#Barcelona, #Meta's Twitter competitor, will be ready by summer.
And lest you believe #ActivityPub integration was just some rumour, think again. In a slide, Meta confirms that Barcelona will indeed be decentralized and will be compatible with Mastodon.
Everyone who thought that AT protocol would easily win over ActivityPub, and that #Bluesky would kill Mastodon just because a few influencers joined doesn't understand the sheer marketing power and pull that Meta has at its disposal.
But believe me, I'm not exactly cheering on Meta here. Generally, where Meta goes, shenanigans happen. I simply don't think Meta is capable of releasing a product without dark patterns.
Nevertheless, I don't think the Fediverse is even close to preparing for what will happen once Barcelona starts federating.
If memes, videos, and pictures can't be exchanged between Zuck's micro-blogging software and other established software such as Mastodon, calckey, and pleroma I don't really see the impact. I don't see many people from the fediverse side falling for the bait and giving up all that fedi freedom. This will feel to me as if Mark Zuckerberg's corporation squabbled whatever opportunity they had in their continued quest to monopolize an already fraught venture of monetizing people's social interactions online.
I think it might actually be an opportunity for the fediverse to recruit. One of the biggest draws of fedi I think is the freedom. We moderate ourselves. One can, also, choose whatever software(s), and features they contain, for one's needs here.
I'm pretty sure they'll just get this shiny new thing so that instagram users would have a text-based platform as well - as they can only share images there. The walled garden would come from the fact that you can still see people's images only on Instagram - I understand this will be a text-only app. And what will #Barcelona not have will surely be:
The ability to freely change platforms (i.e. move from #Barcelona to #Mastodon along with your follows and followers, like you can do even on Mastodon currently).
The ability to change to a different server completely, if you dislike the moderation or stuff (I recall @atomicpoet once said with his previous Mastodon account that it will be Federated, a few months ago, not sure if I understood correctly, but I don't think they would want to lose some users and their data to servers they do not control)
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews this has the best chances of completely killing the fediverse out of everything i've seen, definitely make sure to block this once it comes out yall
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews this is honestly fascinating, I hadn’t heard about this. I’m glad more competition is coming to the social media sphere and that these open source and federated protocols are gaining traction.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews I remember when AOL opened up access to the broader internet, including UseNet. And because of that, I am not enthused about Meta suddenly joining ActivityPub.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews This is really bad. Anyone who knows the phrase "Embrace Extend Extinguish" probably gets that this is not good.
I've seen the argument that the Fediverse needs to roll out the red carpet to giants like Meta. We can do that & lose everything great about the Fediverse, or we can resist it & let Meta try their lunacy elsewhere.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews That creates a lot of questions for me, given that I don't like Meta in general - never had a FB or IG account. Once they start I will check how to stay secure of them - if necessary block each and every account from there or even put an lock on mine here.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews We should be careful though. The strength of the federated cloud lies in having many smaller players all working together. Getting a player in the field that is almost guaranteed to take up 90+% of users is scary and might negate the positives of the Fediverse. The strength of many might become one strong one suppressing the other ones.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews Part of me wants to suspend any interaction with this entirely. I want nothing to do with Meta, and certainly don't want them possibly interacting with my instance on that thing.
Part of being open is having doors you can close, and this might just be the first big one I slam.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews Federating with a data-hoarding, anti-privacy, big tech ad firm seems like a bad idea in any situation; Meta is no exception. If I was an instance admin, I wouldn't want to put my users at risk like that. Also, this entire thing reeks of EEE
@kris@atomicpoet@socialmedianews Technically, yeah, but it's a tiny shadow of its former self. I was a fervient defender of XMPP and I had no use for it when 90% of my friends stopped using it and almost everyone were elsewhere already. And before that, the ecosystem was held back by Google, who refused to implement key features.
@SusanneAmman@atomicpoet@socialmedianews It is not necessary to do block each account of Meta ir tu put the lock on your acvount. You can just block their domain.
@quigs > I would love to be able to block a domain, but still follow an account or two from the blocked domain
Admins can kind of do this at the instance-level, by using Limit ("silence") on a domain, rather than defederating. Would be good if this could be done by user accounts too.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews My initial reaction was, given than Insta is mostly adverts and influencers, “That’ll be an instant domain block.” But some of my children and neices use it and it would be good to follow them without having to endure the things that inspired me to delete my Insta account.
This might require a bit more nuance to respond to. Although any involvement of the dead hand of Meta is a concern.
@atomicpoet > Barcelona, Meta's Twitter competitor, will be ready by summer
That's a good reason to have the proposed fediverse conference later this year, rather than early next year. There's a poll on this here, closing in 2 days:
@strypey That's great. Sadly I cannot attend from Friendica as polls from Mastodon do not federate (I can only see the results of it). But shoutout to the poll!
@atomicpoet > There's a real war happening between ActivityPub and AT protocol
What I see is a multi-faction conflict, in which both AP and AT are high ground some factions wants to control. The conflict is between each of the corporate DataFarms (ie legacy social media) and each of the major factions in the fediverse, in the wider sense of the term (protocol-agnostic, pro-decentralization). Mastodon Inc, for example, is a fediverse faction, but has different interests from the rest of us.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews@venera.social I'm so glad you are taking this seriously. I've seen some utterly bizzarre takes that makes me think the person whose post I read has either not been around long enough to not know the cycle, or they are being deliberately obtuse because we must pRaIsE tHe EnGiNeErS or something like that.
Does calckey have any means of defederating from servers? I've still got my Mastodon hat on when it comes to behind the scenes stuff, so it would be super cool to know if this was possible or not (no worries if it isn't though, I'm sure it can get supported soon!)