Tim Chambers
With the upcoming #meta #Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, *robust* discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining ...which Defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the fedi public social graph today - Want proof? The next argument is about poorly moderated P92 user posts and ad spam. 🧵 1 of N 14 comments
misfit loser zealot patatas
@tchambers there is no question that meta is incapable of properly moderating their platforms. You are telling your users that someone(s) must get hurt before you will do anything. Moderation is never simply reactive, there is also a pro-active element to it as well. And we have overwhelming evidence that federation with meta will cause harm to people commonly targeted for harassment and abuse. This breaks the first item of the Mastodon Server Covenant. 
Baloo Uriza
@smallpatatas That's a good argument for Limiting an instance, since public posts won't automatically get fed to the limited instance in either direction. Also a nice upswing: Someone trying to follow from the limited instance will *always* need authorization to follow, even if said user's default policy is to allow all followers. 
Michael Fisher
@BalooUriza @smallpatatas Which gets us back to the key point: we already have effective tools we can use to protect ourselves. Use the scalpel first, and if that fails, then fine - bring out the sledgehammer.
misfit loser zealot patatas
@tchambers @mjf_pro @BalooUriza No one would say this about Gab, and Meta has done far more harm in this world than gab could ever dream of doing. Attacks on trans people are rampant on fb - any other server would immediately have that sledgehammer come down.
Baloo Uriza
@smallpatatas Nobody says this about Gab because nobody normal would use Gab. Normal people do use Meta, much as we may resent it. Do you want to show normal people there's life beyond corporate hellscapes or do you want to lock people into a silo? If you want to invite people out of the silo but you're concerned the silo is badly moderated, Limit, not suspend. For the purposes of this discussion, "normal" is being used as shorthand for "not a fascist".
Tim Chambers
The 3rd argument for defederation: ➡️ To defend against being Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished. This is a real risk, and others point to Google and Facebook and XMPP, or Google and RSS Google reader. Where a big entity takes over, then rug pulls or extends an open standard slowly into an non-standard, non-interoperable functionally siloed service. This is a real risk. But you don't - and can't - defend against this by defederation. I'll explain why next. #EEEE 🧵 3 of N 
Eric McCorkle
Heading into the 2010s, Google started aggregating everything together into "Google services", an all-in-one account encompassing email, chat, other things, and what was supposed to be their social media site, G+ Initially, this was interoperable through various protocols, notably XMPP and RSS. What happened is they acquired enough of a user base, and then started breaking these protocols one by one. XMPP stopped working some time in 2013, I believe.
Eric McCorkle
I know less about RSS, but I know they decommissioned Google Reader, and I believe they took it off their blogs. They have also been slowly making life harder for private email servers, though they can't get away with breaking email entirely. Yes RSS and XMPP still exist, but Google effectively took their user-base off of them, and they aren't common anymore.
andre
@tchambers love the thread, really well put. O would argue that Google didn't ruin RSS though. Then leaving left a huge void that no one was able to fill. Their product was just that good. They didn't do anything to disrupt RSS, the others just didn't do enough to make RSS happen. As far as I remember, this was a long time ago. And I loved Google reader, and I did try looking for alternatives. |
Gregory's Server
The 2nd argument for preemptive defederation:
➡️ To defend against poorly moderated P92 users & ad spam.
We have all the tools for that now - as users & as admins, and deal with exactly this from poorly moderated servers EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And if we find ANY server not responsive THEN we block. Protecting our users is our 1st job but we have all we need - WITHOUT first strike defederation.
The third argument I'll look at next is to avoid #EEEE - "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish."
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