There has been a lot of chatter about the decision of some instances on Mastodon to pre-emptively block Meta's purported new ActivityPub-compatible service:
It’s a weird own goal for various Mastodon admins who are running a decentralized social network based on interoperable protocols to pledge that they won’t interoperate with services from existing social networks if built on the same open protocols.
It’s not even the hypocrisy, it’s just dumb and undermines the entire point of interoperable protocols.
The Mastodon server admins who are preemptively promising to defederate Threads are effectively guaranteeing that users on their instances will be isolated from a potential majority of users on the overall platform.
I’ll close this post with the same question I did yesterday: Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness? I think openness is the answer. Others clearly disagree.
I cited email as an example yesterday of big companies running big instances and not extinguishing the openness that made the platform great. Podcasting is maybe an even better example. I don’t take podcasting’s future for granted, but 20 years in, it’s still thriving as an open medium, despite the presence of titanic players like Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and Spotify.
The anti-Meta #Fedipact can only achieve one thing: make sure that #ActivityPub loses to the Bluesky protocol. Is that what people here want?
I think this criticism misses the point, perhaps because some of the authors simply don't understand what Mastodon is and what its priorities are.
Federation, not an open protocol, is what defines Mastodon
Dare and Tristan's focus is on ActivityPub and its openness. But ActivityPub ≠ Mastodon, and services can adopt an open protocol without committing to use it to connect to anyone and everyone on the planet using the same protocol. Gab uses ActivityPub (and no one connects to Gab), and a quick view of the average block list for any instance should be enough to show that interoperability is limited by social norms as well as technical ones. Tristan's point is doubly nonsensical seeing as BlueSky's AT protocol isn't even out yet, so Meta couldn't use it even if it wanted to.
What defines Mastodon is not the use of a protocol. The protocol is just an enabler. Instead, Mastodon is defined by allowing communities (instances) freedom of association. It is the ability of communities to choose not to federate with anyone else which gives Mastodon its strength.
Mastodon is not a social network, which is where I think John and Dare start from. It's a set of communities which may, or may not, choose to connect to each other. Those relationships are based on shared values and trust: my instance connects to yours because I trust you to moderate effectively, not allow spam, or whatever other ground rules we can agree on. Some communities choose to apply this loosely, and some more strictly (some communities, for example, won't federate with others who don't have the same expectations around moderation for everyone they federate with).
For some marginal communities the freedom of association which Mastodon is based on is the difference between having a space that's safe for them to express themselves and not having a space at all. It's not about having the biggest possible audience – it's about being able to share in a semi-public way with other trusted communities.
Freedom of association is the foundational human right and Mastodon is the only service I know of which prioritises it over everything else. That's what makes it important – and arguments like Dare's, which claim that if you use an open protocol you lose that right, are just wildly off-base.
Federating with an instance isn’t just about letting individuals connect to individuals
If you want to understand why some communities are wary of Meta, it's worth remembering how ActivityPub works. Let's say I run an instance called EvilMole.social. If I don't defederate (block) Meta's server, any user on their server and any user on EvilMole can follow each other. So suppose that @molesworth@evilmole.social follows @billy@meta.social. What happens?
First, every single one of Molesworth's posts are now available to Meta, including all the replies they make to everyone including people who don't follow anyone on Meta's server. In other words, Meta gets access to posts from people who may very well have an issue with that.
It’s not (just) about anti-capitalism
John's question is whether "the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness" is simply a false dichotomy, because resistance to Meta is based on its past behaviour, not simply anti-capitalism.
Just for the record, I definitely am an anti-capitalist, and I look forward to the day when something more equitable takes over. But you don't have to be an anti-capitalist to believe that Meta, in particular, is not worthy of even a shred of trust
Remember that federating with a Meta service means handing over post data even for posts which are not directly towards a user on their servers. For marginalised and vulnerable communities in particular, keeping data out of Meta's hands can be a priority. It's not that long since the company was tracking people seeking information about abortions, allowing advertisers to target based on sexual orientation, and, of course, making millions of dollars off the back of a transphobic "documentary". The idea that Meta can be trusted with yet more data to harvest is pretty naive at best. For some communities, pre-emptively blocking Meta is entirely appropriate given its track record.
Claiming that a commitment to openness requires giving Meta access to your posts, that you somehow must cooperate with them or allow them into your community is another of those occasions when it's obvious that someone doesn't understand that freedom of association also includes the ability to choose not to associate – and that freedom of association is, if anything, an even more important right than freedom of speech. It's the freedom not to have to listen.
(As an aside, it's interesting to me that American commentators ofter seem to prioritise freedom of speech over freedom of association. Perhaps this is because, while freedom of speech is an explicit part of the 1st Amendment, freedom of association is not – it was only with NAACP vs Alabama in 1958 that freedom of association became a recognised right on the basis of its necessity for both free speech and due process. Meanwhile, in Europe, freedom of association is a separate protected right.)
The email analogy is terrible, and we should all stop using it
John – and many others – often cite email as an example of "big companies running big instances and not extinguishing the openness that made the platform great". There's a bunch of problems with this, but the biggest is that in fact email is a perfect example of how "open" platforms can become dominated by large corporations and effectively lock others out.
Email runs on open protocols, so it's technically possible for me to run a server on my Mac mini upstairs and start sending and receiving mail. The reality, though, is that virtually none of the mail I send would get through – because Gmail, Microsoft, et al would mark it as suspicious and end up automatically blocked as spam.
Blocklists for email exist and are shared across services – and blocking is often pre-emptive, not based on suspicious behaviour of that server. Sure, email is an open set of protocols, but it's also highly restricted by large companies and not at all open to either smaller providers or individuals.
This isn't just an abstract issue: I know of friends who have had to abandon email servers they ran themselves, sometime literally on a box in the corner of a home office, because the big corporations that dominate email simply wouldn't deliver anything they send.
John – and everyone commenting on this – must also know the history of how companies use open protocols as a method of "embrace, extend and extinguish" – but since the Microsoft era they have learned that they don't need to extinguish, just extend in ways which make it incredibly hard for anyone to compete. The canonical example of this for me is how Google has used Chrome to influence the web and its protocols, in such a way as "Chrome-only sites" now being a thing. It's incredibly naive to think that openness automatically makes things better when you have companies totally willing to exploit that openness to dominate a market.
