There is one argument I’ve seen missing in most of the de/federation discussions, that I think should be mentioned, and warrants it’s own discussion.

I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning that defederating with Meta means we have broken the promise of Fediverse, that you can use one account to interact with whatever service you choose, and that it should be inclusive.

But I don’t agree that’s the main idea. There is something that’s more important, and to make sure I’m not misinterpreting it, I’ll just directly quote various websites about the Fediverse I’ve found (I was just taking top results for Fediverse on DuckDuckGo, but I did select only the parts that are the most important point for me personally). But I do concur, I was not able to find a single source of truth, and I’m not really sure how credible the resources are, so please disagree with me if it’s wrong or I’ve chosen some no-name site that just matched my rethorics.

https://www.fediverse.to/ has the following sentence as the main hero header:

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.

Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.

Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.

Another search result is for fediverse.party, which has the following quite in https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/ :

Fediverse (also called Fedi) has no built-in advertisements, no tricky algorithms, no one big corporation dictating the rules. Instead we have small cozy communities of like-minded people.

The page also mentions some link for knowledge about the fediverse. Some of them are only tutorials about how to join, but there’s also https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_the_Fediverse%3F , with the following part:

How does it compare to traditional social media?

Morals

  • Traditional social media is neither social nor media. It is not made for you, it is made to exploit you and it is full of misleading ads and fake news.
  • This is because the aim of traditional social media is to make a whole lot of money.
  • The aim of the Fediverse is to benefit the people.
  • The aim of traditional social media is to control and steer the users.
  • The aim of the Fediverse is to empower the users to control the Fediverse.

I wasn’t able to find more websites directly about the fediverse, and I did not want to quote random articles. But for completion sake, here is a list of FAQ/About sections of websites that are about the Fediverse, but don’t directly support or imply the point of view I was trying to make (one that can be best summarized by the Morals in the last quite):

The split seems to be 50:50, but at least for my DuckDuckGo search results, the https://www.fediverse.to/ is the first result you find, and that one is pretty clear about what Fediverse should be. I wanted to start a discussion about what do the users here see as a main selling point of the fediverse, and whether morals and non-profit nature of the instances is important to most of the users as it is to me, or whether you’d rather have interconnectness and inclusivness.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Decentralization to me is instance to instance communication. I don’t see it as necessarily being anti-corporate, just lacking centralization. Sites like Twitter and Reddit are popular because of the content, not the site themselves. With decentralization, content is more powerful and I can access it from any instance. Even if I’m federated with a big corp website, it gives me more content and it pulls more people and community into decentralization. I see it as a win-win. More users are better to my, I really don’t care the instance, I just want content.

    • Mikina@programming.devOP
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      1 year ago

      I agree that decentralization isn’t anti-corporate. I would even say that it has nothing to do with your motives for doing it. But I’m hoping that the consensus that is reached about what Fediverse should be will include focus on being anti-corporate, and stay in the realm of community-owned and non-profit. Actually, I don’t mind being for-profit, or even ads that are respectful, as long as it’s not manipulating with users in any way based on their data, for example though the content they are shown. DuckDuckGo would be the best example - you get static search results, nothing is “personalized”, and the ads you get are related to your current search only. No ML models exploiting you as much as they can. That’s what I imagine under “privacy-centric”

      And unfortunately, this disqualifies almost every larger company.