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@privacat @ploum @dangillmor I think you've put your thoughts well on this.

I do disagree, but that's mainly because I left Facebook. Which I did giving a full 6 month warning, with my email address and my mastodon handle.

When I first came on the Fediverse, the learning curve was steep. It's better now. My point of view is that I think it depends on what you aim for on this network. For quite a few people on here, blocking for safety has been learned the hard way.

@privacat @ploum @dangillmor It's why when I suggested to my family to try it, I found an instance and found some guides. Although that's at the individual level.

At Scale it's a lot harder to on-board.

But I think it will come down to individual choice, including weither folk stay on Mastodon or go elsewhere for their next social network.

For some of us this is like our 3 or 4 network. The first one you were on, always has the emotional punch of leaving.

@privacat @ploum I genuinely don't see the pact as gatekeeping, if it helps these are my thoughts about the fedipact and why I came to that conclusion.

https://onepict.com/consent-fediverse20230627.html

@onepict @ploum

Thanks for the response, and your thoughts. I will admit, I don't agree with a lot of it, but I do get where you're coming from. I think there's some degree of fractal complexity in these systems that many miss (I wrote about the problem of fractal complexity here: https://careylening.substack.com/p/test-post-thing).

Some disclosures: I (briefly) worked for Meta in 2018-2019, when they were trying to rehabilitate themselves post CA/pre-GDPR. I naively thought I could change some of the particularly odious bad behaviors and practices, and it only took me a few months to realize that this was about as effective as me trying to sprout wings and fly.

Part of the reason is that Meta isn't a monolith anymore; it's a messy, fragmented clown car of a system, a pile-on of various hacks, experiments, deprecated-but-not-yet-deprecated code, forgotten interconnections, and abandoned promo endeavors and efforts. Nobody at Meta knows what data Meta has (and I mean this very literally - they literally cannot comply with a DSAR effectively because they have _no_ clue about what their code is actually tracking, or at least that was the case in 2019).

It's the equivalent of assuming there's a single world order who controls the "System". This shit is so big that while there might be people who know more, nobody (or no single team) knows everything, or even most things. Assuming that conscious efforts to destroy the AP/Fedi are being made by some shadowy leadership group is ascribing WAY too much intelligence and foresight to a group of people who probably thought it would just be cool if they could get on this AP/fedi bandwagon and siphon away Twitter users.

And like, really, I think that's what the main end-goal is. To siphon away Twitter users by showing that Threads will be more like the social network people had on Twitter, back when everyone was on Twitter. FB knows it can't achieve that on its own, so they're going to coopt whatever system might give them an edge.

You hinted at this in a later comment, and I think it's the most realistic basis for any of the P92 efforts. Or, even more cynically: A few people at Meta thought they could get a promo from this.

@privacat @onepict :

"Meta isn't a monolith anymore; it's a messy, fragmented clown car of a system […] Nobody at Meta knows what data Meta has"

Everybody having worked in the industry knows perfectly well that this is the case for every single company bigger than 50 employees. Entropy always win.

And that’s why we should fight corporations: those are soulless robot that nobody control anymore (It’s not new, Steinbeck already told us about this in The Grapes of Wrath")

@ploum @onepict I mean, expand that to logical conclusions: What phone do you use? Was it created by a corporation? What brand of computer do you own? What car do you drive or bike do you own? What food do you buy, what news do you read ... I could go on.

If they're all soulless robots, why aren't you out there living off the land, instead of online? Why support any of them if they're all entities that "nobody control(s) anymore" ?

@privacat @onepict : that’s the very point why I use an #ungoogled phone, why I’m trying to be part of the #permacomputing community, why I’m arguing for #digitalminimalism, why I’m trying to shop as local as I can and to support small creators/local companies.

Your argument is a bit like the naive: "You feel the world is bad yet you live in the world, duh!"

Yet you argue than when we manage to create a small space without #Meta, we should welcome their invasion.

Do you see the contradiction?

@ploum @onepict When I see generalizations like "We should fight corporations" or "We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it" uncritically mentioned without any nuance, I respond with the same lack-of-nuance generalizations.

Asserting that it's all bad, or that only the right people should join (those that share 'the values behind' the Metaverse' (without any articulation about what those might be!) isn't any more helpful.

@privacat @onepict : we should fight abusive corporations. Yes. We should fight too big corporations. Yes. This is not a generalization, it is a widely documented problem studied by academia. It’s called "monopolies". You can read more about it from David Dayen or Cory Doctorow.

Is Meta doing more bad than good? I find it hard to not answer "yes". Is meta a systemic problem that should be fought. For most scholars, the answer is yes.

Those are the basic premises on which we seems to disagree

@privacat also, these fedi spaces are not public infrastructure. They are bigger and smaller communities that have some common values (even if they can't clearly describe them).

Meta is showing up to a house party with a few busloads of people. Some might be great folk. Some might be terrible. We know what Meta's moderation track record is…

How can anyone be surprised that the people running a small house party are not keen on letting a few buses of people in?

@ploum @onepict