hmm, well kids that’s access controls and networking for ya! use it to your own advantage. besides, i doubt any federettiquite has beem established. remember you can always start your own instance with your own friends and block everyone else out. thre’s lno reason not to.
Federation is just a protocol or a shared language so that other activitypub-federated services can act as a user on that instance. Most activitypub software include the ability to block instances for any particular reason. Further, most activitypub software include the ability to host private instances. Nothing about this is against how federation or the fediverse works. It could be considered a dick move, but I think that refers more to federetiquette than the fediverse itself.
Excalidraw is nice. Also, I want to throw in a mention for mermaid.live (mermaid js). A little less flexiblity but it’s nice. There’s also kroki.io which hosts a lot of these types of apps.
Thanks for this. I’ve checked out your site and you’ve given me a lot to think about here. I also just found this site today which might be helpful for folks like us. not lemmy related, but data broker related. https://databrokerswatch.org/
I’d like to understand your definition of tracking, in that case. What is your biggest concern regarding tracking when federating? Am I correct in assuming that you also don’t want to be tracked by other data brokers? I have these conversations because I want to try to steer these conversations in a productive direction. I don’t need to convince you, but it would be interesting to understand the tracking concerns people have with federating. I’m also entertaining the idea of creating a website which shows people what data they share on the fediverse so they can understand where the real risks are (e.g., we probably should reject instances which choosed to use targeted advertising, as it sends data not only to facebook but to data brokers, etc…)
There are good reasons for defederating from instances, such as harassment, hate, lax moderation policies, etc, as you mentioned. I’ve discussed that topic a lot too in other posts, mostly boiling down to “yeah it’s going to be really hard to say ‘yes’/‘no’ to what amounts to being one instance with millions of users”. Personally, I like the decentrialized nature of the internet, the fediverse and the freedom with which that brings. I don’t really have any interest in being on an instance which federates with meta properties, but I also don’t really take a strong stance for or against it. I personally see more conversation about defederating from threads and less concern with a route that some instance owners may be forced to head in: targeted advertising. After all, the tactics meta uses are the same tactics any web developer can use.
The only positive I’ll say about federating with Threads is that some people have a lot of friends who are stick in facebook, and this would be a way for people to stay connected. I think that’s probably why they’re moving towards that direction, especially if they are seeing those users migrate away to ActivityPub. But someone else will need to make that empassioned argument - and I’m sure there’ll be a non-zero number of instances who choose to federate, and users will decide which ones they want to engage with at what time in their life. Choice!
I’m certainly not going to make the argument that people should federate with any instance. You don’t like the instance, you server the connection. That ability was built in for a reason and should remain.
do you see instances that federeate with Threads as being part of Meta’s ecosystem?
That depends on what you mean by “Meta’s ecosystem”. If we consider Meta’s ecosystem to contain only the entities which directly help Meta earn money in exchange for tracking data, then the answer is no, for reasons I have explained.
If you consider “Meta’s ecosystem” to be “ActivityPub federated instances which do not block ActivityPub data from going to Meta” then the answer is yes, but that’s an arbitrary definition. How does meta profit from this? By showing more and different memes to its existing userbase? You could argue that by giving meta more content, the engaged users on meta’s properties will be more engaged and more likely to see an ad served by meta’s property to the user, leading to higher time on site. It’s a weak argument if your concern is being tracked by meta, as ActivityPub doesn’t share tracking information between servers.
I personally define “Meta’s ecosystem” to be meta’s properties and I suppose by extension any site which helps meta do its tracking: any site which shows facebook buttons served directly from facebook, therefor allowing tracking in older browsers. I consider ActivityPub to be a protocol not that far off from RSS or even Email, although RSS is a better comparison as it also happens over HTTP[S]. I define it this way because of my work as a web developer who has also built tracking systems similar to how Facebook’s tracking works, though not as sinister (I used 1st party cookies and pixels, similar to Google Analytics, prior to GA being free years ago). I’ve also worked for some websites that relied on ad views, and learned how programmatic works (tl;dr: each ad you see is an action for your eyeballs based on the data collected by hundreds of other agencies you may not even know of). I’ve also worked for startups where a large part of generating a high valuation for the company involved simply having contact information of hundreds of users as well as some basic information about their preferences. A startup like that would then have data to sell to a broker for programmatic ads.
Ultimately, websites (and instances) require money to stay up. Money comes from volunteers, donations or ad revenue / subscriptions. Programmatic ads can be included inside any website or app, and most importantly, an instance owner could choose to provide tracking data to facebook and other data brokers just to show advertisements, all while choosing to defederate from Meta’s fediverse properties either knowingly or unknowingly. It’s kind of like adding high-security locks on your doors and then leaving your windows open. If the end goal is to provide an instance which respects privacy of its users, that instance needs to choose to show ethical advertising (not programmatic, databroker-based ads which require sending the user’s data with each ad visit). Federating or defederating from meta’s properties won’t send any data to meta’s properties that every instance owner doesn’t already get as a part of ActivityPub federation.
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Oh shi