Gregory's ServerI wrote our first Opinion piece in response to @gruber 's own perspectives on the negative reactions a good chunk of the #fediverse has towards Meta's impending presence here.
Got an opinion piece of your own for our site? Reach out!
Sean Tilley
38 comments
Sean Tilley
@pbaesse @fediversereport @gruber Technically yes, but I'm waiting on an update to the integration, so that all articles get published to one ActivityPub Actor. Right now, every author is an Actor, so subscription is a little weird. 
Coffee (CW all the things)
>> "But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?" > "Confusing users with a service is disingenuous, at best. No one is stopping anyone that uses Facebook from joining the Fediverse. We just want to stop the company itself from bending the network to its own ends." Exactly this. This whole piece is excellent! Thank you for writing it.
Coffee (CW all the things)
> "those platforms tend to shoot down the lifeboats when that affects their bottom line." Great metaphor.
L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ
@deadsuperhero @gruber On the comparison with email I think it's a good parallel: every serious email provider has an extensive blocklist against domains sending spam/phishing/etc mail, much in the same way every serious fedi instance have an extensive blocklist against bad actor instances.
Sean Tilley
Hypolite Petovan
@deadsuperhero @Mabande Which means the largest email servers actually have an allowlist rather than a blocklist, they will drop email from unfamiliar senders. The protocol itself is open, and yet nobody can set up an email server and expect to reach users on GMail or Outlook that make the majority of the network. It’s indeed a good parallel against Meta’s coming to the Fediverse.
L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ
@deadsuperhero @gruber Oh yes! Gmail and others deciding that "small" email providers were to be labeled as spam just because they're not enterprise sized* would be like a couple of massive mastodon instances (like .Social and the incoming Meta) deciding that small instances were silenced by default even without a history of bad behavior. 
Esther Payne 🏴
@deadsuperhero @gruber I'm reminded about years ago with Livejournal in terms of organic community discovery. One of the things that would I think have kept it going would have been an easier way to follow people who were on other instances of livejournals code. But this isn't a technical issue. It's asking users and admins to trust a known bad actor.
Esther Payne 🏴
@deadsuperhero @gruber Folks on here do have a choice of community to move to. Yes moving is hard and it sucks when defederation happens. But it is possible to move instances now, and that will improve. As a user I moved a sub account of mine to another instance, purely because of their admins attitude. What we in the community have a duty to do is on-board, like we did years ago with Gmail invités, Like we did when telling our friends about the networks we were on.
Esther Payne 🏴
@deadsuperhero @gruber but as an individual I certainly don't have to engage in anyway with instances that choose to federate with instances with under investment in community safety. I deleted my account last year from Facebook. I have no wish to engage at all with anything they have created. That's my choice, just like it's anyone's choice on here. 
Abbie
@yuki2501 nah. I don’t think Facebook would have to pay him. He probably thinks they are buddies 🤣@deadsuperhero 
Oblomov
@antijingoist @yuki2501 @deadsuperhero
Abbie
@oblomov Based on his writings it really is the most logical assumption @yuki2501 @deadsuperhero
Radical Edward :hackers_town:
@yuki2501 false dichotomy for sure really weird take to say one of the most closed of closed gardens is about openness 
🕸️ Cobweb
@yuki2501 @deadsuperhero maybe not Facebook, but I bet his sponsor paid him well to take a contrarian view
Hypolite Petovan
@yuki2501 @deadsuperhero It would be a cozy explanation if Facebook paid him to write this disingenuous piece, but a simpler reason is that Gruber personally shares the capitalist infinite growth mindset which is such a dead end that you have to use bad faith to defend it.
mofumofu
@deadsuperhero there are lots of super smart and well intended people in tech, but their brain can’t break away from the Silicon Valley model of doing business 
(((o))) Acoustic Mirror
@adamgreenfield I think "Gruber Is Talking Out of His Ass Again" would have been more accurate, but probably not appropriate for a family media outlet. 😉
Kinetix
@deadsuperhero
Nice, Sean. Good education piece covering many of the reasons for the backlash. @gruber 
John Gruber
@deadsuperhero I was happy to read your piece. But my first question: are you happy with the growth curve here?
Chris Trottier
@deadsuperhero@social.treehouse.systems I like your response to Gruber!
Oblomov
@deadsuperhero @gruber in fact, my understanding is that one of the reasons why Tumblr hasn't tried to federate yet it's that they don't *want* to overwhelm the network —and that's for a platform that could present each blog as a different instance, thus making it much more manageable from “this” side.
Oblomov
@deadsuperhero this is an extremely well written and incisive article and it mirrors do much of what I was thinking about replying to @gruber that I'll probably refrain from doing it and just link to your post. 
Mike Rodriquez
@deadsuperhero @gruber "But I don’t think users are stricken with absolute analysis paralysis like some suggest." Anecdotally, from knowing a lot of "normal" people, you would be wrong. What server? was == forget it about it, for many.
Mike Rodriquez
" I just think you haven’t been in the space long enough to really know much about it." I've been in this space since 1984 when I was a usenet admin. I pretty much completely agree w/John, fwiw, and also, no offense, did not find your article persuasive. It is an important discussion to have, no question about that.
Sean Tilley
@glowrocks @gruber That's okay! It's 100% fine to disagree here. For the most part, those who want to federate with Threads will do so, those who won't, won't. The network has long outgrown a maximalist stance that every node has to connect to every other node. Out of curiosity, did you ever experience something similar during your time on Usenet? What was the outcome?
Mike Rodriquez
@deadsuperhero Good point, folks will do what they need to do and that is a large part of the power of federation. Wrt usenet, there were the AOL hordes, but that passed. There was the beginning of spam, and that didn't. But there were no big commercial entities to compare to FB. Google did eat up the usenet archives I believe, w/vast parts now missing. We didn't handle that well, but then again, who's we? 
Les capsules du prof Lutz
@deadsuperhero "Got an opinion piece of your own for our site? Reach out!" There's @ploum 's excellent take here: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html |
@deadsuperhero @fediversereport @gruber nice! Can I follow the site here?? 😃