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If there is even a single gram of truth to this…
Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I don’t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Meta’s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if they’re dumb enough to do it. The rest of us will rebuild.
I really hope no one is stupid enough to take Meta up on this if it’s true. https://beach.city/@vantablack/110594120842443355
I started on the Fediverse with Mastodon about seven years ago when I had ~42K followers on Twitter and zero here.
Personally, I don’t care how many followers I lose. My tiny, ineffectual, instance of one will defederate with any instance, no matter how large, if this rumour is true.
If this comes to pass, I’d urge those of you on the instances that become Meta’s lackeys to move to instances that are not if you’d like us to stay in touch.
Remember, it’s about quality not quantity. Always.
I’ve been shouting with my whole chest about the danger of large instances for as long as I can remember.
Even if this rumour is not true today or even if the large instance admins decide to act intelligently and with backbone and refuse such an offer if it is true, the danger remains.
You don’t have to wait for the ship to sink before taking action. If you’re on a huge instance, move to a smaller one. Spread yourselves thin. Make each instance a smaller target. Make the fediverse stronger.
(And maybe some of you will now see why I’m designing the Small Web as a peer-to-peer web. Why ensuring that every node – every instance – is equal is essential to any system that wants to resist centralisation and corporate capture. Why if these places are extensions of ourselves, we must own and control them ourselves. It’s the difference between being a person and not a person in the digital age. It’s high time we understood this.)
@aral This is awesome.
@ubiquity75 Thank you. More than anything, I think it’s necessary.
PS. I’d love to be able to present this to academia more but not sure, short of doing a PhD on it or something, how to go about that. Any ideas?
@aral @ubiquity75 collaborate on a paper and make presentations (a tour). I bet privacy-minded associations and organisations would love to have you in events organised together with Universities. @d3 would you like to have Aral Balkan in Portugal explaining it?
@aral @ubiquity75 propose workshops or seminars or teaching formats? As someone who currently organises such stuff at a university in Berlin (last semester, unfortunately), I know it is something that students, at least, would totally benefit from and some be enthused by.
@aral @ubiquity75 look at similar projects by academics if you want that.
It reminds me of stuff @axz works on
@aral Well, that’s something that would be interesting to discuss!
@ubiquity75 Anytime :) mail@ar.al
@aral
@ubiquity75
I would be interested in setting something up. I've talked about your work a few times and I think it might be interesting to pitch similarly for academic infra together. I am bb in academia but I know some web infra ppl around here :)
@jonny Happy to chat :) mail@ar.al
@aral
I keep wondering where we went wrong.
We had something like the Small Web 30-40 years ago.
(Although I find the word a bit weird. For me, a web is a network, that only exists because there are nodes that communicate.)
Sure, you likely didn't have your own server in the 80s. But our "organization" had (university, research institute, military thing).
The whole idea of "having your own website" was something that could have naturally evolved into "having your own server".
And yes, it is high time we fix that "it actually belongs to someone else" thing.
@wakame But it only looked like the Small Web. In essence it was the Big Web we have today. Only it hadn’t been injected with capital yet and the centres hadn’t grown.
Any system that can scale vertically, will scale vertically.
@aral how do you propose handling moderation in a theoretical peer to peer social space? Shared blocklists? Even then, if it's fast to create new single tenant instances won't spam be an issue?
This is not criticism, it's a genuine question. Feel free to redirect me elsewhere to read if you wrote about this before.
@qwazix The same way you moderate in real life as a person. By deciding who gets to follow you and disassociating yourself from the people you don’t want in your life.
The system merely models the human being as we know it in physical space.
@aral in physical space you do have multi tenant instances. You go to a party, you know the host. The other guests have a social obligation to the host to behave. You can also have reasonable trust to the host to have not invited nazis.
The same goes for the dance school, the university and whatnot.
Also online the friction is minimal so a lot of nazis can pile on you from everywhere. If you have to screen every one of your followers you might as well join an instance with *no* moderation.
We must find a way imo for the small web tenants to collaborate on creating safe spaces.
*edit: "with no moderation", not "with moderation"
Compañero Allende 