Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be? : kbinMeta

[–] Kaldo@kbin.social 78 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I've seen this article circulating and I think it's a really good cautionary tale. If meta arrives here in full force it's completely going to take over the fediverse, they are already splitting the community as it is.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Note that this is different subject from being anti-corporate. I don't think there's an issue if companies start booting their instances and creating communities for their games or content, whether its EA, Bioware, CDPR or something like pcgamer, LTT, gamersnexus, etc. They want the PR and visibility on a social network but their goal probably wouldn't be take over the AP, and could add some validity and get other bigger names to be active here. That is assuming we want growth at all.

[–] 50gp@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder if theres any way to pre emptively stop them from taking over activitypubs development and direction

[–] parrot-party@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

They can't do a hostile take over of ActivityPub. The trap is that they would come in with open arms and an army of developers. ActivityPub maintainers would at first welcome the help and guidance from such an experienced team. Then, once they have the community hooked, they spring the trap and start making changes that are actively hostile to small sites. The community flocks to the big site because everything works better there, and the dream is dead.

Now maybe it'll never happen, but it's hard to tell. Even if Facebook joined with the best intentions, that doesn't mean the project isn't going to be taken over by a power hungry manager later who could still activate the trap card.

[–] TechyShishy@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

Right, because that's what Embrace Extend Extinguish is.

[–] Ragnell@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why the big threat is Meta, because they are a tech company. I think any instances spun up by Silicon Valley should be blocked preemptively, but other corpora can have a probationary period.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Honestly, it Meta spun up a Mastodon site to host Meta employees and just have a corporate presence, the way they might have a Twitter account, that wouldn't be an issue at all.

The issue is that they're arriving as platform developers, not social participants. And that's their business.

We should be super suspicious of people showing up to sell the Fediverse, because you can't profit off of community. Community costs money, not generates it. To generate money, you need to exploit people, and exploitation is anti-social. Anti-community.

[–] okawari@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I say they can, this is kind of what we have seen with Chrome tbh.

Google came in, made an awesome browser got market majority and started just implementing things to the point where its hard to keep up and the various specification bodies kind of just have to ratify things that is already in the browser or become obsolete, afaik this happened with components such as the in browser DRM which by design makes it hard to implement.

I think this can come true as long as we let them insert themselves into the ecosystem. The difference here is that we have the option to keep our part of the fediverse pristine by not federating with these servers, even if we doom ourselves to obscurity by doing it.

[–] wagesj45@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

this is the closest someone has come to convincing me that this would be a big problem. i still happen to think that the smaller instances will be fine in the long run. big consolidated instances are inevitable because people like being where people are. look at twitter and facebook. i suspect the worst problem we'd have is people switching from "facebook" to "federated facebook".

now maybe meta will be able to fuck with the standards body that is responsible for the standard. that would be very bad. then i'd be on board. until they do that, i won't worry. i'm open to having my mind changed, but i've found most arguments to be unconvincing as they basically boil down to "but they're big!"

[–] Jo@readit.buzz 7 points 1 year ago

because people like being where people are

That's exactly the problem with mega-instances. From the link posted above:

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

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[–] Haily@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

I was originally in the let’s just sit back and see what happens camp, but this article completely changed my perspective. A very interesting read. I do, however, agree that companies creating their own instances to advertise their products can only be good for us in the longrun.

On a similar note, I was recently reading about Microsoft’s efforts to dominate the whole browser space in the 90s, and I think it’s a very good example of the worst kind of capitalism.

[–] shepherd@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@Kaldo Thank you for the link, that's exactly what prompted this thread!

I think it's just too hard to draw the line of "not rich enough to be a concern." Amazon instance is obviously bad. Pepsi? If they put their minds to it they could do something lol. Hasbro?? They're greedy enough for sure.

Or what if a company starts as a relatively minor player, but suddenly get big. Steam acquires the entire video game industry or something lmao. Then we still have the same problem, they're going to be motivated differently.

So I say we defederate all profit driven instances. They can still make magazines on our instances, if they can follow our rules. If they have trouble following our rules... Well, then I definitely don't want them in a position to affect the whole Fediverse lol.

[–] Zbradaraldjan@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Damn, this article's interesting. I never knew about either Google or Microsoft's actions on that matter. I suppose it's not very surprising anyway. "Don't be evil", LMAO

[–] kudzu@mstdn.social 6 points 1 year ago

It's really helpful to see a previous example of something like this happening. I was aware of many instances blocking the potential Meta instance but didn't really get the reason why. Now it makes sense.

[–] lunar_parking@kbin.social 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly think that social media services should exclusively be nonprofits and run off of a combination of very limited ads and/or donation drives à la Wikipedia. Profit motives destroy things like this, as we've seen time and time again.

[–] Monitor343@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree. I have been thinking the last few days how Kbin can sustainably keep the servers paid for long term. A non-profit, Wikipedia style arrangement is the only thing I keep coming back to that makes sense.

[–] lml@remy.city 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wikipedia is a good example. It is annoying when they ask for the $3 every year, but it's true that a small contribution like that across the many users can keep a free/libre project sustained. Things like Usenet used to be part of your ISP bill anyhow, so a small monthly/annual amount to your instance host makes sense to me. Of course, we pay ridiculous amounts to our ISPs without services like this nowadays, so it does hurt a little

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I made another comment about this previously and I really don't want to end up as the designated "don't donate to Wikipedia" user on the threadiverse, but here we are anyway. Before I continue, I will say I'm not personally involved and I'm not anti-Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I do think the Wikimedia Foundation is misleading Wikipedia visitors about its funding, or at least that it has in previous donation drives.

It's worth mentioning that "Wikipedia" is itself never asking for money. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation puts those donation drive banners on Wikipedia, and those banners misleadingly suggest that money will go mostly or entirely to Wikipedia (it won't) and that your donations are necessary for Wikipedia to continue running (they're not). The Wikimedia Foundation receives upwards of $150 million dollars a year, which is much more than the upkeep of Wikipedia, ⅔ of which is not from the individual small donors who respond to those banners.

Wikipedia's internal "newspaper", The Signpost, has a couple of pretty thorough articles on the controversy. The short version is that a) The Wikimedia Foundation receives millions in funding via corporate donations from tech giants like Google (more than enough to sustain Wikipedia on their own), while the income from banner ads represents about a third of their yearly finances, and b) they then spend the vast majority of that funding on things that aren't Wikipedia:

Total expenses were $146 million (an increase of $34 million, or 30.5%, over the year prior). Some key expenditure items:

Salaries and wages rose to $88 million (an increase of $20 million, or 30%, over the year prior).

Professional service expenses: $17 million.

Awards and grants: $15 million.

Other operating expenses: $12 million.

Internet hosting: $2.7 million.

(Fingers crossed that Markdown works.)

Before I'm accused of cherrypicking data, I'm literally quoting the Wikimedia Foundation's Consolidated Financial Statements for 2021-2022.

Some of those are a bit nebulous, but even if you're charitable (and we are talking donations!) you can lump in "professional service expenses", "other operating expenses" and "Internet hosting" together as "funding Wikipedia", for a total of $31.7 million, which is about 22% of what they receive in donations. For that matter, it's less than half of what they receive in "large" donations, before we even start factoring in donations from sympathetic Wikipedia visitors. Meanwhile, the Foundation spends $103 million on paying its own staff and giving awards and grants to other people or organizations.

Now, you can certainly make the case that individual donations allow the Wikimedia Foundation to remain independent from corporate or other influence, because they in theory could stop taking those large donations and continue operating Wikipedia, albeit they'd have to slash their staff salaries, grants and other expenses to do so, since, say it with me, the vast bulk of their money is not going toward Wikipedia's upkeep.

I want to be clear that I don't think any of this stuff is evil, just that it's misleading to suggest your donations go any more than a fraction toward the continued operation of Wikipedia. Wikipedia will be fine either way, but the WMF certainly appreciates your donations.

[–] lml@remy.city 2 points 1 year ago

Well said, thanks for this info! I was in the camp of thinking "of course the money goes to Wikipedia's upkeep" but I never examined it closely enough.

[–] lohrun@fediverse.boo 3 points 1 year ago

For now, I’m just paying for my instance out of my pocket because I wanna see this place grow. Maybe I will need donations to keep it going in the future once it reaches a certain size but I can’t imagine trying to ever profit off keeping this running. I think the real value in federated instances and content is going back to the ways of the early internet, the personal pet projects that motivate people. I’m also personally totally done with being advertised, scraped, and sold..I don’t want to ever do that to anyone else.

[–] shepherd@kbin.social 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems unlikely to me that corporate instances would ever actually federate in good faith.

They may appear to be compliant initially, but in the long term they just have different goals.

I'm not sure where exactly the line gets drawn, but at the far extreme, I say we treat money-making instances as bad actors. If they stand to gain profit from their actions, they need to be defederated to prevent the sabotaging or enshittification of the fediverse.

[+] Biscuit@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] shepherd@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

@Biscuit Very reasonable question!

I highly recommend this article, How to Kill a Decentralized Network (such as the Fediverse) by Ploum as a relevant factor in this discussion. Even if there's parts you disagree with, I think that's worth discussing too!

To grossly oversimplify the contents of that article, I think federating in bad faith could look like:

Joining the ActivityPub protocol, intending to drown the initial userbase with their own so that the fediverse begins catering to the needs of the majority aka their users.
Introducing subtle bugs that make certain instances function suboptimally, but putting the onus on minor developers to fix it because major portions of the user base comes from them.
Adding features to the ActivityPub protocol that benefit all users, but forces most instances to adopt their practices.
Creating their own version of the protocol "ActivityPub+". It's initially open source and well documented, but increasingly deviates from ActivityPub, until it's functionally closed source fully under their control. It's also mandatory to interact their instances.
Defederating everyone who doesn't fall in step, but that's okay because 99% of content is now on MetaPub anyways. This fractures the Fediverse into confused micro shards (or compliant loyalists).

[–] lml@remy.city 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a good breakdown, thanks! The bad thing is that I could see these issues happening even unintentionally, with the fact that we have a few large instances vs. many smaller ones. So far we seem to have everyone running the same code, straight from the repositories (at least functionality wise). For my own kbin instance though, I have technically changed things. I changed some code to make a custom logo appear nicely, I've added some padding here and there, etc. I have also thought about implementing an automatic job that clears posts tagged with 'nsfw' or other related things in the microblog feed.

I might implement that, and then submit it to the kbin devs if it works well. There's no guarantee that other admins/devs would do that as well. If they implement a feature that makes their community more popular, they would seem to have incentive to keep it private. And that's where stuff like Meta comes in. If they implement rigorous content filtering, I doubt that would make it into the actual AP protocol. It would be the differentiating factor between using their 'safe' instance, vs. going rugged on an independent instance.

They could say "we implement the ActivityPub protocol as specified" and they wouldn't be wrong. They would just have some extras added onto the top to make their experience more polished. Easy to do when you are a for-profit and have plenty of devs. They would just argue that those are the features that make their interface different, like kbin and lemmy are different.

The only way around it is for communities to agree that they will run the software as released, maybe with only cosmetic changes. Any improvements to functionality should be submitted to the devs so that the wider community can benefit.

[–] cacheson@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Kbin and Lemmy are licensed under the AGPL, so instance source code changes are required to be shared with those that connect to that instance (I assume that includes peer instances as well as users). Corpos can make their own proprietary instances, but they'll have to start from scratch and not just piggyback on top of our work.

[–] Melpomene@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

For example, federating with the intention of driving other instances out of existence by dominating the space.

[–] blazera@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

that's not an example, intentions dont matter if they cant act on them. How can they act in bad faith?

[–] Liontigerwings@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

draw users in with piles of money and way better exposure, then get everyone on board with your well ran service with good ui and 100% uptime. Play nice with everyone else, meanwhile gaining dominance on the fediverse. Get a very large userbase in comparison to everyone else. Now, once you gain that dominance, you basically control the fediverse. You can steer it anyway you want. You could even defederate with your userbase and enjoy your new found network built on the back of the community.

[–] Melpomene@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe true. What of a money-making instance that was a B Corp, or a non-profit (moneymaking but aligned to a purpose?) I think there might be space for something along those lines?

[–] shepherd@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Melpomene I'm concerned about the B-Corp getting big, but staying profit driven. Imagine if Steam had an instance. That seems... fine, I guess, for now. But then let's say Steam suddenly acquires the entire video game industry lol. That's definitely a problem. But what if they do it over.. 12 years? At what point are we supposed to realize we're frogs getting boiled?

And non-profits, yeah, you're probably right that they should be fine.

But okay, do you know MEC? They were initially Mountain Equipment Co-op, technically a non-profit. Now they're Mountain Equipment Company, a retail store, but most customers barely registered the difference. This type of thing concerns me lol.

I think B Corps and non-profits can be allowed to make magazines here, that's fine. They just need to follow our rules. They won't like it, but no risk of Fediverse collapse ever, and honestly it's probably best if we get to hold them accountable this way.

[–] Melpomene@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

A fair point re priorities shifting, for sure. Though we'd run into the same problem if a super popular instance decided to sell its instance to, say, Google. There's nothing stopping that from happening, either. Bad actors are going to act bad; we just need to figure out how to mitigate their impact.

I have a fair bit of skepticism re nonprofits too. But beyond defederation, there's not much we can do to stop anyone (including Meta) from operating in this space.

[–] FfaerieOxide@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago

I already deleted a mastodon account over the instance admin's "wait and see" position.

Strongly and preemptively shunning meta is the course of action I view as the correct one, most likely to preserve what the fediverse is and tries to be.

[–] rosatherad@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago

The safest and most effective way to prevent Meta from destroying ActivityPub is to never give them so much as an inch. They WILL embrace, extend, extinguish if given the chance. Defederate from ALL Meta-owned instances. Be vocal about it. Tell other instances to do the same.

[–] codybrumfield@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don’t think there should be blind hostility but it should be clear that any hint of embrace, extend, extinguish will result in hostile actions like defederation. I also don’t think targeted ad tech companies share the goals of the Fediverse. I wouldn’t be bothered if instances had sponsors (as in, “/Kbin is made possible by support from Cloudflare”) like all non-profit media. But any sort of targeted ads based on user activity/data should be ruled out as a way to fund the metaverse.

[–] livus@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think we have already seen hints of "embrace, extend, extinguish" with the confidential meeting they invited the Fosstodon dev to.

[–] shepherd@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

@codybrumfield Well, we already have Meta's off-the-record invitation. I'd consider that to be a hint of shenanigans!

[–] Kierunkowy74@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

kbin.social is in particular situation, as it is the only top 15 server by monthly users, which is not Mastodon. The only Fediverse instances bigger than kbin.social, are:

mastodon.social
pawoo.net (Japanese, Sujitech)
(a lolicon server)
(two fake and one sus Russian instances).

Every other Fediverse server has less monthly users.

It tempts to try federation with Meta, mainly to try Threads' handling of the real threading app.
Meta is going to embrace ActivityPub with Threads by Instagram. Are we (free Fediverse users, creators, programmers, etc.) able to extend, and extinguish Meta's app?
Different Fedi software support articles, threading, formatting, fancy formatting (Misskey-Flavoured Markdown), video, events. I doubt, that new Facebook's app would support all of these at once.

[–] resurrexia@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

@Kierunkowy74

@shepherd A warning about Pawoo: it is FAR TOO EASY to accidentally see lolicon hentai art there right now, despite the admins trying to do something about CP (https://pawoo.net/web/statuses/110195807808920534). The legality and morality of lolicon hentai vs real human CP is another thing but at the moment that shit is out there in the open. Also, they don't allow you to search for text within posts, so you're limited to the global feed where you can encounter the aformentioned, or you have to specifically know who you want to follow and curate from there.

[–] Melpomene@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Kbin.social need not be anti-corporation, but setting standards that fellow federated instances must abide by / putting into place a "collective treaty of federation" or some such that sets the terms of federating with kbin.social (and other signatory instances) would be exceedingly wise. In theory, I have no problem seeing commercial entities as part of the fediverse. In practice, though, I'd want to see strong protections in place to prevent them from turning the fediverse into "Social Network Inc, but hosted on everyone else's dime.

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[–] Guadin@k.fe.derate.me 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It can go all kind of ways. But no matter whether they are blocked or not, they will build their own platform and add 'value' to it. And with 'value' I mean something most people like to use and what makes people feel like they need to be on that platform.

Maybe it will federate with the rest, maybe they're just looking at how they can couple facebook, instagram and whatsapp together through federation. And maybe all three will enter fediverse and you can federate with them. Of course while missing some 'key' features of those platforms. Or they just want to scrape the platform and build on that. Who knows what META will do and how they will do it. They want to be relevant and make money by selling data.

[–] asjmcguire@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

This is actually an entirely possible scenario - given the EU's digital markets act that kicks in next year, this would be a quick and easy way for Meta to be compliant - they can say they are using an open standard, which fully complies with the requirements of the EU act.

/kbin meta