I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community

I wrote a long reply disagreeing with each of your points, but you’re right. This is our disagreement. You’re using the term fediverse to apply to a specific group of ppl/servers that share values with you and I think that’s co-opting the term. The fediverse is more akin to the web (a platform based on technology that allows ppl access to other ppl and information) and it doesn’t make sense to talk about it as a single organization.

I think trying to change its meaning like this is flawed and leads to issues like we’re having now with Bridgy-Fed. You can’t shout at everyone to use the tech in the way you want, because eventually there will be ppl/orgs that just don’t listen. Instead, I think you should be pushing for existing platforms you’re using (lemmy, mastodon, etc) to give you more control of your own data. There are ways to allow small-fedi users to create the exact type of spaces they want and anybody else to have the wide open fediverse they want, if the various project would implement them.

I’m happy to continue discussing this with you or leave it here. Either way, thanks for the chat and have a good one.

For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.

None of those are requirements to be part of the fediverse. The fediverse existed long before ActivityPub was even proposed. Free software, ad free, non commercial, not run by big corporations are all just coincidence because its a grassroots effort. Even now, there’s multiple companies invested in the fediverse: Mozilla, Flipboard, Facebook, Automatic being the most obvious.

Even if you take those as given, none of those dictate any shared values. Bridgy-fed itself meets all of those requirements but clearly holds differing values. Truth Social, Gab, Spinster, etc are all on the fediverse despite being abhorrent to the majority of the rest of the fediverse.

I’m in favor of groups maintaining shared values and enforcing policies based on them. But those policies can never apply to an entire network made up of distinct projects, servers, and people all with different ideas about how it should work.

the nature and direction of the fediverse

The fediverse is a decentralized network. It doesn’t have a cohesive nature/direction. It’s made up of servers providing twitter-like experiences, servers providing reddit-like experiences, forums, personal websites, video platforms, etc. You’ll never know all the places your fediverse data has reached because the fediverse doesn’t have hard boundaries so you can’t possible measure it all.

Which is why I think complaining about other what other software does is pointless. Instead, users should be pushing their own software to adopt more features to allow them to control their experience and data.

a lot of people want nothing to do with it.

And nobody is disagreeing with their right to do that. They have the tools to curate their own experience. But they can’t demand the fediverse work they way they want it to and no other way.

Exactly. It’s also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.

no just like federating with mastodon.social doesn’t make your instance a part of the Gargron fediverse. Meta can’t control non-Meta instances that federate with them

This is nonsense. The fediverse isn’t cryptocurrency. Having 51% of the fediverse doesn’t give you any more control than having 1%. If your instance(s) implement a feature that the rest of the fediverse doesn’t like, they can defederate.

Other instances either react by defederating, but because they only have 49 percent, due to network effects, they get extinct

If 49% of the fediverse defederates from the other 51%, it is now 100% of a new, smaller fediverse. You can’t just claim that “network effects” will cause them to go extinct. Whether those instances have enough userbase to sustain a cohesive network depends on the actual number of instances/users. And the fediverse has sustained itself for over a decade with less than the current ~2 million accts and most of that time it had substantially less than 1 active accts.

It’s not sustainable to keep offering poorly designed solutions. People need to understand some basic things about the system they’re using. The fediverse isn’t a private space and fediverse developers shouldn’t be advertising pseudo-private features as private or secure.

Sure, but that’s already solved on the fediverse by using HTTP Signatures and isn’t related to Authorized Fetch.

I downvoted because they posted about an intentionally non-federated forum in the fediverse community. The post doesn’t belong here.

and having a bot thrashing a server indexing everything

This is a completely separate argument and one that we already have mechanisms for. Servers can use status codes and headers to warn about rate limits and block offenders.

It is also one thing to read/interact with a site as that adds value to the site as a whole

A search index adds value as well; that’s why this keeps coming up. And, again, there are existing mechanisms to handle this. A robots.txt file can indicate you don’t want to be crawled and offenders can be IP blocked

I don’t think an admin’s permission has anything to do with it. If you post publicly on the fediverse, your posts are public. You should have the option to opt out of any indexing (just like you do for the rest of the open web). But saying its ok for you to read this post if it happens to come across your feed but you shouldn’t be allowed to find it via a search is ridiculous. Users get to make the choice with each post whether its public or not, but they don’t get to control how people consume those public posts.

That’s not how the fediverse functions

That is how the fediverse functions. Instances send posts to anyone who request it, unless a block is in place. ActivityPub is opt-out and the web has always worked this way.

be mindful of the culture

There is no “the culture” on the fediverse. Your talking about a subgroup, which has a different opinion from other subgroups. They don’t get to define “culture” on the fediverse.

Those vulnerable groups should have the tools to protect themselves, but that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from having a functional and discoverable system. The internet, and the fediverse specifically, have always been a semi-public space and searchability has been a part of that since the beginning.

That post wasn’t claiming that a search engine would only be used by trolls; it was explaining that they shut down their project because a chunk of the fediverse thinks that and complain about any search engine projects. Discoverability is one of the network’s biggest challenges and a search engine could really help with that.

before they end up with a seat on the activity hub team. Then we’re back where we started.

There is no activity pub team. There is an informal group discussing enhancements at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks but anybody can join that and submit proposals. Any nobody is required to accept or implement those proposals. I have joined the forum and submitted a proposal myself, but nobody has implemented it or even seems likely to.

Also, not blocking threads doesn’t make your instance a “meta controlled instance”. Meta has no power over any instance other than Threads. Even instances that don’t proactively block Threads can’t be forced to use any hypothetical Meta extensions to AP. And its really unlikely that people who started servers on a minuscule network (most likely for fun or philosophical reasons) are going to follow Meta’s lead just to have access to more people. Everyone who is here and everyone who started a server here knowingly did that on a network that is a tiny fraction of a percent of the size of other social networks; an increased userbase isn’t some big reward for fediverse server admins.

Ok. Your point was that you can view Threads content without a Threads account and even if they required an account to view Threads content, users with other fediverse accounts could still see the content because that’s how federation works.

Sorry, i misunderstood your point .

Don’t you have to have an Instagram account to use Threads? Every service on the fediverse makes you create an account. And all of them can put all its content behind that account; nothing in ActivityPub prevents that

They are different because most users weren’t aware of XMPP. They weren’t making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.

When google started removing XMPP support, users weren’t aware and didn’t care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don’t use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.

exactly! The end result of EEE is basically the state we’re already in. I also don’t believe that’s what Meta intends. Despite how a lot of ppl here feel about it, the fediverse isn’t worth the effort of EEE. I think its more likely that Meta knows it’s on its last leg and is looking for something to latch on to (see also: their failed metaverse initiative). And the EU’s recent regulatory drive probably makes the fediverse look even more useful for Meta to attach itself to