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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.?
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.
I'm all for defederating corporations.
The fediverse is already a reaction which is intentionally anti-corporate. Most of us are here because we don't want another Twitter or Reddit or Instagram or Facebook or whatever.
Considering how Google killed XMPP, by the time the harm was done, it was too late to exclude them.
The fediverse is not for corporates. Keep them out.
While I understand that sentiment, I don't think we should be thinking of this from the standpoint of accepting or rejecting corporations, but rather from the standpoint of accepting or rejecting the people using the platform in question. Yeah, Meta sucks, but in defederating preemptively, we would basically be denying people from the Fediverse just because of which platform they choose to use, which I think goes against it's open nature.
As for the bit about Embrace Extend Extinguish, I believe the Fediverse is too strong for that to work. Worst case, Threads becomes the de-facto, and we're just back to where we are now with Threads taking the place of Twitter, and the Fediverse being the option for those looking for something better. Except I think people would actually be more willing to jump to the Fediverse since they would have more exposure to it through Threads.
The people using Instagram/Facebook aren't people who are looking for a platform to browse the Fediverse, at least not the majority. The majority of users there are people who don't even know the Fediverse exists.
Meta isn't looking to join the Fediverse or provide some kind of service to their users, they are looking for business opportunities. They are looking for money, advertising space, free content. Videos and memes were stolen from outside sources into Facebook for years and they still haven't addressed it - there isn't even an option to link to the source outside of copying the link directly into the post.
Meta has no goodwill whatsoever. The ONLY things they are looking for are business opportunities. More people to milk for money, and more ways to do it. They are not a new player in the internet scene, they have always been against social interest from the very first changes they made to Facebook, and they are still that same company under the same leadership.
Not defederating from Threads is choosing to water down the content in the instance's "all" section, in order to have an instance with literally 100x the size of the entire Fediverse, which can at best produce memes and at worst stand against the entire reason anyone even made an instance in the first place.
TL;DR I support defederating from Threads. And I write all of this while considering your post to be good - your opinion makes sense to me, I just don't agree with you. And I don't agree with you because I watched FB and Reddit turn to shit simply because they had too few people in power. Lemmy can survive this problem because there are just too many people in power to abuse this system in the same way.
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 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.
I think it's a bad idea to federate with Threads. If I understand correctly, we'd be mirroring Threads content and Zux' userbase in large. This would put undue stress on SDF equipment and degrade the user experience. Further, there is a lot of 'junk' on Meta's platform which we won't have a problem with if we don't engage with it.
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.
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.
My opinion on this is to preemptively defederate as Meta has proven itself time and again to be a bad actor; they have proven willing manipulate their feeds and algorithms to induce rage based engagement and even though they wouldn’t be in control of the fediverse, they will still at the very least try to heavily influence it. If the fediverse wasn’t a possible threat to them, they wouldn’t have created an app for it and made current fediverse operators sign NDAs. Additionally, if we are complacent, they could start creating Lemmy style fediverse communities to gain control of that aspect of the fediverse as well.
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.
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.
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 hope it doesn't. There is always time to defederate if something is going on.
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.
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 out of the loop here. What's going on with Meta and the fediverse?
Meta is Facebook’s parent company and Threads is their Twitter competitor. It doesn’t yet, but will soon support activitypub which means it can talk to the rest of the Mastodon servers.
The worries range from Meta using this to destroy the fediverse via embrace, extend, extinguish, to moral objections, and more.
I agree with these other two posters. Why not wait and see what Threads even ends up doing before they're potentially defederated? Obviously, Meta wants to find some way to make money from the Fediverse, but will it actually affect users who aren't registered on their servers? Let's see.
