Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?
Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They’re working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.
Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.
What do you think should be done?
EDIT: correction
EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.
Serious question - I’m not up to speed on what kind of effort goes into defederating/refederating. If it’s easy, then is “wait and see” an option?
Alternatively, is preemptively defederating now and refederating later if we want also an option?
If both options are on the table, I say wait and see just because it’s unexplored territory though I agree that it probably won’t be great. If it’s a big pain in the ass to change our stance, also wait and see; that way we only have to do the PITA thing once.
If it’s easy
It is, there’s basically a setting on the server to block certain instances. So the admin would just update that setting to enable/disable federation. However, defederation doesn’t delete any data on either side, it just stops the flow of new data.
So if you care about Meta having a copy of all content for some period, the better option is to defederate now and refederate later if they somehow play nice. There is a risk that Threads could defederate from any instances that blocked it, but I’m guessing they’re not going to bother, I think they’re just looking for data to scrape.
It’s actually relatively trivial to scrape the public data of any instance. If Meta really cared (which I highly doubt), there’s nothing stopping them spinning up a temporary instance with a bot that auto-subscribes to all communities it knows about.
Defederating from threads doesn’t change the fact that all information on any instance is pseudonymous, but very public.
Sure, but they have to actively do that, whereas federation just gives it to them. I want them to have to put in the work to scrape the various instances, not get it for free.
Couldn’t they just get an intern to spend an afternoon actively doing that? It can’t be that hard. I’m not a programmer, but it seems to me that if someone has the proficiency to set up an instance, they would have the proficiency to set up crawlers.
Probably, but they’ll want to integrate it somehow as well. One of the main points of federation is to get access to more content, which means your users have more stuff to look at, which means you get more data to link interests to ads to improve click-through. Scraping it would just give them the data, but they’d have to recreate it for their users to consume.
So scraping is only half the battle here.
wait and see
Both are an option and easy enough.
Honestly, and that’s my personal take as a user not as an admin… I’m in the “wait and see” boat, but I’m nor particularly full of trust about this so my goto would be:
- Defederate pre-emptively
- Wait for meta/threads to prove it’s not a shitshow
- Reconsider federating if/when we get there
I think there should be some instances that at least try federating with Threads just to see how it goes, but I don’t want it to be this instance. The existence of voting in the Agora alone is a reason not to want a massive influx of new users from Instagram. This instance is uniquely vulnerable to the threat Threads may pose.
This instance is uniquely vulnerable to the threat Threads may pose.
Would you mind expanding on that? Why do you think that? If that refers to voting in the Agora, then I’d like to mention that users from other instances can’t vote in the Agora. That is only for users of sh.itjust.works.
On the one hand this is true, but on the other hand making an account here is trivially easy. I can’t speak to whether integration would lead to an influx of new SJW accounts from Threads to brigade these polls, but I can see why someone might be concerned.
That can happen with or without federation.
Nay, not worse than some instances already in lemmy and exposure is two way, but looking at the results, it seems I’ll have to create an alt on some other instance if I want to participate with the bigger communities of Threads.
It’s funny that shit like this gets automatic defederation and not the way some admins behave, make bullshit up, and leave links up to instances they claim have pedo content instead of reporting it to the competent authorities. Just like Musk, they make Zuckerberg actually look good in the shit comparison. But people only want to see what they want to see, specially when it involves someone who puts on a very different face when they interact with them.
Stay federated and if it’s annoying, then defederate.
I can’t bring myself to care whether or not someone using a Facebook app can get a shit post in their feed.
Wut
Defederate
Please defederate from threads.
It kinda defeats the entire point of the fediverse. It couldn’t be more obvious what they want to do, and that’s control it, or destroy it.
Federate, let them get a taste of sweet Lemmy content, then cut them off. Will make the Threads experience feel broken for native Threads users.
Will make the Threads experience feel broken for native Threads users.
Genuinely, why would you want that? It seems pointlessly hostile. Shouldn’t we welcome more users?
For the lulz, obviously. I legitimately forgot Threads exists until this post came up so I’d be hard pressed to honestly claim any meaningful level of investment in the topic.
Cut the thread.
Defederate.
Wait and see. As much as I hate Meta, i don’t think we have much to gain by being a walled garden. Maybe we have also much to lose if we federate, who knows. I would not complain much if we defederate. If we do federate, there should be a zero-tolerance policy. If Meta tries some bullshit, or if there’s the slightest doubt, we should defederate immediately.
This. Lemmy feels too small. If we get decent content from Threads, it’ll be a boost to our communities.
If threads had decent content, why are they federating?
I wonder how much information they can farm by federating? Facebook and Twitter both have recorded history of significant federal government involvement in their platforms, and collect an ungodly amount of information for commercial purposes too.
Is there any useful information they could gather if federated that they can’t just gather with crawlers?
Not clear but I imagine a decent amount can get crawled. Honestly I think the much bigger threat is the history of big tech using EEE to crush any potential competition.
Unless we get access to internal documents from Meta, we can only guess at their reasoning.
As such, their goal shouldn’t directly factor into our decision. If federating with Threads is good for our community, we should do it. If it’s bad, we should either not do it, or defederate.
I still haven’t seen any reasons anyone thought were positive besides more people.
More people is pretty significant. AFAIU the Lemmy monthly user base is in slow decline.
At this point, most of my Everywhere feed is bots with occasional posts from people. A minority of posts have comments. I see the same few dozen users commenting on stories.
Granted, that’s an effect of the instances my host pulls from, but it seems like a bad sign.
You could make the argument that Threads users might have different interests, but (IMO) that’s secondary to the lack of organic content.
It’s not in serious decline though, I don’t know what numbers you’re talking about. Also, Meta lost 80% in their first month, which I think would make them 20 million users. I looked the other day to find actual numbers, they must be super low because I couldn’t find any, zilch, nada that were current. We’re at around 1.5 million, we’re doing fine. Next reddit fuck-up will probably double it. We honestly couldn’t handle too much more anyway plus threads doesn’t provide us any with content, we’re the zoo.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=12
The “Active Users Monthly” stat shows a slow decline after the Reddit migration.
Posts by month is going up, as is comments. Which is good.
As much as I hate Meta/Facebook, we need activity and content to keep Lemmy alive, and Meta can potentially help provide that. If after federation, it turns out to be overwhelmingly toxic or the users provide no value at all, then defederate. If nothing else, doing it later will encourage Meta users to try other insrances.
I was just checking this point before registering here, and this instance pleases me :)
Welcome aboard then.
As you can imagine, we’re not counting votes from accounts made after the vote thread was created because that opens up a bunch of shenanigans. You’re welcome to discuss here though. Thanks,You. are. awesome.
Thanks, you’re awesome too
I don’t get the point of pre-emptively de-federating. This would allow lemmy to have a wider reach amongst a general audience rather than be a niche community. We should only defederate after seeing if it’s a problem or not to be federated with them.
What are the concrete reasons a wider reach would be better? Are there any other reasons why it would be better to have them or not?
It offers a completely different perspective than what people on lemmy provide, which is usually people in the tech sector. So many smaller subreddits exist on reddit because of it’s wider reach. Look at [email protected] for example, the last post in “hot” was from a month ago, current numbers on lemmy just can’t sustain smaller subs like that.
I don’t mean this in a rude way, but shouldn’t you hang there then?
I mean by that logic no one should be using lemmy then, we all should stay on Reddit. This instance was created due to Reddit corporate greed, not because Reddit had “normies”
Your logic seems to be:
- I want all of threads content - Which we won’t get because they can just look at us, not interact with us currently. Also, what content? It’s going to be pretty bad.
- I want all of the users to come in -Our instances are small and can be overwhelmed easily. They will do that easily just looking at it, it might end up being a constant ddos.
My logic
- provide more content for people to look at for a year or two and then think about letting the companies like Meta in, who are known to be evil
- we don’t know how they plan to fuck with the fediverse, they are planning it though
Here’s my low int take: more people means more discussions, which is the whole reason we use this service in the first place
Completely agree. If it is really an issue, we can always defederate later.
We’ve seen this multiple times before. This will not give Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever more reach, it will connect us to the metaverse and then after we have invested in it they will pull the rug. This is classic big tech vs OSS, using EEE to attack the competition.
Good news is this means they see us as a threat
I don’t see how they can get us invested in something that they can take away. The whole point of this system is that each instance fundamentally does not rely on a third party, right?
Do you really want to be the one testing how they’re going to fuck with the system? This instance didn’t update to .19 because they wanted the bugs out. I don’t think we know yet how much and how hard meta is going to try and use our system and/or break it.
![[Discussion] Pre-emptive Threads defederation](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/110b9a64-3945-4558-a7f0-4276854c3731.jpeg){kind=link}