Context
There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.
The lemm.ee federation policy states that it’s not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it’s likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.
However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.
Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse
- As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the “all” page of federated servers.
- Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don’t apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the “all” page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
- Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
- In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don’t have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can’t even imagine yet.
By the way, we’re not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation
- Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
- Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
- We don’t really know what to defederate from - it’s completely possible that “threads.net” will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.
So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.
Update:
By now, it’s clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):
- lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
- Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads
While it seems to be a minority, it’s still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.
A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.
The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:
- The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
- Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
- We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook
Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option
In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:
- There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
- Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
- There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)
Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.
Again, I realize this approach won’t please everybody, but I really believe it’s the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.
Facebook, aka Meta, is cancer. The best way of dealing with cancer is eliminating them at their roots.
Failing that, excising cancerous tissue before it metatasizes is common sense. Even if it’s ultimately benign (which I doubt, given their track record), given the dangers that inaction would cause, it’s best to preemptively exorcise it out of the Fediverse.
Oh, metastasize has to be our new buzzword here.
Given that Meta is cancer, it’s bound to happen, lol!
I concur. It’s quite the pun.
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EDITED: After initially misreading the post, I’m actually very glad that I just joined an instance where the majority of people is so against Facebook and their scummy business.
Hey, are you sure you’re not misinterpreting the votes? There was a small minority of users in favor of federating, but the majority was against it.
I did misread lol thanks for reaching out. The way it was phrased confused my brain…long day at wok haha
Lemm.ee is a great instance if you ever want to ride shotgun on the long road trip of the fediverse but what I love the most about this experience is exactly this…create your own server, instances, communities. We are getting an early chance to build and customize our own user experience here. The idea of keeping out what we are fighting against makes sense to me and wouldn’t it be cool if @sunaurus did it early in the game like the 2nd largest instance did and beat .world to it? (if they follow suit, which I can’t predict)
I’m here to escape Sillicon Valley, not to cut off contact with anyone who’s chosen not to.
First of all did you make your own instance for your profile?
Second of all and more importantly I think you’re right. Even if you aren’t part of a server and they decide to federate it indirectly screws us over in the short term and we get probably get totally messed up in the long term
Some said it’s the Star Trek borg and I’m not a fan but it’s a great parallel
Yes, I spun up my own instance. Partly for fun, but also to have control over my own federation should conflict affect an instance someone else operates.
That’s nice. I would do it myself but thinking my 3 brain cells sad lol and compared to some people I’m not very tech savvy
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I host it on a very small VPS. A huge benefit is c/all never contains communities I have no interest in. Therefore, communities I subscribe to are “favorites”. c/all is a superset of my favorites plus communities I check less frequently.
<3
I’d like to see how Threads evolves before preemptively deciding to cease interacting with it. However, if it’s anything like Facebook or Instagram today then please keep it away from me
I’m coming from the opposite approach. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me a third time? Jesus Christ, stop getting fooled. I’d prefer to defederate and monitor. If Threads turns out to be different, I’d be interested in having a trial account on an instance that federates with Threads. I have a similar feeling about if Tumblr started federating. Cautious trialing from an instance that federates.
Fool me once, fool me twice,
fool me chicken soup with riceThis comment was the highlight of my day.
I’ll guess that it won’t be different.
Exactly. There’s no reason to make federation the default. Keep them at arms length for now.
Like how many people just block random numbers from calling them. No reason to just add millions of Instagram users. I don’t care what “influencers” are up to.
same with the fool me’s. It can’t end well. In case it does, there’s always the option to federate after? Not that I agree with that. Two separate audiences in my opinion, and letting meta in EVER will give them ungodly amounts of market share/critical mass on the fediverse.
Fuck Zuck and fuck Meta
fuckfuck
Please follow lemmy.ml and stand up to the big guys and defederate in whatever form it comes. This is a chance to finally stand alone from the Mega corps and have some peace and quiet.
I’m really surprised by how many
allow
s I’m seeingThank you for sharing this. I’m looking for a new masto server.
What does N/A signify? And does allow mean they are federating?
More like they haven’t publicly announced anything yet.
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N/A != NDA
So they actually meant Not Applicable? My bad, I thought they misspelled it.
Looks like I chose poorly with mastodon.social. I really don’t want to have to switch instances at this point.
Yes, it was definitely a poor choice. Eugen, the owner of the instance was even involved in NDA talks with meta.
“Peace and quiet” is very well put.
Preach! There’s a good opportunity here to keep this space free from the greedy hands of a bunch of rich assholes. People are so eager for there to be a ‘new twitter’ but haven’t even raised one question about whether threads has fundamentally addressed the problem that has lead to the downfall of twitter and Reddit. Meet your new boss, same as the old boss. Why the hell should we keep just hoping that some billionaire ceo will do what’s right. Even if that ceo does the right thing, they will eventually be replaced.
There can be a place on the internet free from capitalist exploitation for profit. Communities can exist solely for the sake of the community. Not every goddamn thing needs to be monetized. Send a clear message that past tactics will not fly here.
Amen
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Peace and quiet is so rare in social media these days, that is so not obvious that we somehow have it here
Exactly we’re here and doing all this work on our own dime so we can have a social media site that won’t turn out like every corporate social media site ever. It’s already working the way we want it to without any help from Facebook, so logically giving them a seat at the table can only not help.
Considering Meta mines as much data from as many people as possible just to advertise to them and also they can’t even launch Threads in the EU right now because of how aggressively it tracks literally everything about their users and Threads’ only purpose is to gather more data to sell to more people, I think that alone is worth not letting them play.
It won’t matter to you if you’re using ActivityPub, because they can’t mine any of your data that isn’t publically available through scraping anyway.
Given that pretty much every instance that I know of is hell-bent on never federating with commercial entities, are there any that don’t have an issue with it?
It looks like I’ll have to move and I don’t even know where to.
Someone posted a link to a Mastodon post (edit: found the post) from the admins at lemmy.world which basically stated that they would take a “wait and see” approach. I can’t find the post right this moment but I’ll keep looking. In any case, it seems lemmy.world will not be defederating, at least until Meta does something bad enough, whatever that may be.
I also saw a post from vlemmy.net about having to defederate from another instance, and the whole post was extremely transparent and well put together. I suspect they will not be defederating from Meta, as it seems that they don’t want to defederate from anyone, barring laws being broken. With that said, they seem to be based in Ireland and I’m not sure whether they’ll have to defederate from Threads for legal reasons or not.
There was a comment somewhere that had a list of servers that had already taken the stance of federating when possible, had not taken a stance at all, and had preemptively defederated. I’ll see if I can find that one for you, as well.I misremembered, it was a list of Mastodon servers, not Lemmy.I’m not sure if this is helpful, but I hope it at least points you in the right general direction! I’m in kind of the opposite boat from you - I am disappointed that lemmy.world will be federation with Threads, so now I’m poking around to find someplace that suits me better. It can be challenging figuring out where instances stand!
Unfortunately vlemmy also seems to be leaning towards blocking Meta: https://vlemmy.net/comment/639289
[edit]
In the light of the downvotes:
Is your email server refusing connections from Google because you’re worried about SMTP being taken over by evil corporations?
I mean, if you do then cool. I want to email my grandma sometimes so I look for one that doesn’t.
Sorry about the downvotes, I think I may have caused people to be very trigger-happy with downvotes by asking for downvotes on the main post 😅 I’m seeing a lot of downvotes on quite high quality comments here.
Regarding the e-mail example, I do want to refute it a bit:
E-mail providers (including Google) are in fact notorious for how strictly they block other servers. This is especially true for any SMTP servers which focus on sending ads - if you set up an SMTP server which aims to earn profit by sending out ads to normal users who haven’t asked for any ads, major providers will very quickly blocklist your server and not deliver anything sent from you.
While it’s true that Threads is not sending out ads yet, you just need to look at how Facebook and Instagram do ads already, and how basically all of their revenue comes from selling ads - it would be very unexpected for me if ads were not their core business model for Threads as well.
Yes, it’s healthy to block scammers. I was asking specifically if there’s an instance of an internet protocol where non-commercial entities decide to block commercial ones like here. Like refuse interoperability with Hotmail / outlook.com because Microsoft is nasty. That’s what’s being proposed by many here.
Threads is already massive, they’re happy with monetising their own users and likely do Activity Pub to appease EU regulators.
If you find a good neutral non-defederating lemmy instance please let me know
Strongly in favour of defederating. Firstly because I don’t want advertising or big businesses taking over feeds, but the point you made about moderation is critical. The sheer amount of content that instance admins will have to deal with will be unmanageable.
On a side note the whole fediverse desperately needs solid moderation tools to handle it’s growth.
Not my instance
(so I didn’t vote), but I must say this is a very reasonable approach. I wish other instances would also consider these points.No you should vote. This affects us all
Now I won’t pretend I’m smart or anything but meta will probably make giant communities and then lock them behind their
data harvesterapp when enough users have joinedGot a point there. Voted.
I concur with you in that this is a great example on how to handle the situation in advance and prepare for when the situation is imminent. I really like the write-up and the @[email protected]’s stance on the matter. Prime example of a great instance administration, I think.
Not totally sure where I stand on the issue but I definitely despise meta as much as the next guy.
I’m definitely not 100% informed about the fediverse, but my understanding was that Threads implements the same protocol that Mastadon servers use, and that that’s different from what lemmy uses. Is that incorrect?
Lemmy and Mastodon both use ActivityPub, which is the protocol that Threads wants to implement as well.
Oh wow I had no idea that lemmy and mastadon used the same protocol.
Excuse my ignorance, but what does that mean for the ability of lemmy servers and mastadon servers being federated with each other? I wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but if we’re talking about lemmy being federated with threads, I feel like I must be misunderstanding how something works.
Yep, they are federated. I’m not a Mastodon user myself, but from what I understand, the Lemmy <-> Mastodon experience is not great at the moment, mainly due to differences in UX. This would most likely apply for Threads as well.
Regardless of the fact that it is meta doing it, I don’t know if a mastodon or twitter like service is gonna work well with Lemmy when it has that much users. So whatever way it goes, I don’t really mind