a little meta about Meta

Adam Newbold on calls to block Meta Fediverse instances:

The very thing that makes the Fediverse special—the ability to seamlessly cross a platform boundary and talk with one another—relies on striving to keep things as open as possible. An open network fulfills the promise of an open internet. Open is good. Open lets ideas flow, it lets people share cat pics and express love for one another, and it helps us to learn. Meta may be awful, but the Fediverse is neither for nor about them—it’s about empowering our friends and families to connect even if we’re using different software or services. It’s genuinely astonishing that this protocol exists today, and seeing it in action is pure magic. I think we should be thinking about how we preserve that and benefit from it, not how we tear it apart before it even has the chance to truly flourish.

A brief taxonomy, perhaps:

Some of the objections to Meta's presence were never anything other than "I don't want Eternal September to come here, too." Tech classism, I guess I'd call it.

Some of the objections to Meta's presence are moralistic ("Meta is evil") in a very full-stop kind of way, because they think it's why their uncle is a racist now or because they're tired of enumerating the legitimately evil shit it has pulled or enabled, like the occasional genocide.

Some object to the presence of a commercial entity at all and some modulate that a little by defining the evil along privacy lines ("Meta will turn on the personal data trawling operation within the confines of the Fediverse").

Some are perhaps what I guess we could call a kind of  "social web realist" take ("Meta is evil and it will run some sort of 'embrace/extend/extinguish' playbook here.")

So ...

There's nothing to do for the "stand in opposition to Eternal September" contingent. Tedious.

As much as I see a lot of complaining about the Fedi moralist contingent, I read the complaining as a modulation of the sort of status sorting that gave birth to the phrase "reply guy" as a slur among winners of social media's attention economy. (Yeah, there's a different sort of "mansplainer"  usage, too, which I accept and am not addressing here).

But for all the dark irritation over "the HOA" and "scolding," I don't see it much. Now and then, yeah, a generalized "if you do foo I will block you" or "people who fail to do bar get blocked" sort of yawped out into the ether, but please just grow an internal filter:

Do you run for a bomb shelter every time a guy in a sandwich board reading "The End is Nigh" walks by? You can't walk down any gentrified block in Portland without being exposed to some sort of half-considered, status-seeking moralism. It's just wearing yoga pants and it's your half-considered status-seeking moralism.

(I'm sure people get @'d by the HOA now and then. Is it worse here than it was on Twitter? I don't know. I was never a big deal on Twitter, and never had a problem either way. It sounds like a success problem to me.)

Anyhow, that's a digression.

I'm not a fan of language where tech implementations "want" to be something, like "open" or "free" or whatever, because they don't "want" anything. That's actually a personal values statement.

There are a lot of people on the Fediverse who do not want it to be "open" or "free" if that means letting problematic people or entities engage with it.  If the Fediverse is people, as Adam cogently argues, then the Fediverse doesn't actually know what it wants to be, as evidenced by all these contingents.

The beauty of the architecture to me is not its "openness." The beauty of the architecture is that the individuals operating inside it have a lot of choice about what kind of instance to be in.

Which is all a long way around to saying that the real decision-makers here are instance owners like Adam, who can choose to share some decision-making by putting it to a vote or a poll, or can choose to be autocratic in one direction or another, or can just not decide. Then there's a secondary set of decision-making as people sort themselves into instances managed in a manner amenable to their values.

And if you're bothered by the moralist or HOA contingent, it might be worth remembering that there's a temperament there that will self-select over time out of The Californian Ideology instances, the normie instances, and the "X in all but name" instances and into little Hermit Kingdoms defined by what they cannot tolerate being exposed to. If, conversely,  your instance goes Full Hermit Kingdom, there are plenty more to choose from. 

But people are just going to go where they're going to go, as they always have. I don't think it's a perfectible situation, or even an optimizable situation.