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How will we keep Meta out of the fediverse?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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The protocols and software are all free and open source. You can't stop a company from running a Lemmy or Mastodon instance any more than you could stop an individual from doing so.
The nice thing is that the system allows for free choice. Your favorite instance isn't forced to federate with a hypothetical Meta instance, and and even if it does you can choose which communities to subscribe to or avoid. Who cares if Meta runs an instance, or a hundred instances? You can simply choose not to use them.
This "anyone is free to join any instance, you can just avoid what you don't like" kind of thinking is perfectly reasonable in theory, but I think what OP wants to know is if this also holds up in practice. You could "defederate" Google and Microsoft by blocking emails from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but the reality is that the majority of people you will need to contact use those addresses. In most cases, your school/workplace will even make you use them for your organizational email. Yes, it is possible to avoid these companies and choose alternatives, but you'll be isolating yourself from the majority of the network.
The question is not if it will be possible to use the future corporate-owned Fediverse without Meta (of course it will), but if it will be feasible for the majority of users.
My bigger worry is that they'll try and take control of the fediverse on a larger scale. Even if all of their users join the fediverse and it becomes less convenient to be defederated from the larger corporate instances you can still have accounts on smaller instances or your own and you'll be able to completely block all the corporate instances. But what if they strike a deal with activitypub? From my knowledge they're the backend of the entire fediverse. If they're able to do what they want with the fediverse as a whole then where do we go? I think that the developers of activitypub would be against that but meta can spend as much as they want to take control of this and I don't know the developers personally so I can't be sure if they'd pass on that money. I might be worrying a bit too much but big tech has a long history of taking stuff over like this.; social media and e-mail are both great examples of that.
ActivityPub is not a company or entity that can strike deals
BRB I'm off to to strike a deal with HTTP
Good to know. Not the most knowledgeable with tech.
You can think of it like HTTPS. It's just rules for computers to talk to each other. If your computer follows those rules, it can talk to the other computers that adhere to those rules. These rules are necessary because otherwise the internet is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, you need rules to tell computers which 1s and 0s to send, and rules to tell computers what those 1s and 0s mean.
The World Wide Web Consortium are developing this set of rules, just as they've developed many other rules. They're a non-profit organisation just kinda trying to make the web a better place.