I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create “better” front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.
Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.
Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.
If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta.
You’re surprised Zuck has bots?
He’s basically one himself.
They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.
What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.
You think it’s unlikely that Meta would deploy bots to the fediverse to try and convince people already on it to join Threads?
I’ve got some interesting real estate opportunities for you, have you ever thought about how much passive income you could make from tolls on the Brooklyn Bridge?
Not what I’m saying.
You think its likely that every account expressing their concerns in these defederation threads is a bot? And it’s not even worth discussing this topic because everyone who disagrees is in fact actually a bot?
I’ve got some interesting real estate opportunities for you, have you ever thought about how much passive income you could make from tolls on the Brooklyn Bridge?
Ultimately this is the thing to worry about. Threads will get the largest communities and as a result the main amount of attention and when/if Meta decides to defederate, it will ruin things. Also, people will generally give zero shits about federation because 99.9% of content will be on meta’s instance.
Ironically, the main thing keeping fediverse from being more popular (the decentralized approach and “multiple places the same community can exist”) are going to be the thing that kills it if Meta gets involved and becomes the big boy.
Idunno what is arguably worse. The fediverse being restricted to more “technical” folks who give a shit, and thus a far more limited audience than a central platform, or being suddenly disconnected from the hivemind after taking all the content.
(Fwiw, I absolutely think that the Threads fediverse plan is to totally absorb all the content and become the main place for it then possibly pull the plug but honestly at that point they won’t even need to the usage stats will basically do the same thing for them.)
I don’t think accepting reality is making excuses.
Comparing meta to beehaw, or really anything else, is truly coming up short. Meta is the 8 ton gorilla in the corner. If the numbers that were released about 30 mllion people on Threads is true, they instantly have 10x the total population, and that numbers going to go up as more people stumble upon it.
Point being, Threads doesn’t need any other communities. People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy. These people are also the same ones who don’t care about if their content is coming from a federated source, or just Threads.
Point being, Threads doesn’t need any other communities. People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy. These people are also the same ones who don’t care about if their content is coming from a federated source, or just Threads.
And hence, defederation is a good idea.
Defederation is to protect us from them. You are absolutely right that they aren’t comparable to beehaw in size - now imagine if people here start joining the communities on Threads (not formal ones cus threads doesn’t have those), and we later decide to defederate, as some have proposed? Beehaw alone caused a massive clusterfuck, now imagine an instance with 10000x more users and power and concentrated community being let in?
Yup. If someone wants to see Threads content, sign up with them. Nobody’s stopping them.
The fact they don’t need us is entirely the danger. They will have a controlling leverage of users and content. If they are the biggest player in the fediverse, the fediverse itself is beholden to courting them.
People don’t want to lose what they get used to. Beehaw defederating from [Lemmy.world] is a good example. The defederation is far worse for Beehaw than it is for [Lemmy.world], because it means people will leave their smaller instance to get the content of the larger instance because [Lemmy.World] is such an enormous player in the space.
This problem would be infinitely worse with Meta if they become the larger instance, who after becoming a mainstay here will eventually be the entire space. and if they eventually wall themselves off - which they will, everyone who has built communities up with them will leave with them. The fact they don’t need us is why it’s dangerous.> eople using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy.
People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy.
this will only be true at first. afterwards, the people who would have signed up for mastodon will instead sign up for Threads. They don’t just bring in new users, they also parasite users who were at all interested. Long term sabotages the organic growth of the decenterlized space. We build up leverage slowly, but once they are here they have all the power.
Seem is a perfect word - remember you have no reliable way of telling if these are legions of real people, good people, bots, etc. don’t let masses online shake you so easily! You too could be a thousand account echo chamber legion if you wanted to.
That’s how these people propagandize and brainwash societies by making use of a social mechanism we have which relies on power in numbers
You can be sure a good deal of Meta bootlickers here are astroturfing accounts. Meta’s business is to manipulate public perceptions and opinions, and astroturfing is definitely one of the tools employed.
I think there are multiple illusions into using one community. I don’t think people do. The average user love instagram when it was for sharing photos, facebook before it was for grandparents, vine (now tik tok) when it was for funny clips, youtube for silly content, reddit for thread format speaking, snapchat for stupid private chats. If we are talking about centralized communication I’m not so sure that is the case either. The reason all of those platforms I just mentioned got ruined for the most part is being of the growth of influencing and monetization. Once capitalism came in it completely changed the original intent of why the user liked those platforms, I doubt most of them even remember why they liked it when they joined it changed so fast. What people want, without actually realizing it, are the same services without the garbage product they’ve excepted and its turned into.
If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.
Except that Threads isn’t organized around topics / communities, it’s organized like Insta / Twitter around following people, so there’s no communities to flock to.
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta.
I’m not here to make excuses for Meta, but not a single one of these “sky is falling” posts actually articulate any real danger with federation. They just list all the bad things that have come out of Facebook to imply that surely something bad must happen here too then.
I’m not here to make excuses for Meta, but not a single one of these “sky is falling” posts actually articulate any real danger with federation. They just list all the bad things that have come out of Facebook to imply that surely something bad must happen here too then.
I did, if you read it. Past and continued malicious behaviour + open manipulativity means that what they say cannot be trusted.
Except that Threads isn’t organized around topics / communities, it’s organized like Insta / Twitter around following people, so there’s no communities to flock to.
Even if there aren’t formal Communities (as in, like Lemmy), there are still communities of people.
I did, if you read it. Past and continued malicious behaviour + open manipulativity means that what they say cannot be trusted.
Trust is not required in this equation. The fediverse exists as a technical system and we can see how it operates. Within the context of those bounds I see no path for meta to break it and no one has been able to explain one beyond vague generalities like “they can’t be trusted”.
Even if there aren’t formal Communities (as in, like Lemmy), there are still communities of people.
Yes, but the point I was responding to was saying that communities like [email protected] would lose all its users when they went to [email protected] when that’s simply not even possible.
I did, if you read it. Past and continued malicious behaviour + open manipulativity means that what they say cannot be trusted.
Trust is not required in this equation. The fediverse exists as a technical system and we can see how it operates. Within the context of those bounds I see no path for meta to break it and no one has been able to explain one beyond vague generalities like “they can’t be trusted”.
I gave examples in part 2 in my post of various routes to destroy activitypub, or nore importantly, destroy or consume the existing network of people.
Even if there aren’t formal Communities (as in, like Lemmy), there are still communities of people.
Yes, but the point I was responding to was saying that communities like [email protected] would lose all its users when they went to [email protected] when that’s simply not even possible
It is absolutely possible if fediverse content is presented as-if it’s just from threads, and then the majority of posters in communities become threads users, and then they either subsume or defederate.
You can post to lemmy communities from in mastodon via @-ing, which Threads could easily add as another feature later. And referring to more general communities the same principle applies.
I gave examples in part 2 in my post of various routes to destroy activitypub, or nore importantly, destroy or consume the existing network of people.
Your points boil down to “Threads will be easier to use and more attractive so people will use that”, congrats, that’s the case regardless of whether or not you federate. That’s not a result of federation, that’s a result of meta having a lot of money to make good apps.
This entire argument hinges on the idea that the Fediverse is filled with great content that Meta will just steal and present to their users when quite frankly that’s just untrue. The fediverse is still a pale imitation of Reddit that is severely lacking in content and is still likely to die from never entering the virtuous cycle required to get a social network off the ground.
Your points boil down to “Threads will be easier to use and more attractive so people will use that”, congrats, that’s the case regardless of whether or not you federate. That’s not a result of federation, that’s a result of meta having a lot of money to make good apps.
They boil down to much more than that. Even if it’s harder to use, Facebook has the ability and the means to run campaigns to promote their own stuff even if it’s worse. Furthermore, it’s not just about that, it’s also about the fact that federating with them entwines us with their communities, and given their size it will not take long for our organisation and communities to be entirely stuck to theirs.
This entire argument hinges on the idea that the Fediverse is filled with great content that Meta will just steal and present to their users when quite frankly that’s just untrue. The fediverse is still a pale imitation of Reddit that is severely lacking in content and is still likely to die from never entering the virtuous cycle required to get a social network off the ground.
Seems pretty alive to me, actually. And the risk is not just Facebook/Meta taking our content, but more us being sucked in by theirs and having their algorithms and strategies used to manipulate us and make us too dependent on their own infrastructure to sustain our own communities again, especially if they cut us off after ^.^ (the threat of which can then be used as leverage or to outright subsume large instances).
Even if it’s harder to use, Facebook has the ability and the means to run campaigns to promote their own stuff even if it’s worse.
Federating doesn’t change that.
Furthermore, it’s not just about that, it’s also about the fact that federating with them entwines us with their communities, and given their size it will not take long for our organisation and communities to be entirely stuck to theirs.
Oh no, we’ve recreated Reddit with millions of users and a thriving community, what a nightmare!
Seems pretty alive to me, actually.
Then go check whatever instance you’re on three times throughout the day and do the same on Reddit and notice the distinct lack of change and movement on Lemmy/Kbin.
more us being sucked in by theirs and having their algorithms and strategies used to manipulate us and make us too dependent on their own infrastructure to sustain our own communities again, especially if they cut us off after . (the threat of which can then be used as leverage or to outright subsume large instances).
If you don’t want to be manipulated by the algorithms that the Threads instances use to surface content, then don’t subscribe to people on Threads, it’s really not that complicated. If Meta leaves later and you find yourself desperately missing content, then guess what? That’s not Meta killing the fediverse that’s Meta having kept the fediverse alive for a while.
Let me put it this way: advocating for Meta being federated with us is like asking to keep a bear in the same room as the family chihuahua.
Here I am saying “gee, I don’t think we should keep a bear and a chihuahua in the same room together. This seems like a really bad idea. Bears are pretty violent and this dog has no way to defend itself”.
Your reply is “Well bears eat salmon, not dogs, so i’m not worried about it. If the bear didn’t have good intentions, why would he be getting in the room with the dog? Besides, if he does start getting violent, we can just take the bear out of the room and separate the two.”
Nah man, i just like the dog, and I don’t need him getting fucked up. If you want the bear you can hang out with him outside, and have the same experience you would have had if he was inside. I get he keeps trying to come in, but I don’t see how its worth the risk to actually let him in.
Bears are pretty violent and this dog has no way to defend itself
Besides, if he does start getting violent, we can just take the bear out of the room and separate the two
Ah, see, the difference between your analogy that uses irreversible physical violence and the actual situation at hand is that blocking an instance or defederating takes a single button click, and isn’t at all difficult for the dog to do.
Also a flawed analogy because in this case the chihuahua is a barely alive clone of a dog that is still much much healthier and actively trying to kill it, that bear might be the only thing that prevents the original dog from killing it.
Hey man, Threads is that way if you want to use it, but I came here because I very specifically do not have any interest. You can sign up there, use it all you want! But don’t fuck the rest of us over because you want to use both platforms at the same time.
And by the way, your cloning analogy changes nothing. The original dog is not in the house, he’s fucking off somewhere else. The bear is actually here, trying to come in, and you’re proposing we use him to defend against a dog that may or may not return. Ill take my chances with the dog.
Hey man, Threads is that way if you want to use it, but I came here because I very specifically do not have any interest. You can sign up there, use it all you want! But don’t fuck the rest of us over because you want to use both platforms at the same time.
Hey man, this thing called the fediverse is based around subscribing to the communities you want to and seeing content from those. You’re screwing over the people who want content from both when you could just, not go out of your way to subscribe to threads communities. Problem solved.
And by the way, your cloning analogy changes nothing. The original dog is not in the house, he’s fucking off somewhere else.
Well this is why it was a piss poor analogy to begin with. Because the real, non-analogous, facts of the situation mean that the bear, the original dog, and the cloned chihuahua are all only kept alive by the same thing, users and their content.
And again, let’s back up for a moment and point out that that’s still not an argument based on any plausible reality. It’s just fear of the unknown. You have yet to articulate any technical ways that method could kill the fediverse, but are just scared of some random X that Meta might do to steal the half dozen mastodon users away.
not a single one of these “sky is falling” posts actually articulate any real danger with federation
Dunno about the other posts, but this article talks about how Google killed XMPP, which is extremely relevant to what could happen to ActivityPub if Meta gets its way.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Yes, everyone brings up that same blog post, and it’s nonsense. Google Talk outcompeted Jabber/XMPP based messenger by providing a better user experience and it would have done that regardless of whether or not they ever supported XMPP.
Google Talk outcompeted Jabber/XMPP
Thus, it’s entirely logical for us to expect that Meta outcompetes ActivityPub by “offering a better user experience”. You know, despite the whole point of the fediverse being cooperation and coexistence, not competition
Defed every corporation. McDonald’s starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.
Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
Yes, reputation is very important. The cluster of people known as Meta has proven it is nefarious at best.
It’s good to consider the case-by-case basis instead of just making general rules.
Like if Lowes wanted to make an instance I wouldn’t worry much about its corporate influence. But Meta is actually an evil organization.
(Though their React docs are some of the best docs I’ve ever read)
It’s strange how Mastodon is so willingly letting them in. Fishy… Fishy and hairy. Like a fish with some nice bangs. Maybe a mullet. A little mustache too, recently brushed with a little mustache brush.
No Gabe, go make half life 3.
This make me chuckle.
I mean, they aren’t fucking wrong. Half life 3 has a federated communication system built into multiplayer? Go do it Gabe.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
I dont think mastodon would, but i think lemmy kbin would. The target audience is different, one is twitter and the other is reddit like. I dont think twitter user hate fb as much as we do.
They always did strike me as idiots
This is an extremely weird ass take to have. Why would the average user give a shit?
Compared to most problems people have, the intricacies of social media platforms is not high on a lot of people’s list. They just go where the content is.
What a very insufferable opinion to have lol.
Like god damn, I knew that the early adopters will have the hardcore with em, but some of you guys need to relax.
I’ve been radicalized by corporate social media’s deliberate harm, what can I say.
I’ve never had any problems at McDonald’s with their ice cream / milkshake machines in Europe. Maybe the US simply gets the faulty machines?
The company that maintains the machines has a contractually enforced monopoly over the franchisee’s. This means it’s impossible to get parts or fix the machines outside of them doing it.
There’s heaps of vids on yt about the MacDonald’s ice cream machine racket.
You’re not getting the real McDonalds experience
It’s a pretty well established anecdote that most of the time a McDonalds tells you the ice cream machine is broken, it’s because they’ve already cleaned it for the night and if they use it again they’ll need to reclean it. It’s easier to say it’s broken rather than make one dessert and then have to reclean it all over again.
Bullshit. I know everybody loves a good “lazy employees” story, but American machines are designed to break down constantly so Taylor gets repair revenue from McDonald’s franchise owners.
I used to work at McDonald’s and got tired of the constant accusations from customers. Johnny Harris made an excellent video on this topic.
I know a good number of McDonald’s employees are lazy, but that damn machine was the bane of my existence when I was a manager. It would just randomly decide not to work for the day and we had to call Taylor.
To be fair, I did say “well established anecdote” and not “well established fact”.
I was a manager at a McDonald’s In the UK for five years. Can honestly say our shake/I’ve cream machine never once broke down.
We never took it off early for the nightly clean though, that only took a matter of minutes.
But the regular deap clean, we took it off for that, usually a Monday or Tuesday night as they were quiet, and we were straight up with customers and said it was being cleaned
That’s not why at all. Watch the video @danielton posted below.
I’m right there with you. I can already foresee that their apps will be prioritizing monetized users like content creators and everything in there will be a transaction of some sort. Who cares, you just have to block their instances and go about your merry way.
Whats wrong with steam?
It’s a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Isnt that based on the assumption that Valves public comment about removing the drm in the case they go under is a lie. It becomes a trust issue then, and to the public view, many put trust in them.
They have no reason to honor that, and are a corporation. I don’t consider that binding or realistic.
There are many things that happen for “no reason”. Its fully a trust issue if you dont think it would happen.
OK. You’re welcome to trust in anything you like. I believe contracts, not promises.
Yeah – it should be in writing with the customers (ToS?) and every contract Valve signs with game developers for it to be something that can actually be performed.
We will need the judicial system to force Valve to remove the DRM.
Wait, do you need Internet access to play your offline games? If so, moving to itch.io
I like itch, but it’s no steam killer. We need a way to somehow own our digital games in a way that is not centralized to one marketplace.
What benefits could give to the user and the producer the descentralization?
Disintermediation would be nice; More of my money going directly into the hands of game developers instead of executives. Also, people who own games should be able to resell them. Can’t do that with centralized platforms. A benefit of decentralized game ownership would be that the developer could be cut into the resale of their games, which shifts the incentive to a more long-term view. A game could be something that is supported by the “used” market, and therefore has a reason to invest in long-term value. No more drive to keep on reinventing the wheel and releasing new games every year, just keep on making the existing game better.
Oh, nice response, I want to be optimistic and see in the future more and more descentralization
i think nothing beats literally getting the zip file with all the contents of the game with no middleware like GOG employs. to decentralize the store further requires the devs to at least manage their own website hosting, domains, ownership status accounts for updates. the only step available beyond that is the payment methods, and i don’t think there’s any viable solution to be done in that case besides having more companies like Stripe and Paypal.
in that sense, Itch is handling things pretty good for devs so far,
The main thing I’m for is improved ownership rights, and currently GOG is the best of them. The only downside with it is that you can’t sell it on when you’re done, like old games in physical media. When digital media has none of digital media’s drawbacks, then I’ll leave off about the potential of NFTs.
problem there is that anti-drm and ownership of a license to download and run software don’t combine while financially viable to the stores. aside from the additional problem of having to manage inventories, trades and everything that happens to break those systems, “owning” the license and allowing to sell to someone else doesn’t do much if you don’t employ a DRM to enforce the make-believe of you pretending you’re monetarily compensating a physical larbor of transferring a given copy of a media, people will share things with each other before you can blink and not care where it comes from so long as it runs and it’s clean, specially in places where people won’t pay for games instead of food. only reason CSGO skins works on Steam as the original NFT system is because there’s servers to enforce what people get to see you holding and what you don’t own. and allowing for transferring games between accounts without a DRM is not something you’ll ever see any big company doing under the liability of being accused of promoting “piracy”.
Depends on the game. These ones for example don’t even require you to launch them through Steam.
Should Note that if a game isn’t on that list, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t DRM free. For example “Rain world” is not on that list and it is not required to launch it through Steam. So this list is by no means exhaustive.
Cool, thanks for the resource
Right now we’re losing tons of information after snapchat bought and deleted the gyffcaf website.
Now imagine losing all games when Gabe dies and the new patron loses the company to a newfound addiction to whatever
Agree.
But isn’t half life alyx basically hl3?
VR will remain a gimmick until it isn’t a whole-ass lifestyle.
“Vr is a gimmick” -people who haven’t owned a proper vr headset
I do games research for a living and have access to pretty much every relevant VR headset made since the first Oculus.
VR is very much a gimmick. There is no killer app or feature, and the closest thing we get to one are exergames like Beat Saber. Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars. Similarly, virtual desktops are neat but really don’t offer any tangible benefits compared to a large monitor to make up for the added discomfort of having to wear a VR headset. The Snow Crash-style metaverse is and always has been absolute bullshit. It’s just a less convenient version of the metaverse we already have.
VR has some potential to create cool embodied experiences, but the benefits so far are so slight that the technology is looking a lot like 3D TV and HD-DVD: technically impressive, no meaningful improvement in the holistic user experience. Hence, it remains a gimmick.
There are multiple games that wouldn’t be the same without VR. A Township Tale, Gorilla Tag, Echo VR. None of these would be nearly as fun without VR. The biggest issue with VR is probably the lack of some more linear story driven AAA games that many people are used to. And you don’t need to invest several thousand dollars for VR. Stand-alone VR with the quest has been a thing for years
You’re kind of making my point for me here. The games that exist for VR don’t really add anything that didn’t already exist but with less convenient controls. A Township Tale is fundamentally just an MMO in VR, and we have already have dozens of MMOs that are easier to play. Similarly, we have a ton of story-based games on other platforms that work perfectly well. VR as a medium doesn’t really do anything for the gaming experience in those cases.
Games that make use of the inherently different interaction modalities of VR, like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag, show some promise in terms of new ways of playing games. That kind of interaction is really interesting and brings something new to the table. Unfortunately, they’re also effortful to play and as such are generally difficult to play for extended periods of time. To some extent they all become exergames. Since they also need a fair amount of space to play there’s a certain barrier to entry for playing them.
I think the the standalone headsets are the future of VR, mostly due to the lower instep to get started. I even own a Quest 2 that I play sometimes (admittedly mostly Beat Saber and Ragnarock). However, the standalone VR headsets are also kind of limited in terms of computational power, so there’s some competition from the casual and mobile market. The mobile (and console, and PC) platforms also don’t have the added baggage of physical excersion that comes with VR, which makes them more accessible than VR.
Again, there really isn’t much of a case for VR beyond exergames. Games being VR can be a selling point for the true believers in VR, but for most people it’s kind of a fun experience that isn’t very meaningful.
A township tale is fun because of the fact that you use your hands for everything. Putting tools together, hammering nails in, fighting monsters, that’s what differentiates it from other MMOs. I don’t see a problem with VR games being physically exerting, less people sitting in a chair playing games is a good thing. In fact the physical nature of it is what makes it fun. I don’t see VR as the future of gaming or anything, I see it as another way to play. Just like I prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters and controller for platformers. The games I play in VR are games I wouldn’t like in a traditional format. The interactivity and immersion of VR is impossible to replicate in a normal game. That doesn’t mean normal games don’t have their place, they obviously do and I don’t think VR should replace them.
Yeah I really wish PCVR was still alive and well instead of the stagnant industry that it currently is. I bought both a Rift S and a Quest 2 thinking that full-length story driven games were going to become a thing, but then the hardware limitations of standalone kinda killed that. Now I don’t really have any interest in buying a Quest 3 or a Vision Pro because I don’t have any faith that there’s going to be developers making those kinds of experiences anymore.
I don’t get why games can optimize for mobile hardware but can’t just give lower graphics settings on PC for some reason. Maybe stand-alone wouldn’t have been such a big thing if they had done that
But…it doesn’t have to be a whole-ass lifestyle, even right now with the current state of VR. Even with an Oculus Quest 2, you just put on the headset, play an hour or so, and then put the headset down like a normal person.
The marketing teams at Meta and Apple want to market it as a lifestyle because that’s the only way they know how to promote it without going into the nerdy weeds of VR game design, etc., but from a consumer perspective, it’s only a lifestyle if you choose to make it your lifestyle.
I have no love for corporations but they’re a fact of life by this point on the internet. They drive a significant about of marketing and users and they’re what make a social media platform take off (which is why Parler and Gab fell apart).
Fediverse SHOULD be an ethical platform, but you have server admins defederating any instance that even has paid subscribers. Isn’t that going too far? Are we trying to force everyone on here into a kibbutz?
I believe the only instances that should be defederated are corporate, self-harm, profanely illegal, and political extremist instances.
Anything further than that and the whole network is going to devolve into a series of micro echo chambers.
Or maybe it won’t, maybe the vast and free instances will flourish while the restrictive instances die out.
Either way, trying to control a community based on wishy washy ideology is not a good look.
I think in these early days we’ll see a lot of power drunk admins who are too eager to push the button, just because they can.
To add to that maybe a general rule of thumb would be to defederate with any instances that go against the sustainability and self interest of the whole fediverse.
Absolutely, and the actions that “go against the sustainability and self-interest of the fediverse” will need to be analyzed and codified into fediverse “law.”
If we make specific and firm rules about what is disallowed on an instance, it makes enforcing those rules simple.
Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn’t matter whether you’re on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.
Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.
I’m 100% in favor of defederating and completely blocking communications with whatever Meta, Bluesky and other big companies throw.
More importantly, I was not aware of how Google killed XMPP, and that’s the most important thing that every Mastodon and Akkoma admin should read about. Their instances will slowly stop working with Threads, people in their instances might eventually migrate back into Meta owned shit, thus slowly killing their instances.
We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.
However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.
He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.
Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.
Another option is to make migration of everything from one instance easy and let them buy whichever instances they want but let the users go somewhere else. Turn their weaponized capitalism into free money for instance admins until they wisen up and stop throwing money at it.
Or set up the terms and services to give the instances responsibilities that must be honoured even after they get purchased by another entity such that buying them becomes unattractive. Like mandate a certain portion of the topmost parent company’s profits (along with clauses to prevent Hollywood accounting from dodging that, maybe say revenue instead of profit and all related companies instead of just the topmost) must be invested back into the fediverse and that changing the TOS to remove that requires a certain number of users to agree. Set it up so that it is designed to only work if the whole point of the entity is to host a community rather than extract profit from hosted communities.
Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads’ users on our discussions.
I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook’s terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.
no, defederation does not “just” do those things
defederation refuses to give them an in to slowly make changes to the platform that will eventually give way to a centralized power dynamic over the whole fediverse
see also: the chrome/chromium monopoly and its effect on the modern web
Just require users to be logged in to view posts, and then limit them to seeing a few hundred every day. That should stop them from stealing the content.
There are under the hood data that is not displayed on the site which they can scrap. FB would be broke if they only rely on the FB posts alone without all the tracking everywhere. Even your movement on the screen or where you pause on the page are tracked.
So no they dont get all the data unless we federate them.
They can do that on Facebook because it’s their code and their platform. They can probably do that on their app and and instance too to some extent but I don’t think they can grab much more than the content of your messages and your likes if you’re on a different instance. Lemmy is open source; if there was a way to get that data we’d know about it.
Don’t even know why and how there are arguments in favor of Meta. They’re bad, everyone knows it. People still use them because they’re basically forced to keep up with acquaintances and family.
Well, I mean, in the United States our culture is built around “business good; much innovation” and anything to stymie corporate efforts is met with groans of “you’ll understand why it must be this way when you’re older.” It’s almost reflex for some to be apologists for corporations.
Heck, I even read some takes around that damned submarine being along the lines of “we shouldn’t regulate the sub industry – that CEO was just trying to innovate!”
I actually agree with that sentiment. Put more billionaires in tin cans and drop them in the ocean where its deepest.
Well, billionaires are wonderful people deep down.
3km deep down, preferably
Well, it’s a goodish sentiment. Where I live the tendency is to be pretty much against all kind of companies and the results show. Country’s economy is a disaster (Portugal). You shouldn’t become all against companies but you shouldn’t be blindly for all companies either. There’s a balance for everything in life and people should learn more about balances.
Heck, I even read some takes around that damned submarine being along the lines of “we shouldn’t regulate the sub industry – that CEO was just trying to innovate!”
Afaik you can’t even regulate it since it’s international waters and the submersible was technically “cargo”
EDIT: TLDR you should have some common sense regarding companies.
Never underestimate what corporate greed can and willing to do.
You have to give them credit, they kept their XMPP servers until the last. But you’re right that Google killed a lot of things.
That is Google’s graveyard
Defederate from those ass holes, zuck can get bent and a whole slew of other bad things. Stupid ass hasn’t done anything of value and still acts like the dumb ass college kid bragging about getting people to give them all their personal details to use his crummy site.
While lemmy.world is not my main instance, so I have no say in whether you defederate or not, I would like to bring this arugment into the discussion, because it’s applicable for all instances, and make de-federation an absolute must for every instance.
Allowing Meta in goes directly against the idea of Fediverse, and we should fight it as much as possible.
This is a literal quote from the main header on https://www.fediverse.to/
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.
I’ve seen a lot of comments mentioning that defederating with Meta goes against the principles and main ideas of the Fediverse, that it should be inclusive and allow people to connect. But, judging by this main selling point of the Fediverse, it sounds to me like Meta shouldn’t be in the Fediverse do begin with.
Not only did I add
threads.netto my blocked instances list, I also went scorched Earth and outright blocked Facebook’s entire IP range through my firewall. Don’t want them “accidentally” reading any data from my server ;)For reference, their IP range is
157.240.0.0/16:Edit: Actually, I might have more IPs to block:
We have a moral and ethical obligation as humans to exclude any participation from Facebook or Meta. Facebook knew their algorithm increased suicide rates among it’s users, but actively suppressed this information because they also knew their algorithm made them more money. The more depressed and addicted Facebook users became, the more money Facebook made. And when they went before Congress to answer for this, Zuckerberg just did nothing, took no accountability, and nothing changed.
This isn’t about boycotting and trying to do some kind of ethical capitalism, it’s about not letting Hitler submit changes to your git repo regardless of what those changes technically are. They could be the most technically brilliant changes ever made to an open source project, but they would still be Hitler’s changes.
While I don’t support preemptive defederation and was willing to give them a chance, it should be clear by now that Facebook is uninterested in being good actors, and allowing a nearly unmoderated large instance with hate groups and also collects this much info from their users is dangerous regardless of who runs it.
I support defed due to malicious behavior, although I still think Threads is going to fail regardless of what any of us does.
Facebook sucks, there’s nothing but dumb boomers on there now. And the amount of data they harvest from their users is insane. If they think you’re a bot, they’ll demand to see your government issued ID or your SSN to “verify” you and totally not to get deeper insight into who you are and how to sell shit to you.
How Google killed XMPP
Google didn’t kill XMPP, it died on its own. XMPP still lacks encryption by default and proper file transfers (there are 3 implementations of file transfers and all of them suck). The problem is that XMPP never had a normal protocol, and as a result, clients were forced to implement the features themselves through extensions which were not supported by all clients and servers. So it’s hard to blame Google for starting to do their own implementation of features. Matrix did everything better, but for some reason people don’t use it. They don’t, because there’s Telegram, Discord and so on.
Don’t defend XMPP. It’s obsolete. If you want a federation, use Matrix.
Hello, I run a 5 user XMPP server for me and my friends Here is the deal in 2023 OMEMO encryption, which is forward secret, is enabled by default in most clients, and alerts you when it is broken But you are right that there are major flaws right now the need to be addressed
#1 is notifications on Apple are broken by Apple, the only solution is getting non-apple friends. That sucks !
That is the big big BIG problem
The rest are mostly quality of life issues
audio/video calls and conference calls mostly does not work
posted links do not display OpenGraph summary, it just stays a cryptic URL
OMEMO breaks serverside history, OpenGPG end-to-end encryption does not really work
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Presence, as in the first P in XMPP is not more advanced than 1998 ICQ, online, away, dnd, invisible, offline, custom message , There is no real presence and multi-client largely breaks presence. Only good aspect of presence are message delivered / message read notification are they are spotty when using multiple clients
These are really the bare minimum that XMPP needs to just to back as a peer in the “regular people actually using instant messaging” game No doubt, the apparent one way street of Google doing embrace, extend extinguish of the XMPP community didn’t help much. But it’s doubtful that it is google that caused XMPP to lag behind.
And on the last note, most of the XMPP client are still under active development with regular monthly progress. Especially Conversation and Gajim are doing excellent work and I still keep my friend group on XMPP because I have hope that all the points above will get fixed at some point.
I was there and I was using XMPP. Interacting with google chat slowly became the purpose of xmpp. Everyone who was using xmpp eventually found themselves talking mostly to google users. Then Google killed the link and every xmpp instance instantly became useless.
We can (and are) building a community without facebook. Or we can link to facebook and find that they quickly through sheer mass become the center of the lemmy community. And then comes the knife.
Matrix is bloatware.
The resource consumption for chat rooms is absolutely ridiculous compared to XMPP and IRC. It’s so bad that I now believe the protocol is inherently flawed or absolutely unsuitable for realtime messaging.
- XMPP: Good mature protocol but poor client ecosystem.
- Matrix: Unsuitable protocol for realtime messaging with relatively good client ecosystem.
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Matrix is definitely better. But that doesn’t mean Google didn’t help kill XMPP when the open protocol could absolutely have been pushed forward to fix the flaws.
Nope. Im out. Im not waiting for admins to do the right thing. I did that with reddit and we all see where that went.
