Everyone who cares about their instance and the fediverse as a whole needs to defederate and block their instances as soon as they pop up.
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The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
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Why is this a bad thing? With all the email analogies, it’s a good thing to have bigger corporations involved
Pretty much the entire bdsm community everywhere was outed on Facebook because folks carried cellphones to events and Facebook started suggesting friends to one another. Fifteen years ago privacy was sacrosanct and no one shared real life names unless they were very close. Now there is no point to trying to keep your identity secret and it sounds silly to introduce yourself as “Master Darkness” or whatever. I mean it sounded silly then, too, but everyone understood the necessity and it was situationally appropriate.
That is the danger of these large corporations. They aren’t looking to serve the broad community - they are looking to exploit our social graph for profit regardless of the destruction in their wake.
One issue with emails is that it’s actually very difficult to self host email servers now as most of the bigger servers would automatically block unknown servers due to spam
I doubt they would be willing to let people host and control their own versions of federated facebook, and I’m wondering then what would make it “decentralized” exactly. Are they just using decentralized as a buzz word because they are using ActivityPub?
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