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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 FWIW I think these screen shots have not been verified
@Chimaera Hence the “if”
@aral yes, my apologies. I can’t see how tens of millions of insta users taking over the fediverse can be stopped. Other than completely walling-off a server, interactions from second and third hand contacts will be inevitable.
βօӀìçҽ ժմ βօղƓօûէ @aral
And… once again… these are the problems of centralization even in our decentralized networks…
@aral Exactly this, truth is about truth, not about numbers...
@aral does anyone know where mastodon.world stands in all of this? I left .social just after joining last October and I’m not looking forward to moving again.
@aral this seems like Meta is going to try the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model to effectively kill Mastodon as an independent federated network.
@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 
@aral I had joined .world with the idea of having a well populated home feed :/
@Chimaera @aral
That's why I joined .social as well and because it was so big and was clearly struggling with the initial huge influx, I set up a monthly donation to them. It seems that was an error on my part. The problem is if someone moves to a different instance, how do you know the new one won't federate with Meta? I've put off moving due to energy, it's not something I can keep doing.
@LizEllisPhD @aral yes, I’m going to wait a bit to see exactly how this play out. I’m not sure if I mentioned but I left .social and moved to .world just after I joined in late October because of complaints from others of poor moderation and a lack of safety for marginalized people. Luckily I was able to figure out how to keep my followers but I lost whatever I had posted.
@Chimaera @aral
I mean, I mostly post shite, so a loss of posts is no big deal, it;s just finding the energy to do it. I looked at setting up an individual instance (I'm trying to get my HoD to set up an academic one for the department so figured it would be good practice) but my brain fog just screams at me so bad I stop. Someone needs to do a set-up-your-own-instance but for folks with an intellectual impairment, with pictures and maybe video.
@LizEllisPhD @aral I deal with chronic Lyme so I 100% hear you
That's the service https://masto.host provides: you pay them and they run your personal server. I have not tried it, but I'm intrigued. There may be other folks offering the same service.
I would recommend getting your own domain name rather than using their free myname.masto.host subdomains. Will make it easier to move elsewhere later if you need to (but not strictly necessary if it's too complicated).
@aral I'm running cleanup scripts on Friendica and Mastodon for years now to not grow too big. I was once the largest Friendica node out there and then reduced the (inactive) user count to below 1000 users.
Mastodon was an exemption with its large influx of new users where I grew to >25000 users.
In the past weeks 6.000 users were removed on nerdculture.de because they were not be used in the last 7 months.
But yes, Meta is a threat we must resist.
@ij Thank you 
@aral I think the trap I fell into, which caused me to join a large general purpose instance, was the thought process "I want to leave Twitter; I should find another Twitter like experience" without considering if I actually wanted another Twitter like experience.
I've got no actual complaints about this instance, it seems well run, but I think the general concept of the/a #Fediverse has more to offer than emulating the Twitter/Facebook/Reddit UX.
@aral How do I learn how large the instance I am on is? (not an expert)
@jplummer Yours apparently has ~160,000 accounts but not all of those will be active (You can search on https://instances.social/list#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users=)
@aral It seems there is some tension between “keep fedi small and distributed” (join a small instance, spread out, etc.) and “adopt fedi over monoplatforms” (join a big instance with lots to read and follow and where it is more straightforward to gain exposure, etc.)
@aral@mastodon.ar.al Apparently I've missed some news. What's this rumour of which you speak?
@BarrenPlanet Is the thread not showing up for you? Here’s the head of it: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110598855375585873
@aral What’s the risk of federating with Meta here? Meta becomes the largest instance then defederates all of the small instances and becomes like gmail?
@Wingy @aral That's definitely one of the concerns, the others are that any Facebook product will bring data collection and ads, because its their whole business model, and that Facebook is a known malicious actor, with content moderation that is barely existent, a platform that is full of Nazis, and an algorithm that has caused actual genocides.
@aral Yeah, it is about quality. The ongoing civil war in Russia is about the first time there are breaking news that I can follow on Fedi, and even then the depth of information is greater on Birdsite with its larger ecosystem of Ukraine and Russia watchers.
@aral If this is true, it’s my worst nightmare when it comes to social media. Let’s hope the truth comes out soon, so people can prepare themselves to migrate if or when necessary.
@alternative_be Exactly. If it comes to pass, we should do all we can to help people on those instances migrate to safer ones before defederating those instances.
@aral From what I've read so far Meta is trying to prep for a time in the near future when Twitter folds under its incompetent management, but to start their alt-Twitter silo they need some initial users. Having ActivityPub compatibility may provide that. It's the same sort of strategy as Slack, which afaik initially had IRC and XMPP compatibility, but then pulled up the drawbridge once they had critical mass.
So large instances federating with Zuck-Twitter will just be bait. It seems highly unlikely to me that he is in any way committed to ActivityPub or the open web.
This is exactly the risk faced by instances that are big enough to draw the attention of surveillance capitalists.
They are a weakness in the system, because they are such a ripe target for acquisition and abuse. That's always what happens when a player accumulates power. And that's not a technical issue - it's a policy problem.
For example, if there was an agreed policy that no instance should be bigger than 1000 members (or it gets defederated) that's wouldn't be an issue.
@chrisg Exactly.
Heck, it should be baked into the protocol.
I mean that’s what I’m doing with the Small Web. Only the instance size limit there is 1 because I’ve had enough of this bullshit.
@aral seems like a two-tiered strategy. Not just embrace-extend-extinguish, but also divide-and-conquer, creating an ad-free access to FB and Insta content that, backed my their money, can host millions, eventually holding critical mass of non-Meta fediverse. Then they will put up federation requirements that will force the rest to join or get defederated.
And recent decisions which led to big masto instances growing even further played right into their hands.
@marcelweiss @mspro is it time to get investigative on this?
Especially interested in your view, Marcel, on whether combining d&c, financial incentives with e-e-e would change your view on the situation, given your research into e-e-e.
@cmw @mspro @aral It's still just a rumor, albeit an interesting one. Would make sense because of spam alone.
Regarding e-e-e. I'm a bit baffled why people here think Meta desperately wants to take over a social network environment with less than 10 mio active users. Instagram alone has over 2 billion MAUs. Does anyone on here ever compare these numbers?
@marcelweiss @mspro @aral the larger the entity, the larger the spam risk. That's why a decentralized network of small entities is more resilient.
Active moderation and shared lists will be the immune system of such a network.