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1. Embed this notice
   Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:04:19 JST Aral Balkan

   If there is even a single gram of truth to this…

   Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I don’t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Meta’s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if they’re dumb enough to do it. The rest of us will rebuild.

   I really hope no one is stupid enough to take Meta up on this if it’s true. https://beach.city/@vantablack/110594120842443355

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:10:06 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     I started on the Fediverse with Mastodon about seven years ago when I had ~42K followers on Twitter and zero here.

     Personally, I don’t care how many followers I lose. My tiny, ineffectual, instance of one will defederate with any instance, no matter how large, if this rumour is true.

     If this comes to pass, I’d urge those of you on the instances that become Meta’s lackeys to move to instances that are not if you’d like us to stay in touch.

     Remember, it’s about quality not quantity. Always.

     Børge repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:11:09 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Robin

     @Chimaera Hence the “if”

   • Embed this notice
     Robin (chimaera@mastodon.world)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:11:10 JST Robin

     in reply to

     @aral FWIW I think these screen shots have not been verified

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:13:14 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • alternative_be✅🖖🏻

     @alternative_be Exactly. If it comes to pass, we should do all we can to help people on those instances migrate to safer ones before defederating those instances.

   • Embed this notice
     alternative_be✅🖖🏻 (alternative_be@todon.nl)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:13:16 JST alternative_be✅🖖🏻

     in reply to

     @aral If this is true, it’s my worst nightmare when it comes to social media. Let’s hope the truth comes out soon, so people can prepare themselves to migrate if or when necessary.

   • Embed this notice
     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:17:33 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     @aral

     That part about the long term financial burdens on big instances being difficult... that's the point of the Fediverse! It is a good thing if no instance can get too big, being spread out keeps us safe from Meta/Facebook!

   • Embed this notice
     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:24:05 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     • Essjay (she / her) 🏳️‍🌈

     @essjay @aral

     Yeah, smaller instances feel a lot more friendly :)

     I'm much happier with the moderation on tech.lgbt than I was when I was a member on mastodon.online, and it is much easier to contact the admin too.

   • Embed this notice
     Essjay (she / her) 🏳️‍🌈 (essjay@outdoors.lgbt)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:24:18 JST Essjay (she / her) 🏳️‍🌈

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!

     @feditips

     I used to be on an instance (nameless) that was, to begin with, quite small and quite cool.

     It then started to grow exponentially. As it grew it became much less cool and in my opinion, lost its way.

     Which is why I jumped to outdoors dot lgbt.
     I've never looked back

     @aral

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:24:52 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     I’ve been shouting with my whole chest about the danger of large instances for as long as I can remember.

     Even if this rumour is not true today or even if the large instance admins decide to act intelligently and with backbone and refuse such an offer if it is true, the danger remains.

     You don’t have to wait for the ship to sink before taking action. If you’re on a huge instance, move to a smaller one. Spread yourselves thin. Make each instance a smaller target. Make the fediverse stronger.

   • Embed this notice
     Chris Gioran 💔 (chrisg@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:25:44 JST Chris Gioran 💔

     in reply to

     @aral

     This is exactly the risk faced by instances that are big enough to draw the attention of surveillance capitalists.

     They are a weakness in the system, because they are such a ripe target for acquisition and abuse. That's always what happens when a player accumulates power. And that's not a technical issue - it's a policy problem.

     For example, if there was an agreed policy that no instance should be bigger than 1000 members (or it gets defederated) that's wouldn't be an issue.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:25:44 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Chris Gioran 💔

     @chrisg Exactly.

     Heck, it should be baked into the protocol.

     I mean that’s what I’m doing with the Small Web. Only the instance size limit there is 1 because I’ve had enough of this bullshit.

   • Embed this notice
     Chris (cmw@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:27:21 JST Chris

     in reply to

     @aral seems like a two-tiered strategy. Not just embrace-extend-extinguish, but also divide-and-conquer, creating an ad-free access to FB and Insta content that, backed my their money, can host millions, eventually holding critical mass of non-Meta fediverse. Then they will put up federation requirements that will force the rest to join or get defederated.

     And recent decisions which led to big masto instances growing even further played right into their hands.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:34:25 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     (And maybe some of you will now see why I’m designing the Small Web as a peer-to-peer Web. Why ensuring that every node – every instance – is equal is essential to any system that wants to resist centralisation and corporate capture. Why if these places are extensions of ourselves, we must own and control them ourselves. It’s the difference between being a person and not a person in the digital age. It’s high time we understood this.)

     https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

     #SmallWeb #humanRights #personhood

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:41:02 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • supernovae
     • Maria Liv

     @MariaLiv @supernovae Oh, I think we know rather clearly where he stands. From his posts it’s possible he’s the one who reached out to Meta first and started this whole thing to begin with.

     https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110568600592555576

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     Maria Liv (marialiv@universeodon.com)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:41:03 JST Maria Liv

     in reply to

     • supernovae

     @aral @supernovae Where do you stand in this matter?

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:45:16 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.

     @ubiquity75 Thank you. More than anything, I think it’s necessary.

     PS. I’d love to be able to present this to academia more but not sure, short of doing a PhD on it or something, how to go about that. Any ideas?

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     Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. (ubiquity75@dair-community.social)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:45:17 JST Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.

     in reply to

     @aral This is awesome.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:47:38 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • wakame

     @wakame But it only looked like the Small Web. In essence it was the Big Web we have today. Only it hadn’t been injected with capital yet and the centres hadn’t grown.

     Any system that can scale vertically, will scale vertically.

   • Embed this notice
     wakame (wakame@tech.lgbt)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:47:39 JST wakame

     in reply to

     @aral
     I keep wondering where we went wrong.

     We had something like the Small Web 30-40 years ago.
     (Although I find the word a bit weird. For me, a web is a network, that only exists because there are nodes that communicate.)

     Sure, you likely didn't have your own server in the 80s. But our "organization" had (university, research institute, military thing).

     The whole idea of "having your own website" was something that could have naturally evolved into "having your own server".

     And yes, it is high time we fix that "it actually belongs to someone else" thing.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:57:22 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • ij

     @ij Thank you 💕

   • Embed this notice
     ij (ij@nerdculture.de)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 20:57:24 JST ij

     in reply to

     @aral I'm running cleanup scripts on Friendica and Mastodon for years now to not grow too big. I was once the largest Friendica node out there and then reduced the (inactive) user count to below 1000 users.

     Mastodon was an exemption with its large influx of new users where I grew to >25000 users.

     In the past weeks 6.000 users were removed on nerdculture.de because they were not be used in the last 7 months.

     But yes, Meta is a threat we must resist.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 21:15:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • qwazix

     @qwazix The same way you moderate in real life as a person. By deciding who gets to follow you and disassociating yourself from the people you don’t want in your life.

     The system merely models the human being as we know it in physical space.

   • Embed this notice
     qwazix (qwazix@bananachips.club)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 21:15:14 JST qwazix

     in reply to

     @aral how do you propose handling moderation in a theoretical peer to peer social space? Shared blocklists? Even then, if it's fast to create new single tenant instances won't spam be an issue?

     This is not criticism, it's a genuine question. Feel free to redirect me elsewhere to read if you wrote about this before.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 21:24:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • 🦧 Buchpirat📚🏴‍☠️🖖🔻
     • Dan Foster

     @kite @prdan Findability and availability. Every node has a physical, always-on, addressable place on the network. We don’t need immutable trees of data and gossip protocols and signaling servers beyond what’s in the existing infrastructure of the web. And so I hope this will lead to far greater simplicity and usability as well as allowing for emergent, extensible use cases and protocols. I see it as a bridge between the web and p2p for everyday people who use technology as an everyday thing.

   • Embed this notice
     🦧 Buchpirat📚🏴‍☠️🖖🔻 (kite@social.anoxinon.de)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 21:24:14 JST 🦧 Buchpirat📚🏴‍☠️🖖🔻

     in reply to

     • Dan Foster

     @aral @prdan what I don’t really get about that small web thingy: what’s the difference to entirely distributed social networks like scuttlebutt?

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Foster (prdan@mastodon.online)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 21:24:16 JST Dan Foster

     in reply to

     • 🦧 Buchpirat📚🏴‍☠️🖖🔻

     @kite @aral this is one reason to advocate for Aral’s small web. Then you decide who to federate with or not.

   • Embed this notice
     🦧 Buchpirat📚🏴‍☠️🖖🔻 (kite@social.anoxinon.de)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 21:24:18 JST 🦧 Buchpirat📚🏴‍☠️🖖🔻

     in reply to

     @aral I don’t care about the number of followers but I do care about the personal connections lost. I recently lost about 50 followers over night and now can’t follow people on mastodon.social any more, that sucks. Some of them were mutuals from Twitter I valued talking to. Loosing a part of my social graph does hurt, emotionally. I’d be happy if we could find ways to avoid these kinds of things!

   • Embed this notice
     supernovae (supernovae@universeodon.com)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 22:43:40 JST supernovae

     in reply to

     • Maria Liv

     @aral @MariaLiv Facebook has billions of people, some bad, many good.

     A good instance admin is going to learn what is coming, engage
     with the communities onboarding and figure out what the next steps are.

     I don’t care if it’s instagram, tumblr, mozilla. I’ll use the resources i have to learn.

     A bad admin is gong to do nothing but support hate and pitchforks.

     I chose to do due diligence.

     What i started was based on learning, what y’all started was an absurd war on admins that luckily i was on vacation and took little part in.

     I still federate with the people who defederated me on lies. I still follow admins who violated trust and spread lies. I still chose to be a rational person in a sea of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

     And i’ll stick to being that person because i think that makes a better place

     i got nothing but love for this place. 🫶

     Aral Balkan repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 22:43:40 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • supernovae
     • Maria Liv

     @supernovae @MariaLiv Your painting of the entirely rational trepidation of those who understand Meta/Facebook/Instagram/surveillance capitalism – based not only on their toxic business model but the many documented ramifications of it on human rights and democracy – as “hate and pitchforks” and “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” is the problem here and is what’s incompatible with “love for this place.”

     What I don’t know is, is it out of ignorance or malice?

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 22:44:44 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • supernovae
     • Maria Liv

     @supernovae @MariaLiv (And by ignorance, I mean privilege.)

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 22:51:45 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Tushar Chauhan

     @tchauhan You’re talking to someone who has sacrificed to do the latter. So I know exactly what’s involved. And that it’s possible to do.

   • Embed this notice
     Tushar Chauhan (tchauhan@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 22:51:46 JST Tushar Chauhan

     in reply to

     @aral This is where power and wealth imbalance come in. For someone who is struggling or at least thinks they are struggling, a steady paycheck of thousands or tens of thousands of euros/dollars per month can be very hard to refuse. It is one thing to go against a system that is opposing you, and another to keep going against all the wealth it offers you.

   • Embed this notice
     Maria Liv (marialiv@universeodon.com)'s status on Saturday, 24-Jun-2023 22:54:16 JST Maria Liv

     in reply to

     • supernovae

     @supernovae @aral Excuse moi Byron, but I sure as hell did not start any war against admins.

     I've loved being on this instance and I have liked you as a person Byron. But I've just fled from Meta and Twtr. It took me a long ass time to get away from them. And I am not going to be sucked back, like we so often are in destructive relationships.

     I've been in a destructive relationship irl that almost ended in me loosing my life twice. It took me ten years to get free. Did you know that abusers use the same words and methods, no matter what language they speak? Yes, research has shown that to be true.

     Meta and Twtr use the same methods to control us, as abusers irl do. I hoped the fediverse was going to be a different experience. I didn't expect the abusers of social media to come here and I certainly did not expect them to be invited.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jun-2023 00:58:58 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Jon Plummer

     @jplummer Yours apparently has ~160,000 accounts (You can search on https://instances.social/list#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users=)

   • Embed this notice
     Jon Plummer (jplummer@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jun-2023 00:58:59 JST Jon Plummer

     in reply to

     @aral How do I learn how large the instance I am on is? (not an expert)

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jun-2023 17:14:59 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Probably Paul

     @BarrenPlanet Is the thread not showing up for you? Here’s the head of it: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110598855375585873

   • Embed this notice
     Probably Paul (barrenplanet@calckey.social)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jun-2023 17:15:00 JST Probably Paul

     in reply to

     @aral@mastodon.ar.al Apparently I've missed some news. What's this rumour of which you speak?

   • Embed this notice
     Kees de Kooter 🍉 (kdekooter@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jun-2023 22:37:40 JST Kees de Kooter 🍉

     in reply to

     @aral chances are their fedi-move is going to as big a trainwreck as their metaverse. They have a long track record of f-ups.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jun-2023 22:37:40 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Kees de Kooter 🍉

     @kdekooter Reportedly, some prominent instance admins don’t think so and are very excited to sit at the table with them.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 26-Jun-2023 17:55:29 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.

     @ubiquity75 Anytime :) mail@ar.al

   • Embed this notice
     Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. (ubiquity75@dair-community.social)'s status on Monday, 26-Jun-2023 17:55:30 JST Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.

     in reply to

     @aral Well, that’s something that would be interesting to discuss!

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 26-Jun-2023 17:56:23 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • jonny (good kind)

     @jonny Happy to chat :) mail@ar.al

   • Embed this notice
     jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Monday, 26-Jun-2023 17:56:24 JST jonny (good kind)

     in reply to

     • Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D.

     @aral
     @ubiquity75
     I would be interested in setting something up. I've talked about your work a few times and I think it might be interesting to pitch similarly for academic infra together. I am bb in academia but I know some web infra ppl around here :)