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CEO of Meta, which recently joined the newly founded #SocialWebFoundation, thinks that "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content".

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/25/24254042/mark-zuckerberg-creators-value-ai-meta

Meta, which recently joined the newly founded #SocialWebFoundation, "cut 21,000 jobs, including in trust and safety and customer service, over multiple rounds of layoffs", leading state and local officials "puzzled by what to expect from Facebook" around voting misinformation.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/meta-misinformation-problem-local-election-officials-worried-rcna172842

#news #TechNews #SocialMedia #meta #facebook 

@wendinoakland Social Web *is* the fediverse, you know?

https://socialwebfoundation.org/what-is-the-fediverse/

@stefan #SWF is also, absolutely, Meta.

@evan @stefan Yes, I do, and I’m honestly concerned. I fear that meta, with its extremely lenient moderation, tolerant of thinly veiled racism, sexism, otherism of the most profound kind, and tuned to magnifying algorithms, will potentially harm some of the people most precious to me in this noncommercial fediverse. Please try to understand my reservations…

@wendinoakland @evan "honestly concerned"

We shouldn't be.

When Threads was announced and people started to panic about Meta taking over, I wasn't too concerned. I thought, they're scared, they see the future, and they're not in it, so they must act.

I did start to get concerned after this new effort was announced and Meta was listed as a partner. It's one thing to have Meta start using technology that's free for everyone. It's a whole other story when they attempt to influence it.

@wendinoakland @evan

But really, we don't know yet what this new group will be able to do and achieve. ActivityPub is still overseen by W3C, as far as I know.

And when they can infiltrate that?

Well, the fediverse is vast. There'll always be servers and platforms free from the influence of corporate social media companies. We'll keep moving to stay ahead of it.

We'll be fine.

@stefan @evan All of my non-ai fingers & toes crossed We all need to stay alert, safe, together.

@stefan @wendinoakland I also disagree that Meta can be a part of this network without influencing it. I don't think that's how social systems work. But I hope that we can take good things from Meta and leave the bad things.

@stefan @wendinoakland one example is reply control. Users on Threads can say who can reply to their posts; users on Mastodon can't. There have been some proposals in this area over the years, and they haven't stuck yet. I think this is a great feature for user safety, if it can be balanced with freedom of expression (I like UIs that emphasize approved replies, but still allow access to other replies).

@stefan @wendinoakland In terms of people with high vulnerability, I absolutely recommend using the defederation feature and blocking early. It's better to play it safe. fedipact.online is a good resource for finding servers that block Threads.

@stefan @wendinoakland I also think that lowering the social cost of moving to a Free Software service is key to increasing usage. If you move to a Mastodon server and you have zero connections to your existing friends and family, you are probably going to churn out. Starting a whole new set of social connections from zero is a skill that only a minority of humans have.

@stefan @wendinoakland I want people who have Franklin Street Statement servers to be able to keep them for the long term.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Franklin_Street_Statement_on_Freedom_and_Network_Services

@wendinoakland @stefan are you sure? I don't think Threads has features to do that yet.

@evan @wendinoakland But that's all I have to say on this topic. I've said on a few occasions that my single-user server is the last social media website I'll sign up for, and I'll stand by that.

Meta trying to co-opt it and subvert it was to be expected. I still believe we as a community can resist that. It's just disappointing to see so many not willing to even try.

@stefan @wendinoakland you and I agree, mostly. I'm part of a cooperative instance, and I want our collective to thrive.

I also think it's great that companies have to engage with the Fediverse now. We have a powerful model and a powerful movement and they can't ignore us any more.

@stefan @wendinoakland also, I really hope this is *not* your last word on the topic. You have a valuable perspective that I really appreciate, and skill with communicating it. In particular, I think your writings on how new implementers should engage with the Fediverse are important.

@evan @wendinoakland Thank you, I appreciate you saying that. And that you're engaging with critics, as far as I can tell, in good faith.

Nothing is set in stone yet, and conversations like these are crucial, even if they're difficult, and can easily get emotional. I'm sure you understand that everyone speaking up does it out of love and care for something you've helped create.

@evan @wendinoakland But for me, the bottom line is, welcoming Meta is a huge mistake given their impact on the world, and disrespectful to all those who want the fediverse to succeed.

When Threads were announced, I was on the fence about whether to federate with them. I understood the benefits. With memories of their deeds slowly fading, I was willing to "see and wait".

@evan @wendinoakland I highly recommend reading this article, if you haven't yet. After putting everything in context, I just could not justify being anywhere near that company.

https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads

And just to add, --

"great that companies have to engage with the Fediverse"

Absolutely, this probably feels like a huge validation of your work, and those of everyone involved.

I just want it done on our community's terms.

@evan @wendinoakland One more "last thing" to add. It would be nearly impossible to make a list of companies everyone here would agree on to steer the fediverse the right way.

But Meta is in a whole other league, see this pair of polls:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110663712542031369
https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110663714020414745

(Note that this was conducted before Matt Mullenweg went off the rails, definitely would be interesting to re-run this.)

@evan @wendinoakland Right. And that means that you didn't feel that this behavior should exclude a company or an organization from participating in SWF?

To me, doing so would be on the same level as excluding a country from the Olympics, while allowing that country's athletes to compete as "neutrals".

I understand wanting everyone to have their say, but this looks like condoning their actions.

@stefan @wendinoakland I mean, did *you* read it?

I think she pretty clearly recapitulates my point, that coming to the Fediverse and starting a brand new social graph is something only a few people are going to do.

Changing the way social platforms work is of utmost urgency, for all the reasons Erin points out. I don't think keeping the Fediverse small and pure accomplishes that.

@evan @wendinoakland Just to clarify, I see "should we federate with Threads" and "should Meta have a direct influence on the fediverse" as two separate questions.

Given the ongoing issues of harassment mainly towards Black people, women, and independent creators, I am actually willing to consider starting to federate with Threads, if that's where enough folks end up. (If they enable federation, that is.)

That's a personal choice that will only affect me, as I run my own server.

@evan @wendinoakland Now, having Meta influence the direction of the fediverse, that's something that will affect all of us. And I am, personally, not willing to take a chance with that.

But like I said, any impact of that level would likely take a while to materialize, so we just have to wait and see.

(And, well, continue to oppose it.)

@stefan so, I think what you're saying is that you think some people and instances will federate, and that's kind of up to them, but influence of Meta on the Fediverse is a red line.

@stefan so, let's flip this idea around. With hundreds of millions of users each, Threads and Flipboard represent the vast majority of Fediverse users. The rest of us are a rounding error in that calculation.

Maintaining a connection to that big network is not guaranteed. There's no reason a group of ActivityPub implementers couldn't go to allowlist mode and just federate with the handful of services that make up the majority of user accounts on the network.

@anildash @evan @wendinoakland Right, and I am definitely more open to the idea of maybe some day federating with Threads, or even Bluesky, and don't judge people who already do that now.

But that shouldn't be tied to Meta being a member of SWF or any other group or organization that can influence ActivityPub.

Maybe when I said influence *fediverse*, I was being a bit too vague, but as I had a chance to explain myself more clearly, this is what the issue is for me.

@evan @wendinoakland SWF has its problems covered in other threads discussing it, and to be honest, I'm less concerned about those.

My problem is specifically with Meta being welcome to directly influence the fediverse.

@evan @wendinoakland I fully expect to see ad support on a protocol level, at some point, and perhaps that's even fine, depending on the implementation. If done right, this can help some servers keep up with the costs.

My concern is that that will not be where Meta's influence will end, and that's something that will take more than a year to fully reveal itself.

@stefan @wendinoakland this is such a good point. I think that ad-supported instances exist, and that is kind of between the users there and the service providers, as long as the users have the choice to leave and take their data and connections.

@stefan @wendinoakland putting ads into the streams that go *between* instances is a much bigger deal.

My instinct is that it just shouldn't happen. However, I could imagine some people on the Fediverse might want the choice to follow an ad-supported account.

@stefan @wendinoakland

If there are going to be ads on some streams, I'd want them clearly marked at the protocol level, so they can easily be filtered by the recipient, and treated differently than other content (for example, not put into search results or the fediverse feed).

I'd probably also want a flag on the account to show that it is ad-supported, so followers are informed before they follow.

@stefan @wendinoakland but honestly, I think there are more important things to work on.

@stefan@stefanbohacek.online @evan@cosocial.ca @wendinoakland@beige.party Meta by itself is not a significant enough threat, but the fact is that Mastodon is also in this foundation. These are some pretty big names with a large amount of funding and influence on the web. I am fearful that their influence will sway the conversations on what fedi needs overall. If we go to one of their missions https://socialwebfoundation.org/long-form-text-on-the-fediverse/ this is a pretty low priority in my opinion.

for this project, the Social Web Foundation will convene implementers and other stakeholders for a long-form text workshop to discuss data structures, interactions, and page formats.

@stefan@stefanbohacek.online @evan@cosocial.ca @wendinoakland@beige.party One of the things I love about this platform is how it has been able to escape the typical "content consumption" stereotype of large social media platforms. I felt isolated on reddit, and I didn't feel like there was a community I belonged in. I lurked, downloading posts, sharing them with other people off platform but never feeling comfortable enough to engage directly. A lot of current social media sites are exactly like that. It feels like you have to engage in a certain way to appease the algorithm (or whoever is in charge of the site if there is no algorithm). It can feel outright hostile (if you go against the flow you're left in isolation again). I hate the "shadowbans" of reddit and other places that hide your content from wider audiences without directly telling you. Tumblr had a similar thing, both shadow bans and community labels on posts that would limit their audience severely. A community label required every account that wants to view it to explicitly go into settings and enable that, something most people did not do. You'd notice a large cut off in traffic to a given post the second it was labeled.

I am very concerned about Meta and Automattic on this front because they're both known to do things like this. If they were to focus on "ways of engagement" by working together as part of a team to build a "diverse web" you can see how that might go south for people who don't fit in with that sort of engagement pattern. Sure, instance software developers can choose not to implement the features that SWF proposes, but they might isolate themselves from the rest of fedi. It requires a significant amount of work from all of us to stick up to that influence and fedi is not really unified on major issues like this otherwise we would have standardized things like report forwarding long ago. I don't know, I hope I am wrong and that this improves the fediverse but I am fearful that the same corporations we escaped to the fediverse from are going to turn the fediverse into their thing and we'll have to find a new place.

@evan@cosocial.ca @stefan@stefanbohacek.online @wendinoakland@beige.party Moderation tooling honestly, we're missing a lot of things on this platform.

@evan@cosocial.ca @stefan@stefanbohacek.online @wendinoakland@beige.party To come back to this, defederations are not defined by the standard. There's no standard behavior for what should be done when an instance defederates from another. Mastodon severs all the following/follower relations during a defed, misskey (and sharkey forks) do not, allowing for defederations to be reversible. It'd be nice to sit down and come up with what a defederation looks like and how it should be implemented. Personally I don't think that all defeds should sever the connection (so perhaps defining "Soft defed" would be a useful thing to do in this case)

@evan@cosocial.ca @stefan@stefanbohacek.online @wendinoakland@beige.party Some software allow for "allowlist" defederation too, which means that by default users are not allowed to federate unless they've explicitly been allowed. Only some software supports this (I believe akkoma? I'd have to look). It's my opinion that in order to began the building blocks of making an inclusive platform for everyone we need to look at how instances do defederation, suspension (deactivation and activation of actors) along with "silencing" which is the fedi equivalent of shadow bans. Things like markdown can come later (I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I hate the inconsistency between misskey's mfm and how mastodon, akkoma, pleroma has markdown) I'm just saying that out of the priorities you're gonna want to have the tools necessary to protect the network before some of the cosmetics.

@evan@cosocial.ca @stefan@stefanbohacek.online @wendinoakland@beige.party Honestly, how I would start off with this is by making a list of instance softwares. Looking at their strong suits. It’d be easy to go from there into a sort of “compatibility matrix" listing what other software has to offer. Consider some of the various moderation tooling in order to find "gaps". So, an example inconsistency I can point out here is how actor deactivations are handled. In misskey, I can deactivate an actor (it’s part of the suspension process) but I can reactivate it by unsuspension. The problem is that akkoma does not actually see that as a reactivation? It ignores it and the actor in question is still considered deactivated to the remote akkoma instance unless there’s manual intervention. Some of these things may not be possible to fully encompass within spec, but making a general guideline for software to follow is a step in the right direction. What kind of actions should someone starting off making instance software look into? There’s a shocking gap in coverage between what the specification defines and how instances are expected to behave.