Fediverse

You make a few good points, I will try to counter them.

The core idea of the fediverse is the same as democracy - that nobody should control the whole. Both are similar enough to allow comparisons.

True, its for separation of powers but this doesn't mean there cannot be any central rules decided upon. For example the consititution of the united states. However, because the Fediverse doesn't have a government, I think a better analogy would be a league of more or less democractic countries that work together. Of course they can agree to an universal declaration, like the united nations agreed on human rights for exactly the same reasons.

So yes, I think that instances should defederate Threads and encourage other instances to do so. However, they should not do it too hard, to the point that you’re effectively dictating what others should be doing.

Agreed. However, there is a difference between a constitution of a country and agreements between countries. For example, the NATO has an agreement with the US that if any NATO country is attacked, US will jump in. However, this is completely build on trust, if Trump decides to not jump in, no one will be able to stop him, meaning there isn't any higher institution that controls the different actors in this agreement other than the actors themselves. This is why I think the analogue of a league of nations is better, because agreements can be much more loose here.

Of course, there would still be a question who would write this document, but the basic idea would be that if it was supported by many servers, it would be put up more or less by word of mouth. To do this most effectively, it would be good to create the document in a way that many servers willing to agree to it. For example through a ActivityPub commitee that exists anyways or a popular meetup of Fediverse servers. And eventually, the most reasonable one will be hold up by the most servers. I think of it as a dynamic process.

But yeah, there would have to be put some thought into it how to craft it and most likely we don't have the institutions yet to do something like that.

That fallacy has a deep impact across the text because the author believes that people can eventually agree on moral grounds based on reason. Often they don’t - because it depends on the moral premises that each adopt, and moral premises are not true/false matters to begin with.

Could be true, I need to think about this longer. However, I still think that as a foundation, basic fediverse rights could be agreed upon through reason and that they could become effective tools against Meta and to improve the Fediverse in general. Of course, they shouldn't be too detailed and let enough freedoms how to realize them technically.

the actual problem is that the Fediverse is internally shattered and cannot agree on anything, including basic moral rules and principles.

That is not a problem. That’s a feature.

I think its good that different moral rule sets can easily develop and implemented; but I think sooner or later it will become a problem, at the latest when more radical parts become pre-dominant. Its not like the Fediverse will automatically develop in a good direction. I don't believe in a hierarchy-free, anarchic society. We need institutions and agreements to ensure that the Fediverse stays a good place.

We will absolutely grow. But „organically“ as every other community that stays healthy does. Most people are just used to the inflated expectations that start ups have.

But yes, I dont see a reason to force growth, especially not with meta.

100% agree with you. Growth must not be the goal, maybe a byproduct. Focusing on growth will eventually compromise the quality of our experience.

Yes. The argument that we need to grow is a capitalistic one imo. This isn’t a capitalistic platform afaik. Small communities are naturally better, I think.

I don't think it needs to be our goal, but I think if the fediverse gets popular, we should let it grow. I see this place as an infinite green space for people to come and feel free to discuss their interests. Lemmy's communities ensure that it scales, because you only join ones that interest you. Then the community can enforce whatever spirit of discussion it wants to maintain and people can create another community if they want to try something different.

I don't like the "they haven't done anything bad yet" argument for staying federated, since there are much better reasons for not doing so. They either have already, and we aren't talking about it yet (ex. downranking fediverse content, those closed door meetings with admins), or they are going to once they need to extract a profit.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.

I would be surprised if they aren't already, and they're likely scraping data from the defederated instances as well.

I think microblog instances should stay federated because that's the best way to fight against threads. (longer discussion here: https://lemmy.ca/post/11771031)

but weren’t there already reports of Meta blocking links/tags in relation to pixelfed?

Much more likely a result of Meta's notoriously shitty auto moderation algorithms than anything nefarious. I promise Meta is not risking the bad press and potential legal litigation to censor a service with 22k MAU.

they’ve already proven to be a bad faith actor.

They've done this for decades.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.

I don't know why people keep spreading this nonsense. If your instance is publicly visible (which it is) then Meta is likely already scraping it. They do not need federation to do that.

Yes: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807

How is that any different than the weekly defederatiosns here?

The Fedipact is deeply regressive. It follows web2 logic, meaning, it treats the arrival of Meta, like it delt with problems in web2: it uses defederation like cancelling - although cancelling heavily depends on the network effects of social media, most of which Meta owns. While in web2, it was possible to isolate people that one was at odds with through this, it doesn’t work like this here, because the cost to do so are much higher, when in web2 they were zero. You are basically trying to cancel the thing that gave you cancelling. This is why the Fedipact will be neither effective against Meta, nor other similar problems in the future. Most of this stems, I think, from the fact that the Fediverse is overwhelmed with the situation and doesn’t have a better solution, and that it hasn’t really understood network effects and how they work in the new, federated social web; so, it falls back in old, regressive behaviour.

The terrorists moral shortcomings are even more reasons to negotiate with them and try to win them over

You're not negotiating with the terrorists (Meta), you're engaging with the public to explain why the terrorists are bad and why they shouldn't buy what's being sold.

The argument is that we aren't going to win this with sheer numbers or funding, so we need to slowly get people to understand why they are better off picking Mastodon/Fediverse over threads. Every instagram user is already being tossed into Threads, and you can't bring those people over if they never see posts or content from the Fediverse

Users "owning" their content in that way would be the instant death of the Fediverse. If anyone can put whatever nonsense license terms they want on each individual comment or post, how could that chaos possibly be federated?

A better approach would be to recognize that if you're posting your words up on a giant billboard you're not going to be able to control who sees them.

Is there single direction federation right now? I don't think there is?

Also it would probably be more realistic for instances to put a default license on content. Users don't want to bother choosing a license and most users wouldn't even know what that means.