this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Here's a very different take on Threads by a Fosstodon admin.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As an admin of a small instance, the privacy stuff is pretty secondary to the moderation headache Threads' traffic would surely induce. mastodon.social by itself produces enough crap that I've silenced them, I can't imagine that Threads will be any better and indeed assume it'll be much worse in that regard.

Besides that, I think there's a difference between having data publicly available and voluntarily sending it straight to a data broker. Either way I don't think you should need much of a reason to tell Facebook to fuck off and I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it

I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we're going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.

Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that's a bad outcome for all involved.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If it was almost any other corporation I'd be willing to give them a chance. If Tumblr actually launches ActivityPub I doubt many people will complain. The fact that it's Facebook though makes it pretty much a non-starter imo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's just a non starter cause you declare it a non starter?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

For me personally with my instance, yes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

It's Meta. Why even attempt to let them? What event in their history makes anyone go, "oh, yeah, that would be good."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn't uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.

I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it's still misguided in this instance, because at least that's overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn't have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.

I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media "migrations" that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.

You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You’re describing the ideal you want in a perfectly spherical fediverse in a vacuum. You have to consider the very real labor and server costs needed to maintain & moderate an instance that gets flooded by the content of corporate juggernauts.

Put simply, if you make people choose

We have chosen; that’s why we’re here. Others are welcome to make the same choice when they’re ready.