Fediverse

Maybe infinite growth doesn’t need to be the goal.

The core idea of the fediverse is the same as democracy - that nobody should control the whole. Both are similar enough to allow comparisons.

Threads in the Fediverse is like a powerful dictatorship trying to "deepen its bonds" with a small but democratic government. The dictatorship will eventually exploit the power asymmetry to control the democracy, direct or indirectly, effectively erasing it. In that situation, the best approach is to simply not play along the dictatorship. (Defederate Threads.)

Another threat to democracy is internal: the centralisation of control over the whole into a few hands. In the case of the Fediverse, this is the reliance on central systems (front-end software, back-end software, instances, discovery systems, etc.). I see what the author proposes as a "Universal Declaration on Fediverse Rights" as, potentially, a new mechanism enabling those central systems - who gets to decide what goes in that declaration?

So yes, I think that instances should defederate Threads and encourage other instances to do so. However, they should not do it too hard, to the point that you're effectively dictating what others should be doing.

An important detail is that the author falls into the fallacy of conflating epistemic and moral matters. This is specially explicit here:

Because without believing in the existence of a objective truth (which they don’t, because they attribute themselves to moral relativism),

That fallacy has a deep impact across the text because the author believes that people can eventually agree on moral grounds based on reason. Often they don't - because it depends on the moral premises that each adopt, and moral premises are not true/false matters to begin with.

the actual problem is that the Fediverse is internally shattered and cannot agree on anything, including basic moral rules and principles.

That is not a problem. That's a feature.

It might have been fake, but weren’t there already reports of Meta blocking links/tags in relation to pixelfed?

If it’s true, they’ve already proven to be a bad faith actor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.

At the end of the day, one side will be right. My moneys on the anti-threads side.

I don’t think it can but hear me out for a second. How about we just don’t grow? We’re not beholden to stock owners needing to see growth year over year. Can we just be happy with what we have?

Now we are trying to make a less obvious headlines to push pro meta propaganda, right?

We, the signees of the fedipact are not in fear. We know that meta has a horiffic track record of both human rights violations and data security violations.

Its actually the core reason why I decided to make a new community at [email protected]. Those who think that corporate greed and shareholder primacy are cancer in our society are very welcome.

Meta’s moral shortcomings are even more reasons to federate with them and try to win over users and pressure Meta to implement better digital rights as well.

"The terrorists moral shortcomings are even more reasons to negotiate with them and try to win them over."

Don't negotiate with terrorists.

Also the article sets up defederation from Meta as if it doesn't do anything. I don't think that's true though.

The typo in the title is really jarring for me. It's losing, with a single o 🥹

It can't. But that was never the intention. Soul was never the intention. The intention was reducing reliance on proprietary and cancerous platforms.

I mean there are a shitload of reasons to not federate with Threads, but I feel like “it will federate ads to your server” is kinda the only one I should need to mention.

We need some basic rules,

1. No single direction federation
2. Users own their content and can licence it as they feel fit

With these 2 it would be hard to fuck up

how can the Fediverse grow without loosing its soul in the process?

It can't? Rather obvious that the "soul" of a community is defined by it's members and the bigger the community the more mainstream this soul will become. Maybe the federation mechanic offers some solutions here, but that remains to be seen.

Many people like simplistic garbage. You can't convince them to like something better, as that creates demands on them to grow as a person, when they likely have other priorities in their lives that demand their attention more forcefully.

This is why McDonalds is the worlds most successful restaurant. Not because it is good, but because it is undemanding.

So, when people think we can pull users from the McDonalds crowd with superior quality, it just makes me laugh.

Are you sure you don't mean a Universal Declaration of Fediverse Independence from Reddit, Threads, and Twitter/X?