Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be?
I'm seeing discussions on other instances about how a "federated" corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company.
What would kbin.social's stance be towards federating/defederating with a Meta instance?
Or what should that stance be?
I've seen this article circulating and I think it's a really good cautionary tale. If meta arrives here in full force it's completely going to take over the fediverse, they are already splitting the community as it is.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Note that this is different subject from being anti-corporate. I don't think there's an issue if companies start booting their instances and creating communities for their games or content, whether its EA, Bioware, CDPR or something like pcgamer, LTT, gamersnexus, etc. They want the PR and visibility on a social network but their goal probably wouldn't be take over the AP, and could add some validity and get other bigger names to be active here. That is assuming we want growth at all.
I wonder if theres any way to pre emptively stop them from taking over activitypubs development and direction
They can't do a hostile take over of ActivityPub. The trap is that they would come in with open arms and an army of developers. ActivityPub maintainers would at first welcome the help and guidance from such an experienced team. Then, once they have the community hooked, they spring the trap and start making changes that are actively hostile to small sites. The community flocks to the big site because everything works better there, and the dream is dead.
Now maybe it'll never happen, but it's hard to tell. Even if Facebook joined with the best intentions, that doesn't mean the project isn't going to be taken over by a power hungry manager later who could still activate the trap card.
I was originally in the let’s just sit back and see what happens camp, but this article completely changed my perspective. A very interesting read. I do, however, agree that companies creating their own instances to advertise their products can only be good for us in the longrun.
On a similar note, I was recently reading about Microsoft’s efforts to dominate the whole browser space in the 90s, and I think it’s a very good example of the worst kind of capitalism.
It's really helpful to see a previous example of something like this happening. I was aware of many instances blocking the potential Meta instance but didn't really get the reason why. Now it makes sense.
@Kaldo Thank you for the link, that's exactly what prompted this thread!
I think it's just too hard to draw the line of "not rich enough to be a concern." Amazon instance is obviously bad. Pepsi? If they put their minds to it they could do something lol. Hasbro?? They're greedy enough for sure.
Or what if a company starts as a relatively minor player, but suddenly get big. Steam acquires the entire video game industry or something lmao. Then we still have the same problem, they're going to be motivated differently.
So I say we defederate all profit driven instances. They can still make magazines on our instances, if they can follow our rules. If they have trouble following our rules... Well, then I definitely don't want them in a position to affect the whole Fediverse lol.
Damn, this article's interesting. I never knew about either Google or Microsoft's actions on that matter. I suppose it's not very surprising anyway. "Don't be evil", LMAO
I honestly think that social media services should exclusively be nonprofits and run off of a combination of very limited ads and/or donation drives à la Wikipedia. Profit motives destroy things like this, as we've seen time and time again.
I agree. I have been thinking the last few days how Kbin can sustainably keep the servers paid for long term. A non-profit, Wikipedia style arrangement is the only thing I keep coming back to that makes sense.
Wikipedia is a good example. It is annoying when they ask for the $3 every year, but it's true that a small contribution like that across the many users can keep a free/libre project sustained. Things like Usenet used to be part of your ISP bill anyhow, so a small monthly/annual amount to your instance host makes sense to me. Of course, we pay ridiculous amounts to our ISPs without services like this nowadays, so it does hurt a little
For now, I’m just paying for my instance out of my pocket because I wanna see this place grow. Maybe I will need donations to keep it going in the future once it reaches a certain size but I can’t imagine trying to ever profit off keeping this running. I think the real value in federated instances and content is going back to the ways of the early internet, the personal pet projects that motivate people. I’m also personally totally done with being advertised, scraped, and sold..I don’t want to ever do that to anyone else.
It seems unlikely to me that corporate instances would ever actually federate in good faith.
They may appear to be compliant initially, but in the long term they just have different goals.
I'm not sure where exactly the line gets drawn, but at the far extreme, I say we treat money-making instances as bad actors. If they stand to gain profit from their actions, they need to be defederated to prevent the sabotaging or enshittification of the fediverse.
Maybe true. What of a money-making instance that was a B Corp, or a non-profit (moneymaking but aligned to a purpose?) I think there might be space for something along those lines?
@Melpomene I'm concerned about the B-Corp getting big, but staying profit driven. Imagine if Steam had an instance. That seems... fine, I guess, for now. But then let's say Steam suddenly acquires the entire video game industry lol. That's definitely a problem. But what if they do it over.. 12 years? At what point are we supposed to realize we're frogs getting boiled?
And non-profits, yeah, you're probably right that they should be fine.
But okay, do you know MEC? They were initially Mountain Equipment Co-op, technically a non-profit. Now they're Mountain Equipment Company, a retail store, but most customers barely registered the difference. This type of thing concerns me lol.
I think B Corps and non-profits can be allowed to make magazines here, that's fine. They just need to follow our rules. They won't like it, but no risk of Fediverse collapse ever, and honestly it's probably best if we get to hold them accountable this way.
The safest and most effective way to prevent Meta from destroying ActivityPub is to never give them so much as an inch. They WILL embrace, extend, extinguish if given the chance. Defederate from ALL Meta-owned instances. Be vocal about it. Tell other instances to do the same.
I don’t think there should be blind hostility but it should be clear that any hint of embrace, extend, extinguish will result in hostile actions like defederation. I also don’t think targeted ad tech companies share the goals of the Fediverse. I wouldn’t be bothered if instances had sponsors (as in, “/Kbin is made possible by support from Cloudflare”) like all non-profit media. But any sort of targeted ads based on user activity/data should be ruled out as a way to fund the metaverse.
I think we have already seen hints of "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the confidential meeting they invited the Fosstodon dev to.
@codybrumfield Well, we already have Meta's off-the-record invitation. I'd consider that to be a hint of shenanigans!
But any sort of targeted ads based on user activity/data should be ruled out as a way to fund the metaverse.
i disagree, i think the whole point of the fediverse is to give the user the choice or freedom to use whichever instance they wish. If that is an instance with targeted ads and the user's okay with that, whats the harm? Its not like other's are having their data sold, only that user is. You wouldn't have to use meta's instance to communicate with meta users.
Taking the swarm of reddit users who've converted to kbin/lemmy has already created much more diverse content/communities here as opposed to only tech minded people using the platform. Meta officially bringing their 1-2 billion users over would have an even bigger impact.
Are you familiar with the embrace, extend, extinguish process referenced by the top commenter? Just wondering if this comment is made with understanding of that process.
Personally, I don't want Meta's money and army of paid developers to be able to make "surface level" improvements that incentivize non-technical users to join their instance, while hiding an increasingly hostile and profit-driven framework underneath.
Here's a blog post passed around a lot today on the issue. I'm not totally sold one way or another, so if you have insight I'd love to learn more.
The problem is that if I want to communicate with Meta users, then my content gets copied onto Meta's servers, just because of how the fediverse works. Everything is a local copy first, then gets federated. So if I reply to someone who is a Meta user, in order for them to see my comment it must get copied to Meta servers. The only way to stop this is to defederate with them (which means the server you are on would not send anything to Meta servers).
kbin.social is in particular situation, as it is the only top 15 server by monthly users, which is not Mastodon. The only Fediverse instances bigger than kbin.social, are:
Every other Fediverse server has less monthly users.
It tempts to try federation with Meta, mainly to try Threads' handling of the real threading app.
Meta is going to embrace ActivityPub with Threads by Instagram. Are we (free Fediverse users, creators, programmers, etc.) able to extend, and extinguish Meta's app?
Different Fedi software support articles, threading, formatting, fancy formatting (Misskey-Flavoured Markdown), video, events. I doubt, that new Facebook's app would support all of these at once.
@shepherd A warning about Pawoo: it is FAR TOO EASY to accidentally see lolicon hentai art there right now, despite the admins trying to do something about CP (https://pawoo.net/web/statuses/110195807808920534). The legality and morality of lolicon hentai vs real human CP is another thing but at the moment that shit is out there in the open. Also, they don't allow you to search for text within posts, so you're limited to the global feed where you can encounter the aformentioned, or you have to specifically know who you want to follow and curate from there.
Kbin.social need not be anti-corporation, but setting standards that fellow federated instances must abide by / putting into place a "collective treaty of federation" or some such that sets the terms of federating with kbin.social (and other signatory instances) would be exceedingly wise. In theory, I have no problem seeing commercial entities as part of the fediverse. In practice, though, I'd want to see strong protections in place to prevent them from turning the fediverse into "Social Network Inc, but hosted on everyone else's dime.
It can go all kind of ways. But no matter whether they are blocked or not, they will build their own platform and add 'value' to it. And with 'value' I mean something most people like to use and what makes people feel like they need to be on that platform.
Maybe it will federate with the rest, maybe they're just looking at how they can couple facebook, instagram and whatsapp together through federation. And maybe all three will enter fediverse and you can federate with them. Of course while missing some 'key' features of those platforms. Or they just want to scrape the platform and build on that. Who knows what META will do and how they will do it. They want to be relevant and make money by selling data.
This is actually an entirely possible scenario - given the EU's digital markets act that kicks in next year, this would be a quick and easy way for Meta to be compliant - they can say they are using an open standard, which fully complies with the requirements of the EU act.