Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 24

It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the future arrival of Meta’s new platform P92/Threads the main subject of heated discussion. People have strong feelings about this, with lots of discourse on the feeds. To get a better understanding of it all, take a closer look at what has been happening.

Events

• Between June 12th and June 15th: Meta employees have been meeting with admins of large Mastodon servers, including at least Eugen Rochko (Mastodon CEO, admin of mastodon.social and mastodon.online) and Byron Miller (admin of universeodon.com). This meeting was under NDA, and seems to have mainly centered around discussing the app P92.
• June 15th: information about the meeting, and the signing of an NDA, starts to spread around the feeds.
• June 18th: @vantablack starts the fedipact, a place where admins can sign that indicate that their server will not federate with Meta’s servers.
• June 18th: Byron Miller’s meeting with Meta contributes to mastodon.art announcing they will defederate from universeodon.com in a week’s time. Soon after, @stux, admin of mstdn.social instantly defederates from mastodon.art, but later in the day removes that block again and apologizes.
• June 23rd: @kev, admin of fosstodon.org shows an email where admins of Mastodon servers get invited to a roundtable meeting with Meta, as well as his response declining the meeting.
• June 23rd: Alex Heath reports for The Verge on the issue. He reports that “Meta plans to introduce this phase [ActivityPub support] about three months after the initial release.”
• June 27th: An off-the-record roundtable meeting between Meta and Mastodon server admins is planned.

Understand the discourse

Understandably, people have lots of different feelings and thoughts about Meta and the fediverse, and the discourse and conversation around this has filled the feeds last week. The conversations can be roughly separated into five different topics. When I say people, I mean subsects of people on the fediverse of unspecified size.

• About Meta, and the ethics of the company. People are on the fediverse as a way to not be on social networks that are owned by Big Tech. They distrust these companies, and disagree with the ethics of how companies like Meta run social networks. One case that was commonly cited is Facebook’s involvement in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. This has crossed a red line for a group of people where they do not want to interact with social networks that involve Meta in any way. The fedipact is an example of this, stating ‘their long track record of pure evil’ as one of the reasons for not federating.
• About ActivityPub the protocol. Conversations around this centre around the idea that ActivityPub is an open protocol, and the inherent tension in trying to ward off other actors from using a protocol that is supposed to be openly accessible. Daring Fireball’s blog post by John Gruber is an example of this, as well as this response by Ian Betteridge that freedom of associating is what defines Mastodon, not the underlying protocol.
• About Meta as an adversary. People see Meta as a untrustworthy actor that is trying to either harm or extinguish the fediverse in order to themselves profit by being the dominant player in this space. This is one of the most hotly debated questions on the feeds, where people strongly disagree with each other. They agree about the goal, (defend against facebook), but disagree about the tactic. For some, this means trying to federate with Meta, in order to draw users from Meta towards the fediverse. For others, this means not federating from Meta to create a space that cannot be influenced. A large part of this discussion centres around whether Meta is deploying an ‘Embrace-Extend-Extinguish’ strategy, historical perspectives on earlier corporate influences on open protocols, such as XMPP, and the best strategy to deal with Meta.
• About the responsibilities of a fediverse server admin. Signing an NDA with Meta came as part of the requirement of holding a meeting with Meta. People felt large trepidation of admins signing such an NDA with Meta. Arguments center around potential liabilities, as well as it going against the culture of openness, as the admins by definition now cannot share information with the community. People felt that this created a rift within the community. Conversations around this have turned vicious at multiple points, to the point of admins getting death threats for signing an NDA.
• About the fediverse as a community. Other people approached the discussion on a more personal level, where the fediverse is a social network where they can feel safe, because they do not feel safe on large corporate social networks. This image, captioned: “Meta: MAY I JOIN YOU?” by @davidrevoy captures the feeling well:

Conversations got heated, as people have strong and passionate feelings about this. These strong feelings also took a more negative turn, with people receiving abuse and death threats over simple things as not instantly wanting to defederate from Meta. Conversations were not always productive either, since people did not always take into account that they were having separate conversations. Yelling at someone that Meta is an unethical company is not helpful for the conversation when someone already agrees with this statement, but has a different tactical approach to the same conclusion. Neither is it sensitive to tell someone that ActivityPub is an open protocol, and you should thus have an open approach to Meta, when someone is grieving and hurting from the abuse they have experienced before on Meta’s other platforms.

Overall, the conversation is far from over, and seems it will continue in the near future.

The links

• Lemmy.link is using Lemmy as an RSS aggregator.
• WeDistribute is back! WeDistribute is a blog dedicated to dedicated to Free Software, decentralized communication technologies, and sustainability. It has long been active on the fediverse, but stopped due to personal reasons. It is now back, and open for contributions. I’ll be involved in the blog as well.
• The Long Effort to Bring Groups to the Fediverse, is one of the first new blogs by WeDistribute, giving a 15 year history of Groups on the fediverse.
• The University of Warwick held a Mastodon Research Symposium. Here’s a short summary by Robert W. Gehl, and here his presentation.
• The threadiverse space is continueing to undergo rapid development. Here is a list with all apps that are currently available or in development, listing currently over 15.
• A State of the Forge Federation for 2023, which gives an overview of how software forges (alternatives to Github, such as Codeberg) are working on federation via ActivityPub.
• A third quarterly update on the #twittermigration by @tchambers, with insightful statistics.
• Bovine is a modular ActivityPub server in Python, which has now evolved to the point that it is possible to build algorithmic feeds with like, similar to Bluesky’s Whats Hot. Here’s a tutorial on how to get started.
• A Kbin server update, on how the server managed to not blow up during the massive inflow of users.
• Lemmy has seen a huge number of spam signups on new servers, making the available statistics fairly unreliable, to the point that the threadcount bot (tracking new users) has been temporarily disabled. Here is an estimate that indicates a total number of users around 200k at the beginning of this week. Talking about statistics: Kbin now has a higher number of active users than Lemmy.
• A blog post on how to build better fediverse post embeddings on WordPress.
• How to submit your Mastodon post to get featured on Techmeme.
• The server veganism.social has replaced their ´Local´ Mastodon timeline with a ´vegan´ timeline. It features everyone with the #vegan in their profile. This is a new and interesting take on providing discoverability that I´ve not seen before.
• A blog post with an update on Radio Free Fedi, and how the music community on fedi is evolving.
• PeerTube released an update that makes it easier for low-power and cheap servers to run PeerTube.
• A fediverse game jam.
• Audio software Funkwhale is looking for someone to help with communications.

Upcoming events

• Fastly is hosting a webinar on how to mitigate DDOS in the fediverse on June 28th. Fastly also reported working with Kbin during the sudden inflow of users.
• PublicSpaces is a conference about building a better collective internet, on June 27th and 28th in Amsterdam, with multiple sessions about the fediverse. I´ll be there on the 28th, so if you´re also there, drop by to say hi!