"Framing Federation" from Adam Newbold

[matt]

Adam Newbold, founder of Neatnik LLC & omg.lol (omg.lol houses a Mastodon instance, social.lol, in which Adam is the admin), just released this essay on his blog all about how we should be viewing how federation over ActivityPub is handled.

Please read the full essay here, it's great.

The analogy of the Fediverse and Email has been used for a while when talking about servers/instances (I even used it in my ancient ramble about the platform), but using it to describe how we should think of "defederating" is kinda genius to me. Like I never thought of how an email service like Fastmail would NEVER block emails from Gmail coming in, it's an insanely destructive action to the email ecosystem. And it should be seen as destructive in the Fediverse ecosystem as well. Blocking an instance as big as Threads is ruining hundreds of thousands of connections from being made and it practically destroys that the open social web should be standing for.

Some Quotes I Liked:

The social web wants to be open. ActivityPub servers want to send messages to one another freely (this is literally what they’re designed to do; it’s the entire purpose of the software and the protocol, just like email). Yes, Meta is trash, but the overwhelming majority of Threads users are regular people just like you and me and they don’t harbor vile, hateful attitudes. They’re just using Threads because it’s easy and it’s available. And when we cut them off from their friends on other ActivityPub instances, we’re not helping anyone. We’re just making things worse: weakening the network, reducing its effectiveness, and preventing people from connecting with each other. Which is the entire point of a social network.

I completely understand the desire to lash out against Meta. But clicking the “Add domain block” button in Mastodon isn’t the form of social justice that anyone might think it is. It just drives a sad wedge between people and fractures the potential of this relatively young and hopeful network.

How many of the admins who block Threads because Meta is awful have also blocked all email from Gmail because Google is awful? My guess: not one. Some of them might even use Gmail every day and not even see the irony.

[paralleljalebi]

This is interesting and I had no idea Threads was a fediverse instance (is that the right terminology?)

[matt]

This is interesting and I had no idea Threads was a fediverse instance (is that the right terminology?)

yeah pretty much. they have opt-in support for connecting your Threads profile with ActivityPub.

[paralleljalebi]

First Meta Wwwwww

[matt]

First Meta Wwwwww

yeah that's what I thought when Threads came out too lol.

but Meta's recent policies are all but not great, which is what has been inspiring people wanting to block Threads on the fediverse again. (probably should've included this context)
https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-tr ... te-speech/