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What do we think of the Fedipact?
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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One concern I have is I guess related to gatekeeping. The fediverse is open and connected. If people on "Threads" start learning more about the Fediverse and how you can follow people on other platforms, they will want to start connecting. If they find out you're on another platform and they know that they should be able to connect, you will end up in a weird conversation about how yes they use a platform that can connect with "Threads" but you can't connect, because the platform has decided to block Meta. "Why?" Oh because "Threads" isn't a real part of the Fediverse, yes the Fediverse is open and anyone can create an instance and they can all join together, but we have decided not to connect with Meta because we don't feel like it's really part of the Fediverse and we are worried that they will ruin the feel of it all.
The Fediverse is open and connected, and instances have the right to choose who they federate with, but I don't believe being a big company is necessarily a good reason not to federate. If the Fediverse gets big, I feel big companies running nodes are a necessary part.
I totally get that a big company creating a proprietary platform that connects seems to go against the spirit, but if we want our friends and family to use the Fediverse then I think it's a necessary evil.
This is of course just a point in time opinion. We have the luxury of watching what happens before it starts to affect us too bad.
By the way I appreciated the history lesson. I am familiar with the Microsoft Network, but it was more of a website with news etc when I got there. It's interesting to know how they started!
I'm really new to the Fediverse and this campaign, but if it doesn't already exist then I wonder if what's really needed is just a generally agreed code of conduct, rather than an outright and very specific banning of Meta or some other company people don't trust. As in, if you act within these stated boundaries then you can expect most others out there will be happy to federate with you, but if you don't then expect to be cut off without apology.
Maybe project92 from Meta already fails the test of what people are comfortable with, but is the test clearly written down somewhere? Is there some kind of organised body of admins to organise its management and evolution?
I guess there are multiple pieces here.
First is the ActivityPub protocol. This can be compared to the Email protocol (there are actually multiple, but I'll try to keep it simple). ActivityPub is not a website or a platform, but a way for servers to talk to each other to share social media type information. It seems fromthis wikipedia article that the standard is now published by W3C, who handle most of the commonly used standards for the web.
Then there is the site Mastodon. Mastodon is a twitter-like site, and it uses ActivityPub to allow one site to talk to another. Mastodon is open source, in which anyone with the necessary skills can contribute code. But the ultimate decider of what goes into the software is "Mastodon gGmbH", a non-profit from Germany.
Then we have Lemmy, which is a reddit-like site that also uses the ActivityPub protocol to allow one site to talk to another. Lemmy is also open source, but unlike Mastodon there is not an organisation behind it, just a small group of core developers. But because it is open source, if something were to happen (changes people didn't like, developers hit by bus, etc) then it is easy enough to copy the code and new developers can start working on it.
Then there's the facebook platform apparently called "Threads. This is proprietary, no one knows the code and it's not shared or open. Facebook have basically built their own independent platform, except for one little difference: it supports ActivityPub.
The question is, who writes this code of conduct? It's not really up to ActivityPub, they created a way for servers to talk, they aren't involved in content at all.
Lemmy could create a code of conduct. They can't force it on all Mastodon servers, because the code is open source so anyone can copy it and make their own service. But even if they could, what happens when a user from Mastodon starts commenting on a Lemmy post? If Mastodon isn't following the code of conduct, do they have to try to somehow block all Mastodon servers? How would you even do this, when anyone can stand up a new server at any time, and make small or large changes to the code at any time?
Ok, so maybe that's hard but it's easier with Facebook, with their big central server model. Who writes the code of conduct that Facebook has to follow? How do you get approval from the 100+ different platforms using the ActivityPub protocol spread across over 40,000 different servers?
Does facebook get a say in the code of conduct? After all, they will let their users follow people on other servers and vice versa. If they do get a say, won't they have massive sway? If they don't then how is it any different from some servers blocking them and others not?
The problem with the fediverse is the same thing that makes it what it is: It's open to anyone, and no one controls it.
Therefore I just don't believe you could identify who should write a code of conduct, and even if you could, you'd have to persuade 40,000 servers to join in. This at it's core is not much different from a petition to have servers block facebook.
If say Mastodon wrote a code of conduct, they might have the sway to get lots of servers to adopt it - but when facebook inevitably break it, they have very little power to do anything about it.
Sorry this is a bit of a rambly post, but the short answer is that I just don't think there is a logical organisation to write a code of conduct, and even if there were, they would have no power of enforcement so you'd have to work that out first.
Thanks and I don't pretend to have useful ideas. In my head I thinking of something along the lines of the Free Software Foundation producing the GPL, and happening to have the synergy with enough devs out there that lots of them (obviously not all) adopted it. Probably not as great a fit after your explanation, though.
Some organisation might try it, I wouldn't be surprised. But I would say there is not a cohesive view about what the Fediverse is for or what it should look like. It grew organically and no one is directing it in a particular direction.
Monopolising the network space for everyone's interactions was a progression of the MS-software-on-every-desktop philosophy, but they tried it too early. They probably also cared too much about where the money was going to come from, and maybe also had an incompatible sense of ethics compared with Zuckerberg's generation of executives.