For a Universal Declaration on Fediverse Rights, or: At the Core of the Threads-Debate lies a deeper problem: how can the Fediverse grow without losing its soul in the process?
For a Universal Declaration on Fediverse Rights, or: At the Core of the Threads-Debate lies a deeper problem: how can the Fediverse grow without losing its soul in the process?
To Federate or not to Federate: is this the Fediverse’s Don’t be Evil-Moment or its own Liberation through transfiguration? And why is the current political Left in wide parts unable to answer this…
Maybe infinite growth doesn’t need to be the goal.
The core idea of the fediverse is the same as democracy - that nobody should control the whole. Both are similar enough to allow comparisons.
Threads in the Fediverse is like a powerful dictatorship trying to "deepen its bonds" with a small but democratic government. The dictatorship will eventually exploit the power asymmetry to control the democracy, direct or indirectly, effectively erasing it. In that situation, the best approach is to simply not play along the dictatorship. (Defederate Threads.)
Another threat to democracy is internal: the centralisation of control over the whole into a few hands. In the case of the Fediverse, this is the reliance on central systems (front-end software, back-end software, instances, discovery systems, etc.). I see what the author proposes as a "Universal Declaration on Fediverse Rights" as, potentially, a new mechanism enabling those central systems - who gets to decide what goes in that declaration?
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.
An important detail is that the author falls into the fallacy of conflating epistemic and moral matters. This is specially explicit here:
Because without believing in the existence of a objective truth (which they don’t, because they attribute themselves to moral relativism),
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.
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.
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.
It's less about the separation of powers and more about the fragmentation of each power. As in, you should be able to ditch any governing power that you dislike, and curb down its influence on your experience to a bare minimum.
So perhaps the best analogy with RL politics would be a confederation with lax citizenship laws and federated entities being free to choose which other federated entities they interact with. With a key difference:
The Fediverse can be completely acephalous. And the reason becomes evident once you analyse the UN of your example - it's effectively Europe and USA wearing a bunch of sock puppets, pretending to talk in the name of the "nations" (actually countries, but whatever) of the world. An acephalous Fediverse would not develop a similar problem.
In this case (Threads), it means that, while we should promote defederation, how to deal with it should be, ultimately, up to each instance.
NATO example
I don't pay taxes to any NATO country so what I'm going to say is solely based on the Fediverse situation, plus whatever I parsed from your example:
We should not need to rely on "trust" on first place. Instead a better approach is to acknowledge that people will fuck it up, they will do things that counter the best interests of the whole, and that the system needs to handle it.
For example through a ActivityPub commitee that exists anyways or a popular meetup of Fediverse servers.
What happens if said commitee becomes hostile, defending its own self-interests in detriment of the ones of the rest of the Fediverse?
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.
Or we could leave those moral matters up to each instance to decide. And the ones screwing up on moral matters get isolated.
The US is a failed and corrupted state that we don’t need to recreate. It’s built on more wrong things than good. Keep your American propaganda to yourself and don’t infest the actually free fediverse with your liberal corporatist ideals.
And this isn’t even touching on the myriad of reasons for us not to federate with an entity like Meta. Not even gonna iterate on them because they’ve been infinitely chewed in and out.
It might have been fake, but weren’t there already reports of Meta blocking links/tags in relation to pixelfed?
If it’s true, they’ve already proven to be a bad faith actor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.
At the end of the day, one side will be right. My moneys on the anti-threads side.
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)
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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.
They do it because they want to make the "Meta is already scraping anyway, so we should just all agree to their terms of service and start federating with them and become one big happy family". It's just good old anti-defederation rhetoric.
How is that any different than the weekly defederatiosns here?
I don’t think it can but hear me out for a second. How about we just don’t grow? We’re not beholden to stock owners needing to see growth year over year. Can we just be happy with what we have?
100% agree with you. Growth must not be the goal, maybe a byproduct. Focusing on growth will eventually compromise the quality of our experience.
Absolutely agree with you as well. Natural growth as a byproduct would mean that those that wish to stay in the fediverse like what the see and stay with the community.
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.
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.
My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.
Now we are trying to make a less obvious headlines to push pro meta propaganda, right?
We, the signees of the fedipact are not in fear. We know that meta has a horiffic track record of both human rights violations and data security violations.
Its actually the core reason why I decided to make a new community at !anticorporate@lemmy.giftedmc.com. Those who think that corporate greed and shareholder primacy are cancer in our society are very welcome.
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.
Meta’s moral shortcomings are even more reasons to federate with them and try to win over users and pressure Meta to implement better digital rights as well.
"The terrorists moral shortcomings are even more reasons to negotiate with them and try to win them over."
Don't negotiate with terrorists.
Also the article sets up defederation from Meta as if it doesn't do anything. I don't think that's true though.
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
you can’t bring those people over if they never see posts or content from the Fediverse
It's still possible. Reddit didn't became popular because it federated with Digg.
When Lemmy will become the reference for human provided answers, people will join. How fast it will happen depends on how bad the experience on Reddit becomes.
If you defederate with them, I thought they could still see you.
The typo in the title is really jarring for me. It's losing, with a single o 🥹
It's nice to let your soul loose once in a while...
Yeah same. I know what they mean but it’s not what’s there and it’s hard to take it seriously 🙈
As near as I can tell there is 15 of us here now and 15 seems like a good number
I think we're up to 16 now. The Fediverse is being ruined.
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I mean there are a shitload of reasons to not federate with Threads, but I feel like “it will federate ads to your server” is kinda the only one I should need to mention.
We need some basic rules,
- No single direction federation
- Users own their content and can licence it as they feel fit
With these 2 it would be hard to fuck up
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.
100% have instance user defaults etc those who want to custpmise further can do so its already part of peertube and pixelfed.
how can the Fediverse grow without loosing its soul in the process?
It can't? Rather obvious that the "soul" of a community is defined by it's members and the bigger the community the more mainstream this soul will become. Maybe the federation mechanic offers some solutions here, but that remains to be seen.
Many people like simplistic garbage. You can't convince them to like something better, as that creates demands on them to grow as a person, when they likely have other priorities in their lives that demand their attention more forcefully.
This is why McDonalds is the worlds most successful restaurant. Not because it is good, but because it is undemanding.
So, when people think we can pull users from the McDonalds crowd with superior quality, it just makes me laugh.
Are you sure you don't mean a Universal Declaration of Fediverse Independence from Reddit, Threads, and Twitter/X?
Does the fediverse need to maintain its "soul"? As long as it preserves user choice and corporate resistance, the rest isn't required and can be maintained in those specific instances.
The soul is always lost
Can we stop all this philosophising and just get on with enjoying it for what it is? Please?
I'm really tired of hearing everybody's thoughts on Meta and Threads. And souls. And money. And the future. There are too many captains of the ship who want their 15 minutes of steering time. Opinions ate like assholes, everybody has one.
If you want Meta and Threads in your life, then join it or an instance that is going to federate with it. If you don't, move to an instance that won't. Same applies for any community that your part of. Or start your own. That's the beauty of this.
Can we please let it rest?