this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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If we had to white board a decision matrix on Facebook federation, what would be the number of risk's and rewards for either approach? How would you weight or quantify them? Just trying to approach this from a little more of an analytical angle, given most of us are developers anyway.
I appreciate the push to be more analytical. I thought that I was being analytical, but this challenge to my thinking has made me realize that I've not been thorough.
Edit: speaking of thorough, I missed including the founding principles of privacy-centric and ad-free. That would seem to disqualify Meta right out of the gate, just as most people seem to prefer.
Ethically, it would seem that admins are limited by that, although I suppose technically, they should wait and see what an instance does before making the decision to defederate.
Anyway, here's what I came up with should anyone decide to depart from the founding principles.
What our root concerns? I could be wrong but I think they are advertising, accuracy, and civility. Some people are concerned about sheer volume of new entrants, but I don't know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to address that concern.
Accuracy and civility are both moderation problems that the fediverse has to deal with whether Meta joins or not. Yes, there may be issues of scale and volume, but if the fediverse is to go mainstream, those problems need to be solved anyway.
There are forms of advertising that I think we could all live with in moderate amounts, but surveillance ads and malware have pretty much destroyed any tolerance for ads.
Okay, so how would ads get distributed in the fediverse?
1 through 4 are all instance-specific and can be avoided by any user who wishes to. There will always be nooks and crannies inside the fediverse that are free of ads and surveillance. The very existence of the fediverse is evidence that there is a critical mass of people to keep those spaces alive.
5, the client, has nothing to do with any instance or, in a sense, the fediverse. Clients can always do what a client wants. It's up to individuals to choose wisely.
So what are the potential benefits? If Meta comes it at Meta scale, then anyone currently using both Meta properties and the fediverse might be able to keep the value of both while using only a single platform. If people using a Meta property follow Meta into the fediverse, that can increase the variety of communities and make very niche communities viable.
My take is that the fediverse can cope with an entity like meta because nobody is forced to join their instance or interact with anything or anyone hosted on Meta.
There are a couple of caveats:
Risks/rewards for whom?
For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.
But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a "fediverse", where all instances' users can talk to one another if they choose. If that's what we care about, there's no choice here: federate, or you've already broken the vision.
Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta's content on their home page. Let's beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:
But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: "Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won't allow it. Go create an account there instead.". As soon as you do that, it's not a fediverse anymore.
I think that it mostly boils down to what most of the users see as the "Fediverse vision". For me, what's most important is that you have communities and users that are providing content to each other selflessly and with good intentions, instead of them being a product that is heavily monetized and manipulated through the content they are served. The Fediverse helps in this regard that it alleviates the problem with such communities - that they come and go, servers die or people hosting them move on. By being part of a fediverse, you distribute this between multiple such volunteers, so a server disappearing isn't that much of an issue.
However, letting Meta in goes directly against this vision, and makes it even worse by letting Meta feed on and monetize content of every user on the platform. That goes directly against what I see as a main advantage of the Fediverse, and it will probably make me reconsider whether I want to participate. But that's only my, pretty selfish and gatekeepin opinion. But my dislike for corporations such as Meta is deep enough, that I simply don't want to have anything to do with them.
But other users may have a different opinion, which I respect, and that's what this discussion is about. It's also possible that I may have misinterpreted what Fediverse was supposed to be about, and I was just projecting what I would like it to be. I guess that we will see how will the Meta situation eventually turn out. I guess that Fediverse will probably split into Metaverse with instances that did federate, and Fediverse that didn't. All that remains to be seen is how large will be the communities left on either side. (Now that I think about it, maybe I have it wrong, and you can for example defederate from Meta, but still be federated with i.e metalovers.lm that are federated with Meta? How does that even work, actually? Will we be able to interact with Meta users through that instance, but not with their posts, or never message them?)