cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7193618

The “free fediverses” are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism. This post is part of a series looking at strategies to position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and “Meta’s fediverses”.

  • Kierunkowy74@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Meta’s fediverses probably also won’t be able to compete with Threads on this. Threads plan to make federation opt-in is the right thing to do from a privacy and safety perspective, but also means that people in Meta’s fediverses won’t be able to communiate with most of the people on Threads. And Meta has the option of adding communication between Threads and the billions of people on other networks like Instagram (which already shares the same infrastructure), Facebook, and WhatsApp. Longer-term, it seems to me that this is likely to be a huge challenge for Meta’s fediverses, but fediverse influencers supporting federating with Meta have various arguments why it doesn’t matter.

    Is it really Meta’s fediverses, when communication between them and their alleged owner is fairly little and actively gatekept by their alleged owner?

    • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      no just like federating with mastodon.social doesn’t make your instance a part of the Gargron fediverse. Meta can’t control non-Meta instances that federate with them

    • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      10 months ago

      Here’s the definition I gave for term in the first article i the series:

      “Meta’s fediverses”, federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta’s behalf.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        …ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta’s behalf

        That is already possible regardless of federation status.

    • ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?

      Joining the fediverse is just a matter of using a platform that implements ActivityPub (the protocol that lets servers communicate with each other. If Threads implements ActivityPub, it’s part of the fediverse, and the people on Threads can interact without any instance that chooses to federate.

      However, instances don’t have to federate with Threads. That’s part of the freedom of the fediverse. If an instance admin decides that they don’t want to deal with an influx of hate, don’t want most of the content their uses see to be from Meta, or just don’t want to federate with a for-profit company that has an awful track record, they should be able to defederate. If a user of that instance really wants to see Threads content, they should be able to move to an instance that lets them, but defederation doesn’t make the fediverse or ActivityPub less free.