how to block meta from mastodon

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Only proven way to destroy decentralized, free, open source solutions.

First stage embrace might not even be malicious, but with corporations it will eventually lead to someone thinking: how can we monetize our position. It is just nature how business works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

It's worth pointing out that the wiki article lists several examples of Microsoft using this approach but I wouldn't class many of them as successful.
- Not only was it not very successful, it's an old outdated Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s and was targeted at closed source competitors and freeware, not open source software where you can just fork out a separate version.
  By all means block Meta instances if you want, but they have 3 billion users, they definitely don't give a shit about a "competitor" with a few hundred thousand users. If simply the presence of a corporation in the Fediverse is enough to destroy it, then it wasn't going to last long anyways. It's embarassing that "embrace, extend, extinguish" caught on around here just because it's a catchy alliteration.
It looks like articles today are saying that Meta is delaying integrating ActivityPub at launch.
That said, I'm not seeing how we get to the last E, extinguish. By its very nature, ActivityPub is decentralized to avoid total control. So even if Meta embraces the technology and wants to monetize it (because capitalism, of course), extending ActivityPub would (hypothetically) be open source - or they would fork it, diverging and making their version closed, and otherwise not function in full with other ActivityPub instances (like with kbin, Lemmy, and Mastodon). Without buying the platform from the developers in full, I don't see how ActivityPub or the greater Fediverse dies. And I could just be missing something obvious, so if you can explain how we get there, I would really like to hear and understand.
I guess the only way I could see it is if Threads got so popular that people literally stopped using the other apps - but I also don't see that happening, because anyone already using stuff like Mastodon are using it because Twitter, Facebook, etc, suck ass and they've moved away from sites like that.
EDIT: Thanks to the one person that actually replied, I saw I was on the right track at the end, but failed to see the obvious (as I assumed).
- It’s hard to predict but the extinguish part would come from bigger non-Threads instances implementing compatibility with Thread-only extensions (in the interest of their users, or for money) and fragmenting the community. Threads then becomes the defacto ActivityPub standard. Maybe some instances stay true to the standard but with extremely reduced communities because now they can’t see what other instances are publishing. So now you have to decide between your ideals and your social network. At best, you’re back to square 0.

Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you'll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.

Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.

Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.

I don't want to interact with anyone on Threads. It is new and it is Facebook.
- Was about to say just that. I'll love to reject people that only follows big corpos.
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
You're acting like there's only two situations: The entire Fediverse defederates with them, or the entire Fediverse federates with them. That's not the case.
I, personally, do not want to interact with anyone using Threads, because Meta has a proven history of poor moderation and of manipulating the narrative for political gain on Facebook and I see no reason to think they won't do the same here. I am not the only one who holds this opinion. Those of us who feel this way can use instances that defederate with them, and have our way.
If you want to interact with them, you can maintain an account on an instance that does federate with them. You do not need to have a Threads account, nor does anyone else.
Strongly disagree here, better to cast them down now while the chance is there. No mercy or quarter provided to Meta considering their track record.
If anyone is foolish enough to go there, let them, but do not drag us towards them.
Meta joining the fediverse is like Raytheon joining anti-war protests. They are not there for sincere participation.
The idea is that at first threads.net will seem "normal", like all the other fediverses
Then they start adding features that either break against other servers, or straight up aren't supported, making threads.net seem more enticing just because all the neat features aren't on the other sites.
Think how Internet Explorer killed Netscape with all the Page Load errors caused by ActiveX, yet everyone wanted ActiveX sites.
Once they've walked through the path of least resistance and grabbed the bulk of the traffic, they just defederate from everyone.
- Yep - best option is to defederate them well before they gain traction & start creating problem by not contributing back to the protocol in a way that benefits everyone.
  I think after the community got burned by Microsoft & then google we’re finally learning.
- Couldn’t any instance or app do this already? Like #peertube does videos in a way that isn’t necessarily fully federated with #mastodon. We get partial functionality everywhere and some places will have some extra things. If it is popular enough, then add it to the standard and let everyone who wants it add the functionality.
People are concerned about Facebook/Meta trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ActivityPub - if I've understood correctly.
- People keep saying EEE as if that's a point in and of itself without really explaining how in this instance

@downpunxx

This is Microsoft's playbook, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,extend,andextinguish, it was use by Google to kill off XMPP - https://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2013/05/did-google-really-kill-off-all-xmppjabber-support-in-google-hangouts-it-still-seems-to-partially-work.html, now it will be used by Facebook to try to kill the Fediverse.

Why is this not more widely talked about? Please share this.

So we're all pro federation and decentralization, until we aren't... I think this is a very preemptive and paranoid measure, but thankfully it will work out just as the technology was built for, some will block, some wont, everyone will make their choice, and be happy in their corner of the internet.

Ever heard of Mastodon blocklists? I mean defederation has been happening for a while.
But I think that's fine. Instances should have every right to block instances that they disagree with.

My first reaction is this sounds like a great way to onboard more folks into the fediverse - but is this a perhaps a paradox of intolerance? Does Meta as a corporate entity have a natural intolerance to the freeness and openness of the fediverse, and if so, does it need to be violently rejected?

I don't understand why this is even a question. Is the tragedy of the commons not taught in american education? Is Land Clearance(one example of many linked) and Enclosure not taught? (Serious question open to anyone, I do not know what history is taught outside major european countries)
This is essential basic history to understand how land developed from being a collectively worked upon thing, decentralised, owned by everybody that worked on it, into something that was owned by a tiny tiny number of people so that they could exploit it to the maximum degree.
Decentralisation is the creation of a commons. The goal of corporations is centralisation of power and monopoly. They are at complete polar opposites in goals. The entire point of the fediverse in the first place is to destroy the centralised power of web corporations who took what was originally a digital commons populated by thousands of sites and communities and through a form of digital enclosure turned it into a space controlled by a handful of companies.
Learn history other than the popular military shit folks. It is essential in analysing what affects you.
- The whole point of the tradgedy of the commons is that publically owned finite resources don't work. You've completely misunderstood the point. If you're following that logic then centralization, ownership, and control is the only answer.
  Of course none of that applies, because what is the finite resource here? Both Meta and the fediverse can co-exist without destroying each other for want of servers or network bandwidth. The only real finite resource here is human attention - in which case federating with meta should be a good thing. This is because it increases the amount of content available on both platforms with the less popular platform benefiting the most.
- As a product of American eduation, I can say resolutely that no, that was absolutely not taught.
  Of course, this is partially because American education sucks and partially because we never HAD common land here: everything was privately owned, after it was stolen from the people who already lived here, and then most of it had people who had no say in the matter enslaved to work on it for the people who stole the land.
  Of course, this is ALSO not really taught, because it'd make people feel sad and make the US look kinda bad, so it's always talked about but you get like, a week of coverage on both subjects, at most.

Spontaneous idea of how to use copyright law for keeping Meta out of the Fediverse (more for fun):

Introduction: Parts of the Fediverse, including Mastodon, are software licensed under the APGL license. This license is a great choice because it forces the ones running the software to grant users access to the source code. GPL for example would allow to run proprietary services based on GPL code. The AGPL does not. Companies like Meta and Google will likely not use AGPL code because it might force them to also publish their proprietary systems behind the scenes. However, this does not help much for keeping the Fediverse save. They simply implement their own software which will not be open source.

Therefore we may need another approach. Defederating is the simplest and in my opinion currently the best. It's easy and keeps people in control.

However, there could be some 'automatic' approach using copyright law. It's a hack which allows to use existing law to regulate the way instances can federate.:

instances would Federate only if the other side can provide a certain piece of information called X
X is protected by copyright law, therefore by default, instances are not allowed to provide X
However, X is released under a license which for permits to copy and distribute X under certain conditions
The conditions allow to tune who can legally federate
Conditions could be
- The server software must be AGPL licensed
- The instance must not be owned by a company with a certain amount of annual revenue

Open question is, who owns the copyright of X?

Please: All read this piece about how "Embrace, extend and destroy" can destroy a federated network. It happened before and they certainly will try to do it with the fediverse.

Big corpos don't want to take it over, they want it gone.

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

Same reason I am highly critical of Jack Dorsey's BlueSky and its attempt at rolling out a separate protocol. The last thing we need is for the Fediverse to be fragmented into a dozen protocols that do things ever-so-slightly differently and prevent network convergence.

If Meta is running a fediverse instance, they're doing it for money. Sure, I might be able to block Meta-sourced content from reaching me, but that doesn't prevent me-sourced content from reaching Meta - where they can monetize it.

Show me how to do that, and I'm on it like white on rice.

This is exactly my concern, I don't want my online activity to become another revenue stream for meta. If they can put ads next to our posts then we're back to working for free for the billionaires.

Meta should stay away from fediverse!

Yeah, not a fan of the ominous shadow threads™️ casts. I don't trust them not to flood the fediverse with assorted toxic garbage to push people back towards their walled garden platforms.
The fediverse offers something radical - a new shot at genuine self determination and a socialised, self-governing internet. That shit spells B-A-D N-E-W-S for incumbent platforms (imo) and they're bad actors in general; they wouldn't think twice about smothering anything that threatens their short/long term profits. Who'se going to stop them?
Might be a little bit overly risk concious but goddamn. If I were them, I'd be trying to kill alternative ecosystems before they grew - especially if mine (metas) is both trash to use, and be used by.
- Even worse, the Threads app is a privacy nightmare
  I bet meta really wants to keep track of people in fediverse

Bear in mind that this blocks you from seeing Threads posts on your profile. Unless you private your profile, this changes nothing as far as what they're able to see/pull from your account. Their official documentation states that the block only prevents users from seeing or retrieving content from those servers. You'd probably have to be performing some DNS-level filtering on incoming requests or web firewalling from the host level to prevent their incoming requests.

Can't you get banned from Threads? What happens when someone posts content on a Fediverse server that isn't supposed to be allowed on Threads? Porn, for example.
- I assume so, yeah. That pins on Meta's moderation doing its job. I'm talking the other direction, though - Threads/Meta scraping your data from your Mastodon account.

I just won't be apart of any instance that chooses to be federated with Meta. There are many people like me, and I hope kbin and most lemmy instance owners are aware of this.

i'll join the voices saying this is bad for the fediverse, and bad for users in general. there are LOTS of normie users who are joining threads who will be shut off from learning about all the cool other servers if everyone blocks them. this will mean users who want to interact with them need to sign up on Threads, which is what we don't want.

what we want is that users on Threads see other servers, learn that they're better, and migrate over.

don't block Threads, show them how much better we are.

Yup this is dumb and misguided
You're missing the bigger picture. If threads is federating with the fediverse, then that means Zuck is downloading and indexing a copy of everyone else's posts OUTSIDE of threads.
- Why can't Meta (or any other shady company/ organization) do that now anyway. Just set up an innocent looking server, populate it with a small number of accounts to make it look legitimate, federate and start sucking in data. Do you really think every single federated server is run by people with hearts of gold and pure intentions? Your shit is already getting harvested, there's no stopping that. They don't need Threads if all they want is to index posts.
  Meta sucks, I get it, but I think a lot of the fear Threads is generating is way overblown.