Even if it’s a losing battle, it feels like we have a better chance if we keep the alternative available.
That's precisely what the mass-defederation is intended to do. From my PoV, defederating Facebook is the only way to keep "the alternative available" as otherwise it'd be drowned in shit and/or EEE'd.
Being federated can allow us to encourage users to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one (ex. Mastodon, Firefish, etc.)
What you fail to mention here is that this goes both ways; it also allows Facebook to "encourage" users to switch to Threads.
"All your friends are on Threads, why do you keep using that weird Mastodon thing?"
"Oh, Threads has this cool new feature where you can use (insert current NFT AI tech bro grift here) but it doesn't work with Mastodon."
But yeah you're right, the last time a tech giant embraced an open federated protocol, everyone and their mom started using the open platform instead. No wait, XMPP is fucking dead after Google did the third E.
Don't let them have a monopoly over the use of ActivityPub. Grow the other platforms: The extend stage only works when the platform gets a near monopoly over use of the standard. That brings up the first action. If there are enough users, services and resources on things like Mastodon/Lemmy, then Meta (or any other company) can't just extend the spec without causing their users to ditch Threads to stay connected to the content they want to see.
How tf do you expect that to work when they will start out with a 98.5% "market share" in the entire AP network?
Might aswell call it "Facebookverse" at that point because the entire rest of the Fediverse as we know it would be a drop in the bucket.
That's right, in a world where the broader Fediverse federates with Facebook, Facebook's starting conditions would be market dominance; a monopoly you might call it.
As long as there is a healthy community away from Meta (ex. what we have right now), then they can't extend & extinguish.
Good luck having a decent conversation with two people when there are hundreds of people screaming about irrelevant trifles in the same room.
Protect the Standards and share why it is important
- Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy (interoperability requirements > etc.), and educate other users about the risks.
Facebook: We will muddy the waters around this upcoming competitor that could destroy our entire business model and drown it in noise.
Users: Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy
Facebook: Oh no, not the expert posts! Ok, we will stop.
the way that activitypub works, the outgoing data is publicly available. Defederating with Meta doesn't prevent that, and federating doesn't give them any more data than they could get otherwise.
It is not. It is only available to federated instances and even to those it's almost always a subset because not every user/community is followed. Due to Facebook's sheer size, they would probably receive pretty much everything from any instance federated with them.
If they were defederated, they'd have to scrape every instance's API to actually export everything. Not a real blocker but much more difficult, expensive and legally questionable. (See the recent popularity in imitative statistical algorithms aka. """AI""" or "Copyright condoms" as I like to call them.)
Additionally, this opens up Fediverse users to Facebook tracking in things like DMs. I'm aware they're not E2EE and you should therefore not expect secrecy from them but putting them into a known bad actor's hands is quite a lot worse.
It's more of an issue when data start coming IN to Lemmy from Mastodon and Meta's Threads.
...that's precisely what defederation is about. You can't stop someone from scraping your API but you can stop their toxic waste from flowing into your healthy platform.
All Fediverse platforms will have to work on content moderation and misinformation. Platforms like Meta, focussed on profit and advertising, will likely moderate in a way that protects their income. Those moderation decisions will be federated around.
Moderation is a problem with our Fediverse platforms already, how tf do you expect us to do the work for Facebook's platform in addition to that when it's like 100x the size of the entire Fediverse?
develop USEFUL but safe and open algorithms for the feeds
There is no such thing. The only reason our current feeds aren't full of shit is because the general signal to noise ratio is still quite high. Refer to the conversation in the room example above.
Unless some sandboxing or other explicit security measure is in place, any software you run typically has access to your entire home directory, including .ssh/. If any one of those was compromised somehow, they've got access to your SSH keys.
That's a gigantic attack surface if you ask me.
The hiding of internet traffic is also a proxy thing, not necessarily a VPN thing.
Not at all. A VPN can be used as a proxy but that's not what they were intended for.
There’s only one route to an IP.
That's not true. There's an infinite numer of ways to route IP addresses on the internet in fact. Most of them are useless however.
your VPN server can try spoofing its outbound traffic to use the client’s IP, but it’ll most likely get discarded by the ISP because it only allows your IP to go out. But even if you can, the answer to those packets will go to the client’s IP, which will go directly to the client and not the VPN.
Mission accomplished? This may be what OP wants? Really not sure.
Replies don't go to your inbox either I've found. I've had the misfortune of being replied to by one of the Hexbear trolls and only noticed because someone else replied to that same comment aswell and I saw the troll's reply in the context.
To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.
And not even a little.
The current HW survery says that about 1.9% of Steam users are on Linux. According to 3rd party sources, there's on the order of 120M to 130M people who used Steam this year. Extrapolating the HW survey, that's about 2.5M Linux on Linux users.
Fortnite is leaving money from ~2.5M possible customers on the table because of stupid ideology.
I would like to have a mechanism to set up a server automagically…
NixOS.
Similarly I would like to set up my user account settings
Home-manager.
It depends on what your motivation is. If your motivation is to criticise someone because of their heritage, it doesn't matter what you criticise them for; even if that criticism is valid.
This will happen in any case unless you had enough capacity for redundancy.
What is in this 4TB drive? A Linux installation? A bunch of user data? Both? What kind of data?
The first step to this is to separate your concerns. If you had e.g. a 20GiB Linux install, 10GiB of loose home files, 1TiB of Movies, 500GiB of photos, 1TiB of games and 500GiB of Music for example, you could back each of those up separately onto separate drives.
Now, it's likely that you'd still have more data of one category than what fits on your largest external drive (movies are a likely candidate).
For this purpose, I use https://git-annex.branchable.com/. It's a beast to get into and set up properly with plenty of footguns attached but it was designed to solve issues like this elegantly.
One of the most important things it does is separate file content from file metadata; making metadata available in all locations ("repos") while data can be present in only a subset, thereby achieving distributed storage. I.e. you could have 4TiB of file contents distributed over a bunch of 500GiB drives but in each one of those repos you'd have the full file tree available (metadata of all files + content of present files) allowing you to manage your files in any place without having all the contents present (or even any). It's quite magical.
Once configured properly, you can simply attach a drive, clone the git repo onto it and then run a
git annex sync --contentand it'll fill that drive up with as much content as it can or until each "file"'snumcopiesor other configured constraints are reached.