As somebody who’s been on the microblogging side of fedi for nearly 6 years, and who dicks around running a couple tiny instances and is chummy with a couple other sysops - I am 100% aboard the “will never federate with Meta, and may defederate with others who do, depending on how this goes” train.
Netsplits suck. But Meta is pure cancer, and sometimes amputation is necessary.
I think Threads is Mastodon-like, even with federation it’s not currently easy for the two to interoperate. Threads users could subscribe to a community and post replies, but how I’ve seen it on my Mastodon account is that it’s super hard to keep track of discussion.
Personally, I like the “wait and see, defederate after first offense” approach that some are taking.
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As much as I hate Meta, I don’t think it makes sense to defederate preemptively. I personally feel like doing that would be telling Threads users “if you choose to use Threads, you aren’t allowed to be a part of the Fediverse” which I think basically defeats the point of federation.
I also think Threads is a good entry point for a lot of people to experience the Fediverse and move to other platforms such as Lemmy or Mastodon.
That being said, if Threads proves to be a huge problem down the road, beyond it just being Meta-owned, then we can defederate. Otherwise, we should wait and see. I think the Fediverse is big and strong enough that waiting to see won’t hurt us.
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Ask yourself, in three years from now will you be thinking “it’s so nice how Meta lets me follow and interact with their enormous userbase for free, without advertising, using my own open source server and frontend”?
Remember that’s the basic expectation today for a participant in the fediverse. If this feels implausible, doing anything else is very incompatible with the fediverse’s existing values.
The problem isn’t just that it’s Meta, it’s any situation where a much larger actor comes in with different motivations. Today we have a small number of users whose servers are almost exclusively run on a “community service” model. Meta is an advertising business. They are much bigger and will define the fediverse if allowed in. If we allow them to connect, it should be much later after organic growth which means we can assimilate them properly and deflect any bad behaviour.
What might happen if Meta throws their weight around? I can predict at least three outcomes
- Proprietary variations to ActivityPub, probably starting with something that seems “understandable” like moderation reasons.
- Certain new features get centralised on Meta’s servers only (e.g. search) claiming that it’s for efficiency in the distributed environment.
- Claiming spam problems, require individual instance operators or their users to verify themselves with Meta to enable federation.
The question in my mind is whether their intention is to destroy the competition, or keep the fediverse alive as a way to claim that they are not a technical monopoly that needs to be broken up by regulators, in the same way that Google provides most of the funding for Firefox.
Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
I have been making a related point that we should be concerned about any instance capturing too large a fraction of the space. I’m less concerned about the fact that it’s Meta than I am about any one instance having a critical mass that gives them a controlling interest.
History has shown that those with a controlling interest eventually use that control for their own benefit.
That’s why I joined a small collection of focused instances and try to subscribe to communities that are hosted in their “natural homes” instead of those on generic instances.
Would you say that also applies to the largest Lemmy instances currently like lemmy.world and lemmy.ml etc.?
Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
Yes, I would. Even if they are administered by people that have the best interests everyone at heart, sheer size means that they must be taken into account as the tools and clients evolve over time.
It’s not that the system itself should be unable to cope with large instances, it’s that the only reason for the system itself to gain that capability is in response to the rise or introduction of large instances. Some of what I’ve seen discussed is the need to change the development roadmap to accommodate the seemingly unexpected rise and possible introduction of very large instances. In other words, those instances are already controlling the direction taken.
I wrote a longer take on point 3: https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/07/07/if-i-was-meta-and-wanted-to-make-fedi-implode.html
I didn’t join the Fediverse to have Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or any other corporate surveillance outfit follow me here and mine data my data from here. I too hope SDF will block Threads.
I’m new here, and I dont have a very developed opinion about this, but my gut says that Meta is going to try to absorb (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse.
I’ve seen a lot of good reasons to do that, but I think that it might just be to get at the software. It seems silly that they would do that given that it’s free, but also they would be destroying a competitor at the same time, and really I’ve been working long enough that it wouldn’t surprise me.
Anyway, i think that maybe democracy would be a great way to decide a question like this, and it would also be interesting to figure out how to set that up in a way that the people asking the question can know whether someone is trying to cheat.
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I would counter that Meta has used their “tool” to in essence to support a genocide and that makes them untrustworthy.
As for having open standards with no gatekeepers… that point is a false equivalency. We have open standard like encryption, but that doesn’t mean one should go post their private ssh keys online. There are bad actors in this world and Meta Inc is one of them.
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Meta is not a person and Meta as a corporation (and the people who run it) are complicit in war crimes.
As for their users (which I am not conflating with Meta, the corporate entity), there is nothing stopping them from creating a Lemmy account.
Again, Meta is not a person and Meta is not it’s users. There is nothing wrong with many of the people who use Meta products.
Edited: I apologize, I removed part of the comment that was on retrospect, uncalled for.
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My take is that it’s a Trojan horse meant to handle a multiple potential competitors, the Fediverse being one of them. Meta tries to either take over or kill competitors: they purchased Instagram for fear of competing with it; they purchased Whatsapp; they considered purchasing TikTok and then when they didn’t, they instead funded the push to malign it and ban it. This is all in addition to all the other things they’ve done (like manipulating teens’ emotional states without their or their parents’ consent, building shadow profiles for non-Facebook users, using a free data usage counter as a Trojan horse to figure out what apps people were using and then purchase one of the popular ones… WhatsApp, and the previously mentioned alleged warcrimes to name a few).
We agree that Meta Inc. has no moral scruples and buckets of money. Where we disagree is that I think that not only does the corporation have no moral scruples, I think they actively use their lack of morality to snuff out competition using what ever means possible and then shape opinion to make a profit. If Threads were just a client like Memmy, Jerboa, or Tusky it would be different, but it’s not.
Edit: added a clause changed some formatting.
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There’s being an optimist, and there’s being a pollyanna.
Your optimism about Meta is badly misplaced.
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If you block all of Meta just because they’re Meta, not only do you punish countless potential valued contributors who have done no wrong,
Bullshit. There’s no “punishment” whatsoever. Those users are free to open accounts on fediverse servers at any time.
you also embolden Meta to engage with the Fediverse in less legitimate, more underhanded ways.
You mean like anointing a few heads of big instances as representatives of fedi and trying to get them to sign NDAs? Shit like that?
Let’s focus on building affirmatively and consciously the community we want
This is literally the point of pre-emptive blocking. Meta is an existential threat to the quality of this place, period point blank.
People, individual people, built Fedi out of nothing. It’s our party, we quite like it, and we can pre-disinvite entities with an enormous track record of shitty behavior whenever we want.
If you want to interact with such entities and the typical user that comes with, by all means, find servers that federate. It will drive a netsplit, and that sucks, but it’s also working as intended.
I just hope SDF is on the right side of the split. Fuck Facebook and every single thing they stand for.
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This feels a little bit like a “corporations are people” spin, intended or not. But I don’t think that’s benefited society all that much, in past.
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are people and don’t deserve to be presumed guilty of Crimes Against The Fediverse for exploring it with any particular tool.
If they would like to explore, they are free to use any of the many tools not built by a shitty company with shitty intentions and many, many, many shitty users.
I don’t understand the point of doing so preemptively. Just make a standard set of rules. Defederate when someone breaks the rules. Keep it simple. No point of sending the message of “there is no value in integrating with the fediverse if you’re a large corporation”. Much better to send a message of “if you continue to be a bad actor, you’ll lose out on the benefits of the fediverse”
The point would in part be to prevent them from pulling an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish like Google did with XMPP.
What is the policy then? Can no large company integrate any product with the fediverse for fear of EEE? Is there a certain size company where it is acceptable, or is there a list of companies that are on a blacklist?
We could make a policy against federating with social media companies that have a history of either trying to take over their competitors, or when that doesn’t work, trying to get laws passed to outlaw them.
Honestly, my biggest concern is the raw amount of data being federated with Threads would push to the instance. I could see that becoming a problem, regardless of what your take on Meta is. We are talking about a potentially huge amount of extra stress on the server.
Fair, but surely the solution is a “wait and see” approach vs just blocking it completely? Maybe Threads overloads the server for… an hour? A day? Then someone turns it off.
Plus, if there’s a lot of data exchanged, doesn’t that just mean that a lot of SDF users want what’s on Threads, or that users on Threads care about what happens here? Either way, seems like the right move is to keep the channel open if possible.
The counterargument here is that there maybe so many posts etc. that users here can not effectively block them. I know that I am on Lemmy because I don’t want anything remotely like Twitter, ever. I don’t care to follow individuals, but communities.
Granted, I’m not entirely sure how the federation aspect works. If I understand it correctly, things like images etc. will only be stored if someone from this instance actively clicks on the post. However, does the sheer amount of posts being served affect the server itself? I don’t know enough to effectively comment here, I guess.
I think the performance impacts on other instances will depend on how Meta engineers integrate Federation. I’m sure it will involve some “Federation Gateway” service on their infra, whose job it is to cache content from and make requests to the Fediverse at large.
Preventative medicine is best. Stop it before it becomes a problem proactively.
surely the solution is a “wait and see” approach
No. I don’t want anything to do with anything Mark Zuckerberg touches, and I don’t want to have to wade thru an ocean of drivel from the type of users his services attract in order to socialize online.
Yeah, but you’re arguing for completely different reasons than I’m taking about. They raised a technical concern and that’s what I addressed.
I guess I don’t understand why we would be lenient with a corporation that has actively destroyed the modern internet for profits, blatantly violates user privacy, etc etc.
The topic of defederation seems to really make people want to break out their soap boxes to talk about open access and free love, despite you know… the real world being real, and corpos willing to shit on your good thing for a few bucks.
Allowing an org to federate is not being lenient, it is how federation works. Defederating should be done to protect the federation from a node causing harm to the federation–not preemptively in my opinion.
So let a known criminal into your home, until they commit a crime? Wouldn’t not letting the known criminal into your home be the safer, more protective route?
I think a house isn’t the best comparison here, as a house isn’t a public space, whereas the Fediverse is. A better comparison might be a town square or a park. Anyone is welcome to be there, but if they do something bad, or it becomes obvious that they are going to do something bad, then they can be removed from that space. Otherwise they should be allowed to exist in that space.
The counterargument to that (I’m not taking a stance on it, but I get why others would) is “it’s already obvious, look at their past history and what they’ve already done just within the past few days”.
Facebook will cause harm by its very presence.
In any event, people with your opinion may end up in one fediverse “neighborhood,” and people with my opinion will end up in another.
I’m fine with that, as the “neighborhood” I end up in will have a lot less inane garbage everywhere.
I question if cutting them off would actually hurt them that much. Like, it would hurt, but not in a project-ending way. It’s far better IMO to use the prospect as encouragement for them to not be openly disruptive in the future.
Hurting Meta shouldn’t be the goal. Not providing direct access for Meta tentacles to the userbase should be.
Hmm. Are you worried more about our data being used, or us being lured into a proprietary service?
I won’t kid myself that our data will be used either way. What I’m concerned about the most might be the negative attention that Meta will bring to federation. I have little doubt government regulation and strangulation will follow.
If my understanding is correct, it also means that other instances will be footing part of the bill and doing the legwork to propagate and extend Meta’s spiderweb?
Yeah, I don’t actually know the details about how Threads is supposed to work. I should look into it.
I’m guilty as well.
One thing that did occur to me just now, is how Meta’s current platforms are the focus of gov pressure to censor free speech and thought crime, under the guise of public safety. What happens when this new platform federates? I think it’d be naive not to expect that stink to follow it. I have a sneaking suspicion Meta will filter content that doesn’t adhere to their own TOS, so does the blame shift to the rest of the fediverse?
Lots of open questions, but the whole thing stinks, IMO.
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If federation takes off even the government won’t really be able to gently censor it, though. They might stomp and complain but short of breaking down a server room door there’s little they can do, and the only things that get that treatment right now in the West are child porn and stolen credit card numbers.
They could basically close off the internet like Cuba or to a much lesser degree China, but closed internets/intranets tend to suck, and then they’re in the awkward position of either rubber-stamping adult websites or banning them, which straight up won’t fly anytime soon.
The only thing it could hurt is us, if everyone defederates people on threads won’t even have a chance to be exposed to other parts of the fediverse, making it even easier for Meta to execute EEE
Exclusion breeds interest. Nobody cares about going to Mcdonald’s but there’s years long waiting lists for multi Michelin star restaurants.
Remember, Facebook literally facilitated ethnic cleansing as a result of their techbro “move fast and break things” philosophy and their disinterest in paying for content mods with knowledge of local languages.
Meta doesn’t give a fuck about anyone here or anything we’ve built. Mark Zuckerberg wants power and money and to push his weird bloodless McDonalds-ized vision of what the Internet should be on every single person on this planet.
Fuck that, and fuck any sort of cooperation with it.
I made the decision to leave shitty corporate platforms for a reason. The people I’d like to follow or interact with who still only use such platforms can come to their decision in their own time.
I am not interested in selling out my values, nor am I interested in enduring a tsunami of bottom-of-the-barrel interaction with average Meta users, in the name of interoperability. Meta made the choice to be a shitty entity with shitty values that builds shitty things. I don’t feel like being covered in shit.
commenting on the responses more than the original question:
imho taking a wait & see approach with meta is like pursuing a wait & see approach with the plague.
I searched this discussion for /mail/ and was surprised to see not one hit.
Defederating from Threads is analogous to refusing to accept mail from or deliver mail to Gmail, is it not?
As long as there’s no concern with Threads knocking SDF over due to outsized mass, I think it’s a bad move.
This analogy keeps being made but I am not convinced it is correct.
Any participant in a dynamic network can choose with whom to have relationships. That’s the point of a firewall or cloudflare or a million other security efforts… to prevent interactions which due to malice or accident would cause some harm to come to the local system. There is no obligation to participate and in fact with the fediverse it is specifically designed with defederation in mind.
The comparison has been made to email explaining the fediverse concept to new users. Most people know about email. But Usenet is much more apt, if you are familiar with that. Usenet had (has) similar concepts such as the way servers share, mirror and distribute content from others servers. There is a burden imposed on any given server according to the others it has communication with. If you never had the pleasure of being on Usenet, it was basically like email discussion lists where the inbox was public. But you still needed to have access to a server to read and post. Messages were sent in similar way to email but every server would retain a copy of messages prior to forwarding them on to a list of other servers. They would in this was percolate through the network. Every server had its own version of the history of usenet according to the choices of the admins and there was not central authority or main copy.
Usenet server admins exercised broad discretion deciding who they would have a relationship with and what they would accept. Nobody was every perfectly connected to everybody else for various reasons including: legality, morals, politics, technical, geography, taste and happenstance. Individual people, hosts that allowed too many bad users, problem communities, filetypes, topics of conversation… all kinds of things were blocked by admins. Some news servers were permissive and some were restrictive. Servers that were excessively permissive became hubs of spam, and thereby risked losing their relationships with other servers because other admins got too annoyed having to deal with it. And servers that were excessively restrictive had a hard time keeping users because you couldn’t really participate properly if unable to see a lot of groups and not seeing a lot of the traffic, plus your messages would not propagate for others to see. So it was a balancing act.
For the most part this is an analogy that isn’t helpful for a lot of people… But maybe on SDF there are some who can recall those days. I do not think the concept of blocking servers breaks the concept of the fediverse at all.
(I am still undecided on my opinion on the question but I think it is a legitimate possibility.)
As I said in the other thread: Would you want to federate with Reddit?
Google hasn’t actively tried to shutdown its competing email providers… Meta has (tried to purchase or shut down its competitors on multiple occasions). Why do you think they aren’t trying to do that this time?
I joined this instance because I like what SDF does as an organization. It’s cool that they offer so many public services that anyone can use if they follow the rules. Supposing Threads ever joins the Fediverse, I’d hope SDF keeps them around as long as it’s not harming SDF users.
@OneCardboardBox @scroll_responsibly I feel the exact same way. I hope that defederation is saved for a last resort. I have friends and family who I would still like to follow, and Threads (riding on top of Instagram) could be a really helpful way to bridge that gap in a user-friendly way.
Me too. I’ve tried to get friends and family to join the fediverse, but they won’t, because they’re happy with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I think they might join Threads though if there’s a huge critical mass of people on there. I would like a way to interact with them on social media without logging onto Facebook or Instagram myself.
If they defederate does that prevent following specific users on threads once activitypub goes live?
Yes, if lemmy.sdf.org defederates from the Threads server, you wouldn’t be able to follow Threads users using your SDF account.
