Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
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A good read about that with an historical perpective : https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’ve been having a few back-and-forths in this thread about how it’d kinda suck from a user’s perspective if my instance defederated from Threads, but after reading those historical examples, I’m more amenable to instances defederating. I saw a bunch of people talking about how Meta was gonna “ruin” the fediverse, but not really elaborating past that. Your link explains that better than anyone else has.
I’ll have to ruminate on that some more to see how I truly feel about it, but those examples are compelling.
Great article, very enlightening for those of us who are too young to remember the early internet.
An important reminder of the right play here. If we are to keep the fediverse out of the hands of enshitification, we need to stay away from letting corporates play the game. Don’t federate.
This should be higher. It’s the playbook for companies like Meta.
Excellent article. I am completely against federating with Meta, and this does a great job of explaining why.
I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but I think this whole defederation business just stinks. I left Reddit because they were forcing me to use their app, but now I’m in a community that chooses what I see?
I’m hoping lemmy sets up a way to ban instances because this should 100% be up to the user.
There’s also the fact that this place is starving for content, this really feels like a shoot yourself in the foot kind of moment. The userbase is going to completely stall if there’s an alternative with 100x more content that can’t be accessed from our endpoint.
Its definitely a complicated situation, I know it’s an unpopular opinion so I’ll accept the downvotes.
In this case I kind of agreed that content is content. But I’m pretty sure Threads has no intention of directly federating with anything other than Meta approved ActivityPub apps anyway. At least as far as participation goes. Meta might publish Meta content over like a dedicated read-only bridge instance, but there’s no way in hell they are going to let users from chrisHandomeSexOffender.sk directly interact with branded content by default.
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish
Is what it’s called.
But in the process, you will also have a “monetize content from other instances users” phase.
I use Facebook and Instagram to post pictures and to stay in contact with friends and family. That being said, I don’t trust Zuck and I believe his intentions will always be to take-over and monetize. When I come to the Fediverse, I expect to see fresh, new, progressive, interesting ideas from the communities I join. And although I am older age-wise, I can see that Meta is tired and out of the loop. I would vote for not federating with Meta.
For me, being on the fediverse is an escape from big social. That’s the whole reason I’m here. Conversations are more organic, less restrictive, and generally better. Plus, it has an awesome DIY feel to it.
I don’t want to lose that to Meta’s insatiable hunger for data.
Excuse me for being crass, I sincerely apologize, but fuck Threads.
I don’t see why they would bother with the fediverse as it exists to be honest. To me it seems like a liability from their point of view. Not sure if they’ve spoken more about this but Facebook getting in more shit by having their users exposed to stuff that they don’t explicitly control doesn’t seem like something they’d want.
That being said, I feel like defederating with them if needed is a solid idea but their sheer size may make that decision difficult for instances that are looking to grow given that they’ve already amassed twice the accounts of the Lemmy fediverse in a few hours. Now not all growth is good growth like you’ve mentioned but there’s no partial defederation so either you leech on some of their userbase or you don’t.
I see some places going for growth if that’s an option which may not necessarily be a bad choice (unless they impose strict rules to follow if you want to federate with them) given that facebook has the capital to bury us with if they choose to so our compliance probably won’t have a very big impact on how things play out in the long run.
It’s because companies like Meta want all the power they can get. As you said, there’s no reason for them to join the fediverse, other than to control it or kill it off, that is.
I’m not against Threads existing, especially with the way Twitter is going. People need an alternative and I don’t believe that Mastodon is the answer for many.
But Threads and the fediverse can absolutely exist separately, and is why I support defederation.
I know people will hate this but I think zuck is just a nerd with the money to do anything he likes but he’s not really very social and not really into sports or anything so like many of us he spends his focus on tech stuff and science fiction.
He obviously kinda loves the idea of the metaverse, and yeah Facebook is riddled with problems but they’ve never really done any of the really immoral and anti competitive things bill gates Microsoft did so I think it’s jumping the gun a bit to instantly jump to EEE - it’s possible he just genuinely believes the future is going to be a federation of open source protocols and he simply wants to live in that future.
That said there’s a lot of problems inherent in letting any big company gain any form of dominance over open social networks especially one as frequently socially problematic as meta
not really into sports or anything so like many of us he spends his focus on tech stuff and science fiction.
I’ve heard he does Jujitsu or something like that.
Yeah exactly, and most the open source Devs I know have done some martial art or other, not knocking it as exercise or anything but it’s every bit as nerdy that electric surfboard he had - if I had his money I’d get in a crazy Chinese Kung Fu master to teach me how to snatch roast chickens and I’d buy every stupid tech gadget toy but I’d still go to bed reading tech articles and dreaming about living in a Cybertronic eco utopia
Don’t federate, they are a terrible company.
Meta has repeatedly introduced features intended to scrape larger amounts of data about our lives and tie it all into one big profile that they can sell. This area of the internet feels like one of the few remaining areas that they haven’t reached, and I’d bet everything I have that’s why they’re introducing this. I couldn’t be more strongly against allowing them a way to link my data here with the data they have from my usage of their existing products. While I understand the idea of open federation to allow disparate communities to interact, one of the lines I’ll draw is letting a massive corporation in like that.
I’m curious, are there policies for usage of data on a service like this? If you federate Meta (or any instance, or this instance), is that granting them the right to use your data as they wish? Assuming the answer is yes, could the Fediverse at large implement a broad, let’s call it “Terms & Conditions”, that must be acknowledged upon federation, regarding how the data is used? Or, if the answer is no, what are the limitations to how data in the Fediverse is used?
Also, how useful is my data to them anyway, if they can’t target me with ads? Certainly there are uses, but isn’t the primary end-game just selling me something? If I’m on an independent instance, I’m not sure how much I care about them having access to my data.
Edit: Mastodon founder Eugen touches on some these questions here. This is specific to Mastodon, I have no idea how much of this carries over for Lemmy.
Will Meta get my data or be able to track me? A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.
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They’ll still be able to scrape the fediverse and all instances without threads federating with them. Defederating doesn’t stop their access to your PUBLIC data on the fediverse.
Anyone can access the public data, but that is not a good excuse to invite them in through the front door. Defederating, at the very least, sends the message that they are not welcome to participate here.
And not being welcomed is going to stop them?
The guaranteed way to fail is to not even try to succeed.
I mean, we have nothing more to lose if they are hypothetically going to succeed. What does it cost us to just try? Why are so many people against even trying, despite it requiring absolutlely zero effort from most of us? Why rush to submit to bad things before they happen?
Meta’s interests as a corporate entity are inherently incompatible with the goals behind the creation of a decentralized and federated service. I do not believe they are able or willing to act in good faith, and I don’t think their presence should be tolerated. Personally, I did not jump ship from Reddit to be reconnected with the likes of Facebook or Instagram. The entire effort feels to me like a panic response to the notion that there are people like myself not being shown what Meta wants seen, and they can stay mad about it.
Addendum:
On the other hand, I think people should be the arbiters of the content they view. I don’t get the notion of browsing /all and then being upset at what you find there, it’s just a raw firehose of what people are up to on the internet. There is a value in letting people consume the content they want, where and how they want it. I’m sure someone would be happy to be linked in to this larger ecosystem. There’s a lemmy instance dedicated to mirroring reddit content and I don’t see the appeal of that, but more power to the people who get use from it.
The nature of the fediverse and activitypub is that we can’t stop Meta from making use of this platform. We’re going to have to handle this situation by proving that we have something different and perhaps better than anything Meta can offer. But I won’t stay in a space where their size and influence is permitted to dominate all conversation, it’s already slightly jarring to hear people talk as if lemmy.world were the de-facto center of the lemmyverse.
Well thought out comment and I wholeheartedly agree.
And it’s not just Meta. It’s any for-profit organization. If we pay nothing to use it, we are the product.
As the greed develops, we’re becoming the product even in places where we do pay to spend our time.As others have said: The day the mega corporations are allowed inside this sphere is the day I look for yet another alternative way to spend my time.
I would say it is alright if for profit organizations want to run their own instance if it is just with some communities about their products or services, like a game or some hardware device perhaps or a local public transport organization and some users who are their employees.
Companies invading the fediverse was always going to happen, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You get more users, a rock solid instance, possibly more support in coding, and maybe more. There’s no reason to have bots essentially copying content from a place that offers federation
There’s also definite downsides, federating could be expensive for smaller instances to handle all that content, potential pressure for more tracking/less porn/more ad friendly code built into the system, making communities better through proprietary extensions to slowly cannibalize the rest of the instances.
Blanket decisions to block corporate instances is probably a bad move, though keeping a short leash is wise.
But think of the type of content meta/IG is going to be creating. It’s going to be a ton of garbage self centered wanna be influencer posts. A never ending content generation machine. If the entire feed of IG was federated, the All view would be squashed with IG garbage.
All is currently like 40% porn, 40% shit posting, and 20% other, you aren’t losing anything by adding Instagram.
Exactly, the way it should be.
Of course you’re gonna have “low quality influencers”, but if you’re attracting THOSE people, you’ve already attracted a massive audience of other people. Those low quality influencers wouldn’t be coming over in the first place if there wasn’t a massive audience to appeal to in the first place. And if there is a big audience on these platforms, then you’re gonna have the higher quality creators come over.
I make YouTube videos, but I’m hesitant to fully dump Twitter because I’m losing out on a critical connection pathway with my (admittedly small) audience. If I could know that a majority of my audience was on mastodon AND that I could collaborate with other creators in my niche, I’d fully switch over and delete Twitter from my phone in a heartbeat.
But I can’t do that because everyone uses Twitter.
Threads is letting people get their foot in the door for the Fediverse. And I think it’s really sucky that, if I want to reach the biggest audience, I might just have to make an account on Threads, because practically all the instances out there are defederating from it.
Lemmy/Mastodon et al basically exist on a principle of ethics that outweighs the desire of “wanting to reach the biggest audience”. People have deliberately chosen this platform over twitter and reddit, deliberately gone from high traffic social media to a platform with a much more limited userbase, because of those principles. Of course the hope is that one day this platform will grow as big or bigger than the old platforms, but organically and on its own principles.
It seems counterproductive to suddenly ignore those principles for the sake of traffic, just because a major corporate player suddenly wants a bite of this platform as well.
If you want visibility and a big audience on account of your career then by all means set up accounts on every platform you can think of, that is all part of that game, but don’t try to force this platform to become one of them just because of that desire for visibility.
I can see where you’re coming from, especially with the part about how people came to Lemmy and Mastodon to get away from the type of people who want to reach the biggest audience. But I guess that leads us down the path of, “What SHOULD Lemmy be?”
I recently ditched both Reddit and Twitter for their fediverse equivalents. But they haven’t been true replacements because they don’t have the users to replicate the sheer amount of content. The mildlyinteresting subreddit has 22 million subscribers. The equivalent on lemmy.world has 100 subscribers. The last post was 3 days ago. I’m not even a fan of that subreddit, but the fact that such a weird type of content can keep so many users engaged speaks to how many people are out there searching for mildly interesting things to share.
Lemmy just doesn’t have that.
I guess it all comes down to this. I don’t care that much about expanding my content creator presence into Mastodon/Twitter, that’s just not the type of creator I am. But (I think) Lemmy could use more creators. Not even “content creators” in the traditional sense of youtubers or twitch streamers, but random people making posts on their favorite communities. If someone’s favorite subreddit is mildlyinteresting, and they come over here and see that the biggest mildlyinteresting community only has 100 subscribers, what do you think they’re gonna do?
Which leads back into the question, “What SHOULD Lemmy be?”
Do you think it should be a reddit equivalent with as many users as that has? With as many super-niche communities as you can think of?
Or should it be a somewhat niche thing with an admittedly passionate community?
Maybe I’m just kinda imposing my own beliefs here (as someone looking for a reddit replacement), but I’d prefer the former. And you don’t need super high quality users to post on communities like mildly interesting or whatever, you just need interested people. You need numbers.
Exactly. No offense but I don’t care about your business.
If I walk into a bar,I just want a drink. I’m not looking to get advertised to. If I go to a park, why would I want to see fifteen billboards advertising to me?
Is there really nowhere to go where we aren’t always the product? Lemmy and the fediverse at large are basically saying that since we are the content creators and the users and chip in to keep it all going that we aren’t being mined for data and swamped by bullshit. I’m good with that.
You should never gatekeep though, it looks bad in my opinion
Can Meta scrape the data off other apps like mastodon from federated communities? I don’t exactly know how that works. I’m assuming mastodon and other not profit based apps don’t track any data so how would meta joining the fediverse change it?
I think it’s all but given that meta would have the largest number of users using its apps in the fediverse. Threads already has 2 million sign-ups in hours so it would be a miss to just defederate from it and lock down millions of users from interacting with meta users. Let’s see how it goes.
Edit: 5 million sign-ups in 4 hours according to zuck
They can scrape without federation. Scrapers are just scripts that will go to websites, collect the html data, keep what has been deemed valuable, collect all of the links to other pages on that page, stick them onto a stack and pick one off that stack to continue to the next page and keep going.
yeah, so it really does not matter whether they are federated or not as far as our info goes. The only difference is how much content we see and how many people come in and out.
While I’m generally opposed to defederation as a general rule, I’m also old enough to have suffered through Microsoft’s Embrace Extend Extinguish paradigm. Never again. Absolutely no federation with megacorp instances.
I think it’s more like the enshittification process.
- Try to lock in as many users as possible
- Try to lock in as many businesses as possible
- When both 1 and 2 are of sufficient size, squeeze them both for profits by ruining the platform altogether
At least, that’s how I read it. We’re currently at step 1 and I’m sure Meta is creative and greedy enough to make it all the way to step 3.
I guess the E.E.E. process will also be part of this, most likely after step 1 has been completed?Yep, kerberos being a perfect example.
Personally I’ll support instances that choose to tell Zuckybags to fuck right off, and I think the fediverse is pretty well set up to be able to do that.
But I guess the bigger question how is how we protect our information, since it seems like everything that happens here is pretty wide open.
The big companies will all come for places like this and trawl for “genuine human input” to feed their AI cashbabies, and what we create has value. Maybe even the shitposts. So how do we protect that?
There’s no way to protect against that. They can still have a scraper set up to crawl the fediverse without threads ever federating with any of the instances.
Yeah, I get that, and I don’t think the solution is a walled garden. But I do think it will become more of an issue as these companies get more aggressive about going after any data they can find.
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The difference is that Reddit was looking to IPO off that data, here that won’t happen. We were the product there.
If you’re ok with your data being used, maybe there’s a way to opt into that. But I would rather it be something data trawlers had to forcibly ask first rather than just stealing it and then saying “oopsies”
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At this point, I really don’t know. But I guess the difference is that here, or possibly other instances at least the users can have a say in it. Posting topics like this helps.
That for me feels way better than just having some company give out the terms and having us accept it whether we like it or not.
I feel like this is all still new enough to where we can shape it in a different direction than “growth at all costs”
It’s not really fair to call it stealing.
This is an open source platform so you can use the code freely, the developers decided to make it open source because creating tools and sharing them for everyone to use enables us all to work together and build better technology which improves the quality of life we all enjoy.
I take the same attitude when posting here, I’m making a public statement because I believe we as a society make better choices when all voices are heard and that I have something to add to the discussion - if someone wants to take an idea that I have and build in it or incorporate it into a speech they give then I’m happy about it because that’s the point of expressing an opinion, for it to spread. If someone learns from what I’m talking about then I’m happy, I don’t feel robbed or like I lost anything.
Coming on a free and open source platform then demanding ownership of your text would make even less sense than Bob Ross getting angry that people are following along with his painting tutorials. I get the sentiment and yes ai is changing the world and people will lose their jobs but it’s also bringing endless positive advancements which will improve and extend billions of lives - if datasets are locked down by oddly selfish rules like having to track down the original poster and ask for permission then only big corporation’s will be able to train LLMs and other ai thus giving them a monopoly.
Also another interesting hypocrisy that a lot of people are missing, meta might be awfull in many regards but they’re actually pretty good with open source and wrote a lot of the tools that made things like stable diffusion possible. Taking what they give then complaining when they use content posted publicly just feels so odd to me.
Just to rag on the Bob Ross metaphor, because I absolutely love him, he might not have minded if I followed along with his paintings, but he was absolutely selling some pthalo blue (which is not a bad thing its own right) and what happened to him after he died was absolutely terrible in terms of monetisation without his permission.
I guess this is all sorta tangential to the main thread here, but I think we should start seeing our information in terms of actual value, and even if we choose to contribute to an open platform like this (which I absolutely support) how much is that actually worth.
Kinda like if you work pro bono, it’s still good to keep a record of what your billable amount would have been.
Zuck and co have a vested interest in making us think that what we provide is worthless
I really am split on this, I think that modern corporate media has a big incentive to convince people that we shouldn’t participate in community projects and that working together for the betterment of all is somehow a bad thing because this is what directly affects their monopoly and control.
That said you’re right that other portions of corporate evil benefit by us thinking it has no value.
I do think we need to move away from the pushed ideal that the only benefit to work is money because that really does just benefit the rich - take Wikipedia as an example, writing pages for that isn’t going to earn me money but it allows me to live in a world where Wikipedia exists, and it’s not just me that gets to use it but everyone trying to do anything now has access to that resource which means whatever I do it’s possible that the work I put into editing articles has somehow made it a bit easier or a bit more possible.
This is even more true with open source software, it’s possible that a project I’ve done some small thing to help has grown to benefit the people making point of sale systems that allow a cafe I like to reduce costs and stay in business or maybe the veg was grown by someone that learned how from a YouTube video made using open source software…
AI is already making so many more things possible and when natural language control is better evolved it’s going to have benefits like giving every human on the planet access to world class healthcare, education and tech support, it’s going to allow anyone with an idea to make it reality and to allow open source developers to create really amazing things that we can all use.
If harvesting my throw away comments and old wiki edits can create a tool that will allow me to sit down and describe the electronics projects and coding ideas I want to make then they’re welcome to it.
Hey I just wanted to say first of all, this has been great discussion, I really appreciate it. I guess it all goes back to the original purpose of the internet, which was never meant to be turned into some heavily monetized cash cow for a handful of companies. Open source has created some amazing tools, and I’m a big fan of things like GNU and cc licenses. For me, individuals using whatever I write as a tool is no problem at all. But when it comes to a big company that just wants to scrape data for a LLM, that’s not the same.
This is wild thinking, but like say if they wanted to scrape the lemmyverse, ok, but they had to pay so we could maintain servers etc. We’d all benefit.
Yeah maybe a share-alike clause would be best, use the data if what you’re making is properly free otherwise pay
The zucc better keep his sticky fingers away
I seriously doubt meta is going to have an open federation policy anyway. It’s definitely going to be a tiered white list of Meta-approved Activitypub apps and instances. With built-in monetization for devs in the Activitypub “market.”
Honestly it’s what reddit should have done if they were smart. Figure out a way to monetize through the API by pulling third party apps into a walled garden.
