I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don’t have the power you think we do.
What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They’ll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn’t even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it’s Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It’s like an absolute wet dream for them. They don’t even have to coax people to use their own platform!
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you’ve ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
Edit: And it’s even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.
Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.
What I’m taking issue with is essentially the same thing that is getting Reddit into hot water. Spez is acting like all the content on Reddit is exclusively his. And legally, it probably is, since it exists on his servers. Now if you extrapolate that out to Meta on ActivityHub, any instance that federates with them immediately puts all of your content directly onto Meta’s servers. Once it’s in their possession, it’s legally theirs to do with as they please. If they want to pull a Facebook or Reddit, using your data, they can with no way for you to opt-out. Sure, nothing is stopping people from doing it already, but Meta does not have your best interest in mind. Ever. They’ve shown it again and again. So I think people are preemptively wanting to cut off this spigot of user data to Meta because their abuse of it is a matter of when, not if. Any other company might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Meta? We know who they are already.
Also, as I said elsewhere, Meta could already use a bot to scrape Lemmy instances, but you can’t sell a bot to investors. But you can sell a platform. Meta will build a slick platform to sell to investors and sit back while federation fills up their instance with data which they’ll turn around and sell the same way they do on Facebook. And the insidious part of it is that they’ll take your data even though you didn’t use their platform. Right now I can decide not to be data mined by Meta simply by not using Facebook. To do that here if instances start federating your data onto Meta servers, you’d have to not use ActivityPub at all. Either that or the fediverse fractures into Meta and not-Meta, which also sucks.
This is really a lot more than simply setting up an RSS feed.
I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.
Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.
Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.
If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.
So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.
I’m confused about what kind of data you want to protect. If you mean your posts and comments, they are already publicly availible on the Internet. Meta doesn’t need to make a activitypub app that gets federated with Lemmy (or kbin) to aggregate and sell this data.
Is there an other kind of data that is visible only to server administrators?
Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
Someone correct me if I’m getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.
If that’s true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.
So, even if you’re not signed up for Facebook’s version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.
If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people.
I don’t think so. The most probable result is Meta (and maybe Google, Amazon, etc) running the mainstream instances, and sn alt-fediverse of smaller, tech-savy instances that defederate them. Most people will have only an account in the Meta-fediverse, and only a minority in the alt-fediverse or in both. Similar to most people now having a WhatsApp account, and only a few using Telegram or Signal.
Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.
I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.
I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth
Isn’t that exactly how “embrace, extend, extinguish” works? Meta’s huge numbers and publicity means that once it joins the Fediverse it will become the Fediverse, by sheer mass. Every other instance will be not even be a blip on the radar compared to theirs.
We get exactly one chance to refuse and it’s here, at the start.
What is even their saving grace? Publicity? People will only see “Meta” and “Facebook” plastered everywhere. And you know they’ll use their instance to archive and analyze everything, and build fake profiles, and cross-match them to Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram, and so on and so forth.
Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg have done some of the most vile stuff to privacy. They’ve preyed on the personal data of billions of people. If there was such a thing as privacy genocide they’d be guilty of it.
This is like getting into the pool with a big hungry shark with syphilis. For goodness’s sake, stop to think about it for a second.
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Meta will try to have good content. Then they’ll add features rapidly calling them “standards”. The open source community won’t be able to keep up. Meta content will not work fully on Lemmy and other clients. People will migrate to meta controlled instances to keep the good content. The open source and community versions will end up being a pain and only for the true believers like Linux desktop.
I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.
EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…
Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don’t have the power you think we do.
What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They’ll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn’t even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it’s Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It’s like an absolute wet dream for them. They don’t even have to coax people to use their own platform!
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you’ve ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
Edit: And it’s even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.
Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.
What I’m taking issue with is essentially the same thing that is getting Reddit into hot water. Spez is acting like all the content on Reddit is exclusively his. And legally, it probably is, since it exists on his servers. Now if you extrapolate that out to Meta on ActivityHub, any instance that federates with them immediately puts all of your content directly onto Meta’s servers. Once it’s in their possession, it’s legally theirs to do with as they please. If they want to pull a Facebook or Reddit, using your data, they can with no way for you to opt-out. Sure, nothing is stopping people from doing it already, but Meta does not have your best interest in mind. Ever. They’ve shown it again and again. So I think people are preemptively wanting to cut off this spigot of user data to Meta because their abuse of it is a matter of when, not if. Any other company might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Meta? We know who they are already.
Also, as I said elsewhere, Meta could already use a bot to scrape Lemmy instances, but you can’t sell a bot to investors. But you can sell a platform. Meta will build a slick platform to sell to investors and sit back while federation fills up their instance with data which they’ll turn around and sell the same way they do on Facebook. And the insidious part of it is that they’ll take your data even though you didn’t use their platform. Right now I can decide not to be data mined by Meta simply by not using Facebook. To do that here if instances start federating your data onto Meta servers, you’d have to not use ActivityPub at all. Either that or the fediverse fractures into Meta and not-Meta, which also sucks.
This is really a lot more than simply setting up an RSS feed.
I completely agree with the overall point you’re making, but would like to correct the legal aspects. I am not a lawyer, but I do have a pretty good understanding of US copyright law which is the most relevant in this case.
Having possession of data isn’t sufficient to legally establish the rights to do as a company pleases. In general, an individual author immediately has copyright on a creative work as soon as it’s recorded in any medium. The main exception to this is “work for hire” — a legal agreement that employers hold copyrights since they’re paying for the work. It’s usually part of the paperwork an established company has you sign when you start a job.
Because of this, and because we users aren’t employees of Reddit, they need a license to duplicate and display our copyrighted posts. The terms of service for any online service almost always stipulate a “worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual license”. In other words: you still own the copyright to your post and can still share it elsewhere, but by sending it to Reddit, they get to put it anywhere they want and you can’t ever take that right away from them.
If Meta begins slurping up data from the Fediverse, things get tricky. They’re probably violating copyright law if they do that, just as ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc… likely have. However, legal enforcement of our rights would be near-impossible. Everyone who has ever had an account with any of Meta’s properties has most likely agreed to an binding arbitration provision. (These are utterly immoral, they force you — as a precondition of doing business! — to preemptively waive your legal rights before anything occurs that would cause you to need them.) These provisions also prohibit any sort of class action, so each individual person would have to initiate their own case against Meta. And then you’d have to somehow prove to an arbitrator from an organization selected by and paid by Meta that Meta violated your copyright. And Meta’s high-priced lawyers will have all kinds of ways of referencing prior cases to argue why what they did is fine.
So yeah. But again, I completely agree with your main point. Meta will (if they haven’t already) collect all the data they please from the Fediverse and use it to further their business interests. And those business interests are not aligned with our best interests.
I’m confused about what kind of data you want to protect. If you mean your posts and comments, they are already publicly availible on the Internet. Meta doesn’t need to make a activitypub app that gets federated with Lemmy (or kbin) to aggregate and sell this data.
Is there an other kind of data that is visible only to server administrators?
Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
Someone correct me if I’m getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.
If that’s true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.
So, even if you’re not signed up for Facebook’s version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.
I don’t think so. The most probable result is Meta (and maybe Google, Amazon, etc) running the mainstream instances, and sn alt-fediverse of smaller, tech-savy instances that defederate them. Most people will have only an account in the Meta-fediverse, and only a minority in the alt-fediverse or in both. Similar to most people now having a WhatsApp account, and only a few using Telegram or Signal.
Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.
I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.
Isn’t that exactly how “embrace, extend, extinguish” works? Meta’s huge numbers and publicity means that once it joins the Fediverse it will become the Fediverse, by sheer mass. Every other instance will be not even be a blip on the radar compared to theirs.
We get exactly one chance to refuse and it’s here, at the start.
What is even their saving grace? Publicity? People will only see “Meta” and “Facebook” plastered everywhere. And you know they’ll use their instance to archive and analyze everything, and build fake profiles, and cross-match them to Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram, and so on and so forth.
Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg have done some of the most vile stuff to privacy. They’ve preyed on the personal data of billions of people. If there was such a thing as privacy genocide they’d be guilty of it.
This is like getting into the pool with a big hungry shark with syphilis. For goodness’s sake, stop to think about it for a second.
I am not. Facebook is largely responsible for poisoning the Well that is the internet. They have shown what they truly stand for. I am completely uninterested in any platform that has a single thing to do with that company.
Yes, inclusive of human beings. NOT large corporate interests. Your views are wrong and you should feel bad.
Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.
Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.
Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄
Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.
But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.
Irrelevant. See above.
Meta will try to have good content. Then they’ll add features rapidly calling them “standards”. The open source community won’t be able to keep up. Meta content will not work fully on Lemmy and other clients. People will migrate to meta controlled instances to keep the good content. The open source and community versions will end up being a pain and only for the true believers like Linux desktop.
Which may not end up being a bad thing to a certain extent
“Good content”? You mean like the stuff that’s on Facebook now?