this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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With rumors Meta wants to federate with ActivityPub instances, what say you about instances having Terms of Use policies preventing use of volunteer contributed content being monetized (for example)? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by varsock to c/[email protected]
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I am not one for policies restricting choice but I fear the situation where Meta sets up instances that become big, say like Lemmy.world. Then one day when their instance is popular, they decide to charge other instances to federate with Meta's instances.

Big corps like YouTube, twitter, Meta, etc are known to offer services at a loss to grow their service and then drop the hammer and demand payment to use what people already rely on.

I feel a policy that prevents federated corp instance from profiting early on from FOSS, self hosted, and volunteer federated servers is something to think about - though I do not know the best approach.

I like what Open Source software does with their licensing approach where you are free to view, use, and contribute but if you take you must distribute the source code to others. Some outright ban usage for profit without a license.

Obviously licensing applies well for software to prevent abuse, and I would like a discussion about what Terms of Use policies can prevent volunteer work from being abused - if any are desired.

see the following cross-post from: https://programming.dev/post/427323

Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?

I'm not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.

Here is a link if someone don't know what Meta's Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I personally think the proper approach is to limit them to one instance. If they suddenly start trying to distribute a Meta "easy setup" variant of their server or something such that anyone can set up a Fediverse Meta-based server, that's where the line should be drawn. That does have the potential to run an EEE play.

However, if everyone from FB wants to be able to subscribe to Mastodon or Lemmy content from their FB account, that's not nearly as big a deal to me assuming they all come from @facebook.com or whatever. Because worst case, people just block that one server and their embrace is over.

[โ€“] varsock 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I agree with the second part of your comment, and have concerns with the first part of your comment.

I'm all for allowing others to subscribe to Lemmy or Mastadon content, which is why simply defederating isn't as attractive as ToS. I want others to see that their communities/intrests/heros/what have you/ exist outside of Meta. I want the average person to contribute even if they don't know how to set up an instance. What I don't want is Meta hosting content then paywalling it, cutting off others.

For the first part about limiting to one instance... Well FB is technically one instance from a "domain" perspective. They have load balancers and tons of servers hosting their "instance".

like I said before, I'm not a policy guy, I don't know how to solve this. But it would be nice for those who are to spear head this and rally up volunteers so we can get in front of it. If there are no solutions, defederating would be the easiest.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not a techie guy either, so I may be way off base on my expectations of how things work too.

Mostly I just meant that as long as the domain is a single one (@facebook.com) or whatever, then it's quite easy to defederate from for any server, or for an individual user to block completely if they want. (Or at least it is on Mastodon.) But yes, I support Meta being able to link up as long as they do it on an equal footing with the rest of the Fediverse and in a way that isn't a blatant attempt to run some sort of EEE op.

[โ€“] varsock 2 points 1 year ago

I see what you mean now, that makes sense.

being on equal footing

agreed. Now how can we level the playing field with a multi billion dollar corp lol