Meta (lemm.ee) @lemm.ee sunaurus @lemm.ee 1y ago

[Facebook federation megathread] Downvote this post if you want lemm.ee to federate with Threads. (Updated)

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.

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431 comments

As someone who deleted Facebook in 2012 and has zero intention of going back to any of Meta’s products… I don’t see a need to defederate and would prefer not to.

Hear me out… maybe i just am still figuring this whole fediverse thing out but I don’t see how it can be bad.

If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts. Like I still have trouble finding/following content across federated instances, basically going there, getting the name of a community, coming back here, and plugging it in.

Any data they could mine about me they could get anyway since it’s either publicly available or not. They could just stave the fediverse under some other domain/IP that doesn’t even need to federate.

In the event they try to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, they would just change the activity pub protocol in some way, at which point we would have two competing standards. Open source ActivityPub, as used by Mastadon, Lemmy, and the like… and Meta’s ActivityPub… if we don’t use theirs their extended (bad) version of the protocol, they essentially fork and we don’t get to see their content. So we’re just going to defederate now so they don’t have that carrot to dangle over us? Why not just know if they starts fundamentally changing the protocol we just let them break themselves back off from us? We don’t lose anything we aren’t giving up already by defederating.

The ONLY thing that fundamentally changes for me is I don’t get to follow any Threads accounts from the relative safety of the fediverse. At which point I probably have to bite the bullet and spin up my own dedicated instance so I can chose to not defederate. All that said I’m more concerned about this on the Mastadon side of things, as like you said it probably wouldn’t even integrate well with the Reddit style fediverse.
- You're simplifying things.
  You can't disregard privacy discussions as "they know everything anyway". There is a vast difference between what they know when you install Instagram/Threads and use it everyday and when you use nothing relevant to Meta. At the same time, I'm not sure how federating means your privacy is threatened either. (Let me know if I'm wrong here)
  "We could just fork away" is also a wrong idea. Everyone on tech groups are crying about Manifest v3, why are they not just forking Chromium? Think of RSS. Open source coders can never compete with a billionaire dollar company with a massive user base. It's pretty easy for Meta to dominate the platform.
  I'm not completely against federating with Meta, think there could also benefits to this, but it's also a pretty risky for the future of fediverse in my opinion
  
  100% agree that by using treads directly/installing their app, they get way more data. I would actively discourage people from using it. But all the normmies that are on Facebook Instagram anyway are gonna continue t do what they do. What I’m tryin to say here is that they get the same info on me as a Lemmy/Mastadon user by scraping the public lemm.ee site as they could by federating with us. I’m not giving up any privacy by being on a federated instance. But perhaps I’m wrong here if anyone has a technical explanation.
  
  I also agree with what your saying about manifest v3, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Let’s say 10 years from now Threads and the Open Source Fediverse (plus let Google and the other tech giants get their platforms all up in the mix) are all happily working together. Then Meta Google etc collaborate to change ActivityPub the way Google is changing Manifest v3. The Open Source fediverse continues on without implementing the new bad “features.” We become incompatible with them. We’re back to where we are now. We’re back in a small corner of the internet that doesn’t work with the broader corporate sponsored internet. The potential downside I see here would be if by letting Meta and the like play in our swimming pool, normmies have less incentive to move over to a Mastadon or Lemmy instance and we end up with a smaller pool when everything is said and done.
  
  Why play ball with corpo bullshit at all? I have no interest in facebook, meta, any other mainstream, ad-filled social media shit pile. Why give them a chance to fuck up when we KNOW they will fuck up. Because we only end up at square one while Meta steals momentum in a new space?
  
  Fuck Meta. When i start seeing promoted content I'm out.
  
  They could get even more info by federating than by scraping. However, there's nothing to stop them from spinning up a server that they don't publicly talk about and using that to get that same info.
  
  what would they get from federating besides essentially an API access?
  
  Well API access gives them more detailed information about people's actions (such as their upvotes and downvotes) than merely scraping does. From an advertising perspective that's quite valuable
  
  And what's to stop them from getting API access anyway? Maybe not from the threads.net instance but maybe from some kind of shell instance?
  
  As far as I can tell, Absolutely nothing. Which means that defederating from them does absolutely nothing to protect users of this instance. Literally the only thing it does is hurt users of both instances by preventing them from talking to each other.
  
  I would argue the opposite about the incentive for 'normies' to come here. we can already see that WAY more people are perfectly fine with using threads and other platforms from these companies. If we federate now, then all the content and community generated on our side of the fediverse will be able to be seen by a LOT more people, they will then get used to seeing it and then when it gets cut off when meta forks and defederates themselves, people will move over.
  
  A potential compromise that may or may not be possible depending on how stuff works on the back end is barring Threads users from posting or commenting to limit the amout of advertising, spam, and potential hate, but still letting them see us. It might also cause threads to defederate from us before that potentially. also maybe federating as normal for a few months and then cutting posting and commenting later, or if the load from threads gets to be too much on the lemmy servers.
  
  Yes I see it your way too, federating with Meta can be the gateway drug to bring normmies into our world. I guess I was just looking at it pessimistically.
  
  I think I saw somewhere else in this thread a link to the instances that are already defederatting, and some were listed as blocking deletions and other halfway steps so I think what you’re suggesting is possible.
  
  I think the biggest point and the reason why I think he's right about the privacy issue is that when I have an account somewhere on the Fediverse, Meta is going to be able to access that data that is publicly available from my account. That data is out there and available and that's just how the Fediverse works. The activity pub protocol is going to publish all of that activity.
  
  The difference being that if it's defederated from, then I have to have an account on their platform, and then they get access to way more of my data. Defederating as far as I can tell is a lose lose situation. Because no matter what meta is completely capable of scraping data off of the Fediverse. There is absolutely nothing that can stop them. Even if they are defederated from they will still be able to access all that data. Because the date is either public or private. If it's private then only the instance that I am hosted on has any access to it, if it's public then every instance (whether it's defederated or not) can access it.
  
  The only thing that defederating realistically accomplishes is preventing users of this instance from interacting with users of that instance. At least as far as my education can tell.
  
  It feels like there's a lot of very valid reasons for people to hate and distrust meta and there's a knee jerk instinctual reaction to defederate and I understand why but at the end of the day the admins need to be weighing the actual pros and cons.
- Thanks for the response! I want to point out one thing:
  
  If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts.
  
  Unfortunately, this isn't true (as of Lemmy version 0.18.1). With their massive user base, Threads could easily ensure that all content by their users will always have huge amounts of upvotes. This would mean that any post or comment made by a Threads user would always be at the top of "Hot" or "Active". This also goes for any synthetic content (ads in the form of posts/comments).
  
  Consider also that Facebook has full control over what their users see (through their algorithm) - effectively this means that they will be able to control what the top voted posts and comments are on all instances that federate with them.
  
  Thanks for the clarification. I think my though process would still hold true on the mastodon side of things but this is Lemmy and I didn’t think that through fully.
  
  So even if I only view my subscribed communities on non-threads instances, Meta could be using their algorithm to show/suppress posts from our side and artificially boost the upvote count to put them at the top of our pages…
  
  I’m still in the “wait and see” camp as they probably won’t integrate as much with Lemmy 🤷‍♂️
  
  I mean that's still pretty easy to handle though, give users the ability to filter specific instances from their "Hot" or "Active"
  
  Hack you can even make the default automatically exclude meta instances from that.

431 comments