert-island. I get marginalized communities not wanting to deal with the hassle of a growing network, but getting marginalized stories heard is one of the key ways to improve things going forward and defederate-first-ask-questions-later doesn’t help there.
The point of the article is not that defederation should be used as a management tool, but that it can be very effective in protecting the fediverse from becoming a monopoly play among big corps only.
See, you said it yourself, “don’t see tier 1 ISPs de-peering each other”, “don’t see major providers blackholing major providers”, “major players don’t de-peer other major players”, you talk about big players only not blocking each other, but that misses the point of small players being blocked out by the big ones.
quote from the article:
Blocklists for email exist and are shared across services – and blocking is often pre-emptive, not based on suspicious behaviour of that server. Sure, email is an open set of protocols, but it’s also highly restricted by large companies and not at all open to either smaller providers or individuals.
This isn’t just an abstract issue: I know of friends who have had to abandon email servers they ran themselves, sometime literally on a box in the corner of a home office, because the big corporations that dominate email simply wouldn’t deliver anything they send.
That’s the risk, corporations are not stupid, they see the potential in the fediverse right now but they have the nasty habit of “embracing, extending - not always extinguishing but making it almost impossible for new competitors to enter the market”.
They could totally ruin the fediverse if left unchecked.
@PriorProject @PorkrollPosadist
All the examples you provided were infrastructure, not social communities, so I think it’s a poor comparison.
Instead, I’d compare AP federation to _social_ constructs. Communities, clubs, groups of friends. Even larger constructs like cities or nation states.
In _those_ examples it’s clear that limiting association is commonplace and healthy.
That’s not to say that social groups putting limits on association is _always_ a good thing, just that it’s a necessity for maintaining a healthy group.
All the examples you provided were infrastructure, not social communities, so I think it’s a poor comparison.
I find it very hard to draw clean lines that categorize email as “infrastructure” and the modern fediverse as “social communities”. There is a clear email-based precedent for Lemmy in usenet, for Mastodon in email lists. I struggle to think of any activity we perform in the fediverse that doesn’t have a fairly close analog that was powered by email.
The thing that makes email “infrastructure” is not how we use it, but rather how we rely on it. In the early days of mail ecosystems, it wasn’t always possible to communicate across providers. Email became infrastructure because the ubiquitious interconnection it provided was so useful. If the fediverse is successful, I would expect it to become infrastructure in a very analogous way.
Even larger constructs like cities or nation states.
In those examples it’s clear that limiting association is commonplace and healthy.
It don’t understand this argument. Nations do restrict travel, communication, and trade to other nations. The costs of doing so are enormous, and nations that do so excessively are generally regarded as totalitarian regimes… not something to be emulated.
Comparisons to clubs and friend-groups break down in usefulness when we’re talking about a group of three hundred thousand of our closest friends, growing at 5% to 10% per day. When these kinds of systems scale to infrastructure size, they become more like governments which I addressed above.
The internet is federated, but you don’t see tier 1 ISPs de-peering each other over arguments on social media.
No, but they intentionally cripple peering to blackmail others into paying extra or move their data-centers into the network of these bad-actor ISPs. Happens all the time sadly.
Email (which IS a great analogy… exactly because of the precedent for combatting abuse at scale) is federated, and you don’t see major providers blackholing major providers.
Keyword “major”. Everyone else is pretty much defederated these days, which is the point the article was trying to make.
Telephone networks and the banking system are both federated, and generally major players don’t de-peer other major players within established ecosystems.
Read up on history. You have this completely backwards. It took many years of government intervention to force them to open their networks. And in some countries banks still don’t interoperate or charge obscene rates for it.
Read up on history. You have this completely backwards. It took many years of government intervention to force them to open their networks. And in some countries banks still don’t interoperate or charge obscene rates for it.
I have nothing backwards because I said nothing about cause and effect, you appear to have fabricated some historical error about regulation so you could have something to condescend to me about. But even so, regulators did not invent cross-network calls nor did they invent inter-bank transfers. Both of these industries had those things prior to regulatory mandates and went through “wild west” periods that have clear parallels to the fediverse today (the early 1900s for telephones and the 17th century for banks) when interoperation existed but was quite selective. My point was that mature federated ecosystems converge on valuing connectivity very highly, and the fact that this value was so clear in these two cases that it was eventually encoded in law supports rather than refutes that claim.
First, every single one of Molesworth’s posts are now available to Meta, including all the replies they make to everyone including people who don’t follow anyone on Meta’s server. In other words, Meta gets access to posts from people who may very well have an issue with that.
But this is already the case. If Meta wants fediverse content, it’s so much easier to just scrape it than it is to build a fully interoperable ActivityPub service. They can get all data with a crawler instead of waiting for individual users to follow each other.
