[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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a lemm.ee user, but I support defederation should Meta decide to permit access to Lemmy instances. We're here to escape Silicon Valley, not look for opportunities to invite them to dinner.
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)
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.
Absolutely on point. If it's deal with Facebook or deal with Reddit that doesn't have a partnership with Facebook I would go straight back to Reddit. Fuck Facebook and their rebrand attempt to distance themselves with the Meta shit.
Exactly, if we want them in our space why put up with the growing pains of the Fediverse, just go to them and forget Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. We need to be our own space or why exist at all. As said before, if you want their content just go to their sites.
I’m excited by the potential of the fediverse, and I want the fediverse to grow. That means more users. However, the noncommercial nature of the fediverse is why I’m excited by it in the first place. I couldn’t care less if there’s yet another gigantic social network full of ads.
Allowing any profit-driven interest to influence the fediverse risks destroying what makes the fediverse interesting and special. I’m not willing to risk the fediverse in order to grow it.
I think you’re misunderstanding their point. They’re saying they don’t care about another ad-filled, user tracking social media platform (Threads), which is inherently opposite to what Lemmy is. They and myself care enough to not see the influence of Threads / Meta on Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole.
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.
Staying as far away from Meta has been my goal since leaving Facebook 8 years ago. I really like this instance, it meets all of my needs for my Reddit replacement.
I don’t see a reason to federate with a corporation unless they were able to deliver something I’m not currently getting and their corporate support would greatly improve performance/sustainability for this instance. But based on previous experience, a company entering a space usually makes it worse.
The thing with VR is that non-bigcorp alternatives cost a fortune, as Meta takes the loss on the hardware. Standalone VR is also impossible without bigcorp interference (as of now!)
I still have an Instagram account, when a company gets so big they get hard to avoid. But Instagram, for the time being, has a lot of content I can’t find elsewhere.
I think like a lot of people the reason I'm putting up with the growing pains of a decentralized network, the fragmentation of communities that come with it, and sync issues across instances is because we want to try something that isn't run by corporations that views users as something to sell off to the highest bidder. If I wanted to deal with a centralized large user base why wouldn't I just skip this whole fediverse thing and go straight to Meta or reddit or Twitter or tiktok that is way more user friendly? I'm not here because I want another reddit clone that ends up being run or is influenced by another billionaire asshole down the line.
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.
Now now now friend it sounds to me like you haven’t had your brain washing! Don’t you know Meta has our best interest when it comes to delivering high quality ads. They even collect all your data and manipulate what you see because they care so much that you’re seeing ads that might interest you in an extremely invasive way
Ok in all seriousness we cannot associate with meta becuase I’m sure they’ll make a ton of big communities and non meta users will join because of the sheer size and then close it off and go “if you want your community you gotta get the meta app” the whole embrace extend exterminate thing
Right, or they'll set their own technical standards... so lemmy.world can't interact with threads unless they start doing data mining that threads can scrape. This is almost certainly their conscious and explicit plan.
Sounds like a good recipe for failure. Let’s block all instance we don’t like for whatever reason. Let’s fragment the fediverae till nobody uses it because it’s a mess of instances that don’t talk to each other for a slew of reason.
Oh stop being hyperbolic. That's not what I said at all.
Big companies like Meta will ruin this place given half the chance.
They don't want a Fediverse, they want access to the users here so that they might one day absorb them. Federation with corporations will ruin the Fediverse, it's that simple.
Go make a threads account if you want to look at ads so badly.
You know, we've already got an app to go to deal with Zucks' social media hole. It would be nice to have a space that wasn't connected to it. Then we all get the best of both worlds.
The thing about waiting to take action until they break the rules is that by then it's too late.
Google played nice with XMPP up until they established a dependence - then they went for the jugular. Do we have any reason to believe Meta will behave any differently?
When you identify cancer, you don't wait for it to Metastasize - you cut that bitch out as early as possible.
I see this article posted over and over again, but it doesn't help when many of the posters themselves don't understand it (I don't mean it's your case specifically, of course, just generalizing)
The article starts saying that Google won by EEE with a completely personal hypothesis that has absolutely no factual base (the protocol would be more used today if Google didn't use it, which is unprovable and overly optimistic)
Then proceeds talking about the office suite describing it as a similar EEE case (which was not since it was MS own thing since the beginning) and by completely ignoring the most glaring and important fact that lead to the current results (which is it being the default suite on any pc)
Then it finishes by saying that the fediverse shouldn't be popular and have many people, it should instead focus on the freedom of it (which can be agreeable)
The real message of all that article is just that yeah, the average user likes to use whatever they find served to them directly (in Gmail, on their pc, on their phone) and doesn't care at all where it come from or how it works.
Convenience beats privacy for most people, out of ignorance.
There is absolutely no need for any EEE evil plan for someone who already controls the majority of users, that's just a shortcut to avoid developing something from scratch.
There are real issues with federating threads (moderation, ads, their number controlling the All/Hot pages etc).
It's not useful, in my opinion, to keep using EEE as a scarecrow without even understand that at the moment Meta has absolutely nothing to take advantage of since the number of people that use mastodon only without any meta product on their phone is so small to be nothing to them.
What meta can gain from mastodon is that they don't have to start coding from scratch, saving time and money and coming out now at the perfect moment of Twitter collapse. And maybe a bit of a positive image because they "work on open source".
That's the whole value they probably see on this atm, not way less than a million people that probably have other meta products on their phones anyway.
I think we should focus on the real problems, this EEE thing is basically becoming propaganda at this point and makes almost no sense in our specific case (lemmy vs threads)
I also agree with a defederating-first cautios approach, btw, for the reasons explained before.
But we should talk, inform and discuss about the real problems
In the Google example, they integrated with XMPP, weaponized compatibility to slow development of XMPP features, and then pulled the plug. Unsure how to really address your post without just pointing back to the article.
Hostile takeover of a decentralized network is a pretty specific issue, so if you don't like the Google vs XMPP thing, then no worries, but where else can we pull insight on the matter of Meta vs the fediverse? Broaden the scope to megacorporation vs a small competitor and the megas consistently snuff out -any- competition before it has the chance to become -actual- competition. The fediverse is a mosquito next to Meta; that doesn't mean they won't swat.
WhatsApp and Instagram weren't real threats to Meta; that didn't stop Meta from removing the competition from buying them out. In Zuck's own words: "it is better to buy than compete." ...well, you can't buy the fediverse, so that leaves them with tactics like EEE to avoid competing.
Our options are to either trust Meta to play nice, or assume hostile intentions and take proactive measures. Zuck's own words weigh in there too: "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
I changed my instance yesterday to a Meta defederated one. An absolute no brainer. And people who think, that you shouldn't defederate from Meta, can just install and use Threads along with all other Meta crap. Meta will never change. Lemmy is a fresh breath of air, the idea behind is great. Don't burn it.
Same. There really couldn’t be a worse potential company to be involved with.
If the “wait and see” folks want to interact with Threads people, just make a Threads account.
All that will come of federating with them is the fediverse drowning in a deluge of their awfulness. We have a nice thing here - allow it to grow organically and it’ll hopefully remain a nice place.
Please explain to me, exactly how it would result in
Drowning in a deluge of their awfulness
Like I'm actually struggling to understand how federating is going to do that. Individual users can still control what shows up on their feeds through the things they follow subscribe and block personally. Why does the instance as a whole have to defederate? Why block and prevent users of the instance from being able to engage with parts of the Fediverse?
Because most of us have friends and family who we want to keep in contact with that aren't nerds.
The fediverse is only ever going to be a playground for nerds until it has mainstream appeal or the very least is compatible with the mainstream. I want to be able to migrate completely away from having a Facebook account, but I can't because there are people who I want to and have to stay in contact with on those platforms.
If meta added fediverse support to Facebook, that would mean that I could completely get rid of my Facebook account move to a fediverse instance somewhere, or even self host my own, and still be able to keep in contact with those people who are never going to leave the mainstream site like Facebook, X, Threads, etc.
I've been saying it for years that it needs to be a legal mandate that any social media platform above a certain size should be required to support ActivityPub as a way to prevent them from having such a monopolistic hold that prevents netizens from being forced to have an account on their platform.
Maybe it's because I'm being short sighted, but I think the Fediverse is best when the individual users on the platform are the ones who get to choose who they connect with. Not the hosts of the instances.
Why are you coming in hot making multiple long ass replies in a post that's
a. Two months old.
b. About a subject that ended all relevance two months ago?
I don't believe that federating with Threads will be completely apocalyptic, and I actually believe that the commercialization of the Fediverse is the way it will take over the internet. You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all. The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else, meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.
That being said, I believe that for technical reasons, as well as the fact that it'd be very easy for Meta to strangle their competition in the cradle if we (Referring to the Fediverse as a whole, as this isn't even my instance) cooperated with them, nobody should federate with Threads until the Fediverse is large, resilient, and technologically matured enough to survive a hostile takeover attempt by a corporation like Meta. Basically, defederate from them for now, and reconsider at a later date when the Fediverse has had time to establish itself. I think in the future, the Fediverse will be able to easily deal with Threads being popular and enshittifying itself, but I simply don't think we're there yet.
You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all.
Actually..
Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn't exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.
Most content on the internet is produced for free by users. Websites like Reddit can't exist without the free work of their moderators.
So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That's cheap compared to the other costs..
The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else,
Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can't just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side. That's how they got us. The main selling point of Thread today: "come, many people you know are already there!"
meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.
They wouldn't get into it without a plan to monetize it, that's the type of things they're known for..
Overall, I think people over-estimate the cost of running things on the internet. We already "paying" most of it just by producing meaningful content. We don't need tech companies to take their share in the process, we only need time and brain work to make the Fediverse easier to use so that our friends on the other side decide to join us here.
Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn't exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.
Doesn't disprove my point at all. You can say that some innovation and upkeep is done by volunteers, but paid labor does way more innovation and way more upkeep on the Internet. For example, the day-to-day maintenance of things like Youtube, a cornerstone of many people's lives, is done for profit by paid workers.
So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That's cheap compared to the other costs..
Well, the thing is, some hosting fees are higher than others, and people do not like paying for things. This is why YouTube has had to get so predatory with its advertising, if they switched to relying on donations to cover the astronomical upkeep costs of being the go-to video hosting service, they'd go under within a week. Websites like Wikipedia, which mostly hosts letters and images, are way more affordable, and the limited number of people who donate are enough to keep it up.
Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can't just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side.
I thought the entire point of the Fediverse was that you can interact with people from different instances as long as those two instances are federated with eachother. Using another instance allows you to keep interacting with the original instance's userbase while avoiding most of the ads or poor moderation that comes with it.
They wouldn't get into it without a plan to monetize it, that's the type of things they're known for..
I wasn't referring to nor do I care about monetization, I'm mostly referring to enshittification and monopolization.
I too am in favor of defederating with Threads. If Meta just wanted to create an instance of mastodon for users who are interested or something like that maybe I would have been fine. But Meta is coming in with an entire social network with millions of users. This is going to completely disrupt fediverse and current users will be forced to interact with it in some way. In time Fediverse would be completely dependent on Meta and lose it's own identity. The Fediverse needs more time to grow slowly as people realize that profit motivated social media just doesn't work and want something different. With the current decentralized model, I feel we do have plenty of time to grow and don't need meta's user base. I think it's time to define what fediverse stands for - it can't be just any entity using activitypub. You have to define some rules and guidelines if you want to be part of the community.
Personal feelings: If I ever want to view Meta content, I'll go to a Meta owned app. I'm enjoying this new frontier and want it to thrive as safe haven away from massive corporate sponsorship.
although you would be signifigantly safer on this side of activitypub though, if you install the app they get WAY more device info from you than is transferred over activitypub, which is only what is absolutely needed as far as i understand it, meaning no info on your device itself.
It would be way safer for you as a user though to have an account on this side and then view content through federation.
By having an account on a meta-owned app you are giving them vast amounts of data whereas if you have an account here on the Fediverse, All they're getting is what you choose to be publicly available on your Fediverse account...
I'd really don't understand your logic here... Because all of the data on the Fediverse is available to meta by them. They're going to be able to read all of that data regardless. As far as I can tell the only thing that defederation will accomplish is preventing you from accessing their data.
By virtue of how the fediverse works: if I, or they, want to be on Threads, then I, or they, can go make an account there & leave lemmy out of it entirely.
Anyone saying it would be nice to interact with Facebook can just go make a Threads account. Anything else is just endangering the rest of the community for their convenience.
Hell, the design goal for stage 3 of my app is multi-account, multi-server feeds. After that I'm looking at integrating other services...
I can't think of anything less tempting than the endless unsatisfying feed patented by Facebook, but I can stitch it in with your fediverse feed seamlessly. I can release builds for every platform
I can't unstitch it. No one can. If we let them in, they'll wash away what this place is in hours... There's no unringing that bell
It's real, real easy to add them in, in many places and in many ways, and if we take some time we can wait until we have tools to fine-tune federation
I don't understand why you're bringing in how the fediverse works, because one of the ways that the Fediverse works is by allowing users to choose a place to call home and where they create their account but still access all the different social posts from everywhere on the Fediverse. By virtue of how the fediverse works I don't need to have an account on their website to view their content. Or at least I shouldn't have to. If they support Fediverse, I should be able to access all of that anywhere on the Fediverse I want.
The whole point is that I don't want an account on a meta platform, I don't want to volunteer that much data to them. I want to be on the Fediverse and still be able to interact with my normie friends and family who aren't ever going to be willing to get on this platform for nerds that the fediverse is going to continue to be until we are willing to play nice with others.
Threads, Facebook, Meta, ZucctheSucc can go pound sand.
If Lemm.ee doesn't defederate I'll need to move to anther instance or host my own. I'm not willing to feed them data to enrich the evil shits that run that company.
I think someone needs to educate me because based on my understanding of the Fediverse all they have to do is access the data stream from this instance they don't have to have full federation with them. If zuck wants your data they're going to get it because that's the way the federated platforms work.
The only thing that defederating would do is prevent you from accessing data from their platform. The only thing that de-federating them will do is prevent users on this instance from accessing or having communication with any user on that instance. If meta wants to get data from lemm.ee or any other federated platform All they have to do is read the data that's published by the servers. There isn't really anything that any fediverse instance can do to prevent other platforms from reading information. Just receiving.
I'm in Lemmy.world but would like to chime in with my two cents too if you all don't mind. Just as one would approach a venomous creature—observing from a distance and acting accordingly after gathering enough data—it might be wise for instances to consider defederating from Threads right from the beginning, until further observations are made.
Regardless of how well they try to present it, we should remember that big corporations not only fail to act in our best interests but also view us as the product. Contrary to the spirit of federation, monopoly will always be their ultimate goal.
Firstly, I am anti-Meta. If someone on lemmy/mastodon wants to use Threads and their instance blocks it then they are free to get a Threads account. Likewise if someone is using Threads and see what they feel is an incomplete experience, they are free to find a lemmy instance and sign up.
Here's my question, and it's one I haven't seen anyone else ask. Is refederating possible? Difficult? If we assume the worst and are wrong have we cut off our noses to spite our faces?
I believe refederation is as simple as defederation. It's a reversible setting.
I think a follow up question would be, would platforms who are defederated by your instance retaliate by defeterating their instance from yours? If so, would they be so willing to refederate as you are, when that time comes? Or will they hold a grudge.
If anyone's wondering, I'm on the fence but leaning toward defederation. Meta is a scourge.
Edit: also looking to find a new home instance, I don't like or appreciate the lemmy.world admin's silence on the matter and feel like they attended that "off the record" p92/threads meeting with Meta and are playing ball. I have nothing to back it up, but what more would compel such silence? If you're not sure, just say that. The lemmy community seems to appreciate transparency, and I know for certain that I do too.
You can't get a threads account without instagram (yet?), but you could definitely just join an instance that federated Threads. Probably the best option if you want that content without the Meta account
Remembering what Facebook did with XMPP (initially allowed their users to speak to other messengers' users, then got sloppy with compatibility, causing great workload to unrelated app developers, and finally, having accumulated enough mass for Messenger, stopped supporting XMPP) - Facebook should be avoided like fire.
Facebook is also bad for society, allowing manipulation (targeted advertizing), aggregating great amounts of user data (harming privacy) and prioritizing user engagement regardless of the social cost (a hateful conflict generates more clicks than cat photos).
I feel strongly against corporate involvement with the Fediverse so I'm going to have a pronounced reaction to it.
Hell no to federating with Threads. Yeah they're a different platform and they have not joined the Fediverse yet, but they're using ActivityPub and they could do all kinds of nasty things with it (as evil profit mongering corporations always do).
For future reference, say no to any kind of corporate influence.
Personally if I wanted to interact with Threads, I would make a Threads account. It's free, I already have 100 accounts across various websites, so what is 1 more.
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.
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 🤷♂️
Not a lemm.ee user but I think we should all defederate from threads. The fediverse is supposed to provide a safe space from these corporations, not welcome them with open arms, especially Facebook.
Someone else said what I was thinking. If it was a corporation like Home Depot or something maybe MAYBE, but a company with a proven track record like meta….. yeeeeeeeeaaaah no
The distinction I've been drawing is "corporation" vs "social media corporation". Home Depot doesn't gain market share by damaging the Fediverse, but Meta does. Therefore, I think if Home Depot wants to make an official account or instance, that's fine I really don't care. Meta making an instance? I can't stop them, but I can sure as hell encourage people to not give them power in the Fediverse.
Honestly, I personally have zero tolerance for this. I'd block Home Depot and every other company too. Some people enjoy Wendy's sassy tweets but it's still marketing. It's still only there to drill the brand into your mind.
Social networks are for people to socialize, that's why they exist. We're just conditioned to expect the financial incentive in everything. As if people wouldn't make anything otherwise. People make cool stuff all the time and just put it up on the internet for everybody. Because it's cool and because it may be useful to others. People write games and software and draw art and compose music and websites and edit wiki, not even expecting any (or minimal) profit from doing it. Because it others will find it useful and/or enjoyable. People are fundamentally kind and compassionate if they're not pitted against each other in the name of profit.
Lemmy and Mastodon are deliberately made to not be profitable. It's a safe haven from all the corporate nonsense everywhere online and offline.
You know, I was going to be a wait and see vote. After seeing the justification and a better understanding of the consequences, I agree with defederation. As much as I think Lemmy has room to grow, it should not be via Facebook and obviously fuck ads. I stand with King @sunaurus
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.
Apps and website that are basically performing mass surveillance (incl. voice) should be blocked in my opinion. It's already insane they are legally allowed. I am all for an open Internet, but I choose not to use Facebook, Threads and all kind of apps which do the same. They should not be able to use or index my responses on other platforms. Besides ignoring my personal space making money of it as well whilst I get nothing. I know that's already difficult to prevent, but we can make it harder for them to do so.
I wonder how many shill accounts are actively trying to sway the tide of opinion around here, especially during all of this uncertainty, excitement, and vulnerability.
Honestly curious, like if we could see a number for, "traffic increase in troll farm activity" or some shit.
I’m in the minority here but I don’t want to defederate yet.
One of the biggest benefits of federation is that it allows me to interact with brand accounts on my own terms. With Twitter, I often found that the best way to get support was to contact the brand's account directly. I can't do that on Lemmy if we defederate.
And during major news events I want the up-to-the-minute coverage you find on major news outlets’ accounts.
But being over here on Mastodon and Lemmy, ideally, I can get that interaction on my own terms instead of being subjected to The Algorithm.
If this is not possible due to protocol limitations, or it becomes onerous to block spam - and the tools to do so haven’t caught up - then I’d be in favor of defederation. Not preemptively.
If you want to interact with brand accounts and have up-to-the-minute coverage from news outlets' accounts, why not make an account on Threads? Why does it have to be here?
You say "being over here on Mastodon and Lemmy, ideally, I can get that interaction on my own terms instead of being subjected to The Algorithm" - but that just isn't possible.
Any instance federated with Threads WILL be subjected to "The Algorithm", and it won't just be obvious spam. Instead it will be content curated to push a narrative or product, without you even noticing.
I'm with you. preemptively defederating feels like shooting ourselves in the foot. It would be great to be able to access content from larger communities on our own terms. If meta starts trying to dictate the rules, sure but as it stands now they don't control activitypub. I think I'm also in the minority that wants to see the fediverse grow into a proper alternative to traditional social media, though.
They don't control ActivityPub, but they are in control of what their own users see (and vote on), so they would effectively have full control your feed thanks to the sheer volume of votes that they can publish into the fediverse.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that Lemmy could act as a nice buffer between yourself and Facebook. But the "The Algorithm" is exactly one of the major things I'm worried about - currently, there is no way in Lemmy to avoid our users being subjected to their algorithm if we federate with them. Perhaps if such tools could be added to Lemmy, the situation would be different.. something like ignoring all votes that originate from Threads.. I will think about this.
If we downvote, then what's the point of migrating here from Reddit? Facebook and other mainstream social medias can pour funds to create their own “universe.”
I certainly have no love for Meta, so I don't really mind just defederating from them on principle. Plus it won't matter much since, as you said, Threads is more of a Mastodon adjacent thing. There wouldn't make much difference even if you did federate with them, at least at first.
That being said though, if you do want to consider federating with them in the future a thing that would be important to me is that they would have to not be the only big corporate instance. I do not like the power imbalance between Meta and the current fediverse. If ActivityPub becomes a standard protocol that lots of companies start using and Meta keeps their spy garbage on their own instance then maybe it would turn out alright to federate with them. If it's just Meta then I have absolutely zero trust that they won't abuse their power to make our lives worse no matter how innocent they seem at the time.
Thanks for posting this and sharing your thoughts on this big topic. I voted up as I think it’s best to stay away from anything Meta related. It would ruin Lemmy. I like that you’re taking a logical view of the whole situation.
I mean the beauty of the fediverse is that if you INSIST on being able to access Threads via a Lemmy account, you can, even if all the big instances defederate. IMO the risks/downsides outweigh any possible benefit in light of the fact that defederation doesn’t remove access for anyone, just restricts it
You can tell by how fervently they're arguing this when the solution to defederating a community they want to be involved in is just... going and making a free account on Threads.
Also threads.net should be the ActivityPub domain, when they show you how you will be able to view user profiles on other instances it's using threads.net domain name.
I would like the fediverse to grow organically at a steady pace. Just from a pure logistical view alone Threads could overwhelm our instance, let alone moderating. I don't see anything +ves from federating with Threads.
Presumption of innocence - until they actually push ads to ActivityPub, there’s no formal reason to defederate. The moment they do - cut the cord
Same thing with EEE - defederate the moment they change the protocol unilaterally, not before
It’s a stress test for Lemmy. What if lemme.world grows 100x and dominates the global feed - it’ll be sad if our only solution at that point was to defederate from them
Federation does not give Facebook more ads data: entire ActivityPub ecosystem is open and scrapable, they will still know that [email protected] asked a question about growing shrooms
This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Its current readable prose size is 108 kilobytes.
They cannot change the protocol unilaterally. What they can do is add new, proprietary features incompatible with the protocol to their own apps to disadvantage competitors.
It seems unlikely this could happen. It hasn't happened to Mastodon either, why should it happen to Lemmy? In addition, if Threads decided to federate, no instance would be capable of handling the load hundreds of millions of posts from Threads would generate for quite some time, I assume. Lemmy has currently one million total posts.
They need consent in order to use and process any of the data from each user or they'll receive even more fines - at least in the EU. They'd have to limit scraping to non-EU citizens, which is an impossible task.
That’s exactly what I mean by changing the protocol unilaterally, without changing the standard. The way I see it: if they play fair and work with community on extending the standard, that’s a good thing. If they start creating non-standard extensions, ban them
Don’t we want the fediverse to grow though, one way or another (a few large instances or several medium-sized)? If that’s the case, we’ll have to deal with the scale at some point
Legit question - is this really how it works? My understanding is: indexing public internet is fair game. Google scrape(d) Reddit and twitter and indexed with no issue. So I’m assuming fediverse will be indexed. The missing link for ads is knowing that buttface17 is “John Johnson” on Facebook - does this problem become easier if we federate with them?
They're already guilty... it's fucking Facebook. They're an algorithm for social control, data aggragation, and advertising. They cannot do otherwise. You're an absolute fool for thinking otherwise... or maybe a paid goon. They don't deserve a chance. They're just a corporation, not a bunch of nerds trying to connect.
Thank you! Interesting points. The stress test in particular would indeed be super valuable, and would probably result in another round of optimizations being found for Lemmy.
I'm leaning towards not presuming any innocence for them, though - just having a new app does not really take away their track record.
I'll play devil's advocate, The upfront advertising may help the fediverse reach the critical mass needed to create the zeitgeist of accelerating adoption that turns it into common use.
There's a lot of sentiment here about keeping out the "riff raff" that comes with a popular platform. However amongst all those commoners are also the obscure experts in niche subjects that leave comments answering questions that don't really get answered anywhere else on the internet. The scale of Reddit allowed those serendipitous encounters between questions and answers that don't happen anywhere else.
If those encounters could happen on the fediverse, then the fediverse would be unkillable because of its decentralized nature. If Threads attempted to dominate the same way that Reddit did, instance owners could defederate it at that point and protestors can easily hop over since they'd already be familiar with the fediverse.
I feel like this fall under the assumption that the fediverse needs some entity like Meta to help curate and create the instances people want to see. I fundamentally disagree with this idea and I believe this goes against the idea of being in the fediverse.
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!
I'm for federating with any instance that doesn't exist explicitly to break this community rules. I turned blind eye to not defederating Exploding Heads because Lemm.ee is a small server that doesn't host any big communities they could interfere with. I thought it was an indication that it's an instance that would allow me to curate my experience.
This is a European server, it's fair to assume most of the users here are protected by GDPR. The talk of scraping data seems like a nonsense, Meta can do it without federating. And as Elon learned, closing your APIs means other entities will do web scraping which puts more stress on your infrastructure.
I don't understand how most people here are for open standards, interoperability and the moment their protocol of choice gets traction they drop everything and opt to create their walled garden, except with 5 dozens of people. This is it, you've literally won. I guess some people will keep fighting big corporations for any reason on principle. That's ok but not something most people are interested in.
There's a lot of talk about how XMPP was killed by Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I'm convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven't actually lived through it. XMPP was embraced, then Google and Facebook got bored, dropped it and moved on. They did not poison the protocol in any way.
If Meta tries to extend Activity Pub in a malicious way then that's the point you defederate. If they get bored of Activity Pub and move on you have lost nothing, you probably gained more users than you would if you didn't federate. I don't believe it will come to this, EU Digital Markets Act means more platforms will have to open up, other commercial platforms will join in to capitalize on that and we'll end up with consortiums coming up with reasonable changes to standards. If not they'll get bonked by EU regulators with even more laws.
Finally, it's a shame that we've done this vote via Lemmy post. It has hit "All" view for a lot of people who are not part of this instance and probably irreversibly poisoned this discussion.
I’m convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven’t actually lived through it.
I'm a person who lost contact with people on Facebook while using Pidgin. This unfortunate development in ancient history actually forced me to briefly register on Facebook to maintain contact - because they couldn't be convinced to adopt Pidgin and Pidgin users were a minority (as were users of other XMPP messenger apps, at least separately counted).
Prognosis: Facebook will play along to gain mass, then go incompatible. They will do this at a moment when they think users will gravitate towards their side of the fence.
Advise: never open that door, there be dragons on the other side.
We should remember what they have already done, and expect more of the same, because they haven't changed. Justified grudges are perfectly fine to hold. A corporation that has harmed society by supporting polarization in many countries (formation of echo chambers, targeted advertising) should be boycotted in retribution.
I'm glad I found your comment, its so shocking to me how everyone is just defaulting to "defederate because Meta bad" without considering that this platform needs help to remain relevant and survive
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.
Now I won’t pretend I’m smart or anything but meta will probably make giant communities and then lock them behind their data harvester app when enough users have joined
I agree that we should defederate from meta. We moved over here because of the shitty corporations so we shouldn't let them in now that we are actually creating a community away from them
Reddit was the bandaid that let people actually find anything on search engines and now it's getting gutted for the same reason search engines were. I think the fediverse's complete aversion to advertising and business in general is going to be what insulates them from whatever the hell is happening to commercial social media
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.
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.
Though I was not in favor of federating with threads, I do love the idea of monitoring the situation, I don't like to close any possibility off I don't have high hopes for threads in the fediverse.
I really like it here. I came here to interact with other people without the greedy exploitation and manipulation of huge companies that try to inject themselves into every aspect of users' lives just for the privilege of socializing online. The business model of every single large player in social media is disgusting and antisocial. This forum is perfect the way it is and interacting with any large corporation can't do anything positive, but can definitely contribute to ruining what you've got here. Thanks again for running this instance.
I’m happy to manage my own subscriptions and block settings to hide any content from Threads or other instances I may not enjoy. I don’t need my instance doing that for me.
My understanding of the argument for defederation is basically “but they might monetise all our social graphs”, but our content is publicly available on the Internet, so they can do that regardless.
You had my upvote by the title, read your text anyway. I completly agree and as some people pointed out that we should federate so threads is a beginner drug for the fediverse: i dont think that this plus will matter, the threads users would have to see fediverse content to even notice the difference and i think that already would get pretty hard.
So i dont even think that the plus points are real plus points
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.
Lemmy, mastodon, kbin and all other parts of the fediverse use activitypub. its the program that connects them all together and makes it the fediverse.
Not that I think it would change the results, just out of curiosity, can you as the admin separate out upvotes/downvotes by lemm.ee accounts versus other servers voting?
This is a community of individuals escaping from corporate manipulation and abuse. As a new platform, we need to support our own and grow a healthy foundation.
If we give this parasite access to our community, others trapped on meta platforms will never leave their comfort zone to try something new and potentially better(to them).
When were big and strong like ox and with a name more recognizable than reddit, we can federate and show off our strong community. Or move on due to fading interest in threads like most meta platforms
If there's one thing that the Fediverse has the capability of doing it is introducing real competition into the social media space though,
By defederating and cutting off users of that meta platform from the rest of the Fediverse you are strengthening metas monopoly though. You're making it more difficult for people to leave that platform.
People choose a social platform based on the people they can communicate with. I still have to maintain a Facebook account because there are people on that platform that I need to stay in contact with. I don't want to have a Facebook account but I have to because it's the only way to keep in contact with them.
If Facebook federated and I could communicate with those people who decide that they want to stay on Facebook I could then get rid of my Facebook account. I could take advantage of the biggest benefit of the Fediverse and enjoy my social media experience on whichever instance I want without cutting myself off from people who've chosen to be on a different social media instance of some kind.
Federating with meta platforms will Make it easier for people to leave meta platforms. Anymore most people are only on Facebook because it is a monopoly and you have to be there in order to talk with everyone that's there. Giving people an option to talk to people on Facebook without having to be on Facebook yourself makes it easier for people to leave Facebook.
I read this post and have been pondering this question for a good chunk of the day. I had a thought that may or may not have any impact. I hope I can convey this correctly.
Say Lemme.ee defederates fromThreads. But we are federated to Lemmy.world. Because we are federated with them, and they are federated with Threads, is there going to be some...Threads posts leaking though to our all. Or does the all feed only extend one..."hop"?
My brain keeps going to something akin to six degrees of Kevin Bacon. I know it's not the same, but wasn't sure how the fediverse handles the "all feed". One hop.. two hop....etc.
Thanks for any insights from people who actually know how this works.
In this scenario, Threads posts would not reach us, but we could still be indirectly affected by their Algorithm as it applies to non-Threads posts.
Here's how:
The Threads Algorithm decides what posts to show their users, these posts get massive amount of activity due to sheer number of Threads users
If lemmy.world decides to federate with Threads, then their front page could be fully dictated by Threads (because Threads votes would completely overshadow any organic votes from lemmy.world users)
lemmy.world users interact with these posts they see on their front page, thus boosting those posts to the front pages of other instances
It's a hypothetical scenario which makes a few assumptions (most notably proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy), but if it happens then it's a real problem that we can't really defeat unless all big instances defederate (or other tools are added).
I see, thanks for the explanation and reply. I don't think there's an easy/simple way around based on the current knowledge. I can't say I am a fan of Threads dominating the feed. But at the same time, I don't think we should become an island unto ourselves to avoid them. (IE doomsday scenario)
But thanks again for the reply and for keeping us informed about what's happening. Keep up the great work!
Is AUTHORIZED_FETCH a function that can be enabled on this instance? It's available in Mastodon, and it's my understanding it's available in Lemmy as well.
I think the negative points make sense and take priority at least before/until Meta decides on and announces written behavior rules how they intend to and will operate and interact.
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
I despise Facebook and have distanced myself from their products for well over a decade. That being said, I can't support punishment for pre-crime especially when we are the ones pushing for open communication and power of the people. To me, defederating from threads before they do anything wrong is very hypocritical and giving them ammunition against Lemmy, etc. The media isn't going to listen to us, they are going to listen to Meta when they say that they wanted to open up their borders and we slammed the door shut.
In short, defederating immediately means we are the ones breaking federation.
Refusing to hire a babysitter with a history of sexual abuse isn't "punishment for pre-crime". It's just being smart and avoiding extreme risk to your children.
In the same vein, we all know how Meta/Facebook will behave, we know they're going to do everything they can to exert total control over everything they touch. It's practically a legal requirement for them to extract maximum value from the very air we breath.
So giving them the benefit of the doubt is nothing less than reckless. It's like trusting a crack addict with your wallet.
Refusing to hire a babysitter with a history of sexual abuse isn’t “punishment for pre-crime”. It’s just being smart and avoiding extreme risk to your children.
That feels like a poor analogy simply due to the fact that this discussion is about federating with Threads rather than asking everybody to join Threads itself.
But the powers provided by federation specifically disempower monopoly control. Interoperability is the gold standard of breaking up the tech monopoly network effects. If Facebook is simply trying to capitalize as a "first mover/early mover" and is willing to set flames to the old system of control in order to get ahead, let them. Zuck gets to stay relevant for another 10 years, and he sows the seeds of distruction for the rest of them.
Yes there is risk, but it can be easily mitigated by simply keeping an eye on it and using defederating as leverage in that relationship. Worst comes to worst, just defederate anyways.
I definitely think that you have a valid point - defederation can make us look bad to potential new users. It might be a bit of a case of shooting ourselves in the foot. On the other hand, sometimes you need to amputate a foot in order to save a patient.
It's certainly a difficult topic for sure. You're absolutely right about amputation but in those cases you make absolutely sure that the infection is indeed a problem.
To me it's also telling that any time and instance on both Lemmy and Mastodon ask their users this question it's invaded by people from other instances that become the strongest vocal opposition. It really makes me feel like there's a very loud minority that is more intent on making others see their way than they are the actual will of the people. That's not to say they don't have valid points but they make it really hard to judge the actual pulse.
Reality is that I'd probably not leave lemm.ee if you defederate immediately because of the UI differences that you mentioned but when it comes to Mastodon I think it's a bigger deal. You've so far shown that you're acting as a great admin so I have trust that you'll make the right call - whatever that is.
Our humble admin is pinning this post only to get a feel for what users think about the idea so all opinions are under consideration. We haven't done any "amputating" yet and may not ever need to. As mentioned in the OP, Threads has not actually federated with anyone yet (as far as I know) and even if they have, Lemmy is fairly insulated from Mastodon at this point.
This is this not a case of "pre-crime". Meta has a proven track record along with similar corporations in how they operate and the ways in which they monopolize their space. There's no doubt the limb is gangrene.
I agree, i dont think there is too much harm in federating for a little while but being very cautious and watching their actions. It seems like a waste to potentially throw away all the interaction from all those 'normie' users who would have otherwise had no interaction with the fediverse or see what its like.
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?
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.
I have some questions about federation. Is this an ok thread to ask in?
Basically... The model of federation I have in mind is an opt-in, mutually agreed one. Is this not the case? In other words, I assumed that federation with Threads would require both Threads and lemme.ee to agree to federate.
If that's the case, then the question being posed should be whether we should opt in to federation with Threads, no? So I feel I must be misunderstanding something. Can someone help me understand how content from Threads could wind up in my feed through not specifically degenerating from Threads or through some kind of mod inaction?
fwiw, I am against federation for reasons I've seen posted commonly among other respondents, so I won't bother to list them out. That is as unlikely to change as Meta's reputation for user data collection.
Most instances use a federation blocklist, so it's opt-out. Technically federation allowlists also exist, but manually maintaining an allowlist nowadays (with thousands of instances out there) would be quite painful, unless you really only want to federate with a small handful of instances.
As you mentioned, how would federating with Threads even look like? The format is completely different, would it just be a "threads" community and every post there ends up in one community?
Apart from that, I get the general skepticism against meta, but what’s the danger in federating with them and then defederating as soon as any of the rules are actually broken? Just curious, don’t hate me
In a hypothetical scenario, if I was a PM at Facebook and I wanted to maximize Threads ad impressions through Lemmy, I would implement it like so:
Get the top 1000 active posts from federated Lemmy instances every day
Send out comments under those posts that contain ads. Potentially put a #ad in there somewhere as a "legal disclaimer" that it's not organic content
Incentivize Threads users to upvote these synthetic comments in the Threads app - expose and highlight these comments in feeds, make them look engaging (maybe make them look like memes etc), maybe gamify it somehow
3b. Alternatively, just doctor the scores for these synthetic comments, so no real user interaction is even necessary
This would ensure that all Lemmy users will get ads from Facebook. Even users who are not subscribed to anything from Threads.
Okay that could be a how, but it’s not explaining what the issue would be with defederating once that happens, and not how the two services coordinate together, since they have such different concepts behind them.
But even if they could do it, it’s probably not gonna be worth the effort for what will be 0.5% of their own user base where they can get much more detailed information and control.
My assumption is that each user would be an Object in ActivityPub and then you would follow that user (subscribe in Lemmy terms). If that's the case, then that user would appear to be a community in your feed.
There could be a lot of benefits working with Facebook. There could also be many detriments. I think it's best to block it until we understand the consequences better.
we can federate whenever we want, when they gain our trust, so no need for urgent, defederate please don't make into an instagram clone while it is shaping
Does it even matter? Interacting with Lemmy from Mastodon is wonky and borderline useless. If Threads is the same, I doubt federating or defederating with them will make any difference.
One of the biggest problems with Facebook has been it's monopolistic control over social media.
People can't migrate away from it because of the effective monopoly. I've tried to move social platforms dozens of times and the thing that makes me come back is the fact that there are certain people that are on Facebook that refuse to migrate. They are happy with the status quo over there. And the only way for me to communicate with them is for me to maintain my Facebook account.
Federation allows me to move off of Facebook and still keep in contact with those who refuse to move off of Facebook. I've always wanted Facebook to support federation for this big reason.
All of this translates to threads, there are some people who just aren't nerds, people who aren't like us and aren't willing to deal with the growing pains of something like lemme or mastodon or other federated platforms.
There really is no benefit to de-federating with them that outweighs that as far as I can tell.
I have a lot of friends on Twitter who are now migrating to Threads. They are not going to come to the Fediverse no matter how much I annoy them. Federating with Threads will allow me to interact with them.
Also if the Fediverse works with Threads, a few of those people might come over.
Federating with threads leads to the same issue that happened to google talk years ago - it once embraced the XMPP protocol, meaning anyone could set up an XMPP server and immediately start chatting with other XMPP users or google talk (or facebook chat, now that I think about it). This was amazing because if you had gmail, you suddenly had in-browser access to a lot of friends. I remember some friends way back then talking to me about getting a regular jabber account because it would be so easy to just use that. I also remember soundly rejecting that idea because "Why would I do that when I can already chat with you?"
The problem was that Google decided that XMPP wasn't sufficient for their needs and started to extend their internal implementation. Suddenly if you were on "regular" XMPP you were a second-class citizen. There were times when you couldn't connect cleanly to google's XMPP implementation and it created problems (admittedly, some of these problems were with the XMPP protocol, and others were Google deciding to "embrace" XMPP by inventing their own software to interact with it). From my younger and naive point of view it just seemed like my friends who used jabber et al were just running the inferior software/client.
Then, suddenly - Google decides to kill talk and replace the in-gmail version with something else entirely. All those friends I had were just "offline". You couldn't reach them; I also didn't see the need to create a jabber account because of all the perceived difficulties of interacting with them at that point. Some of them gave up and got google talk/hangout/whatever else accounts. Big corporations are pros at killing open source; the example above is just one of many. You can see examples all over the place such at VSCode and how they've been closing up access to their plugins, Apple with the GPL3 change to the open-source software they use, and now Facebook with threads.
You aren't going to be able to convince your friends; they aren't going to move regardless. And if Threads federates and, months/years down the road decides to defederate because they claim to have more content/features/whatever anyway, to all your friends on Threads you'll just go "offline" - and your friends will just wonder why you didn't use Threads in the first place.
This also one of the benefit of federation. We need to proceed very carefully about this (no hasty decision). we can't just defederate immediately and later we backtrack our decision.This does not look good.
I don't want to block them over the bad stuff they are probably going to do. Why not just wait and see what they do then block if needed? Defederation now is clearly taking a curation stance on what we all see.
I'm actually hoping it takes off. There is content on Facebook I would like to read but I cannot agree to their TOS. If they let it federate out that's great. I would never be willing to make an account on there.
I don't see any sensitive content they get from us that's not publicly posted anyway.
I’m not saying lemm.ee shouldn’t defederate but I think we should take a wait and see what happens approach. As you mentioned they aren’t even supported by Activity Pub yet. Let’s see where it goes.
I downvoted but I’m not opposed to defense rating in the future should they prove to be as evil as we suspect.
My personal opinion is that I think large instances should "take one for the team" and suffer through federation with threads, at least in the beginning.
It's no secret that the fediverse still has a (shrinking) content gap with the centralized alternatives. Exposing potential users to our content is really the only way to get a critical mass of users. While there has been an explosion of content, a quick perusal of niche communities demonstrates that we have not yet reached the critical point.
So ultimately, I think that at least one of the large instances, i.e. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or Lemm.ee, should be tasked to suffer for the greater community, for a while.
I am personally against defederaring from Threads.
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.
If Facebook goes out of their way to push ads like that then yes, defederation is perfectly justified and invalidates everything else. However, there's no way to know what they will actually do until they do it. While at the moment it doesn't have ads, it obviously will in the future. But will those ads be actual posts, or just shown in the Threads UI? Can the users interact with them? What if they are posts, but without artificially inflated counts, so they'll have less interaction than regular posts anyway.
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.
If other fediverse users can see posts on Threads, it works the other way around too. Threads users will be able to interact with posts outside of it. "But they'll only show posts from other Threads users!!", until a user wants to follow someone not on Threads. Yes, that number is shrinking, but it doesn't have to once they federate. You can simply not make an account on Threads, users on Threads will follow you just fine, and you will show up next to everyone else. Threads may be a majority, but it won't be all of it.
Hell, having a Threads majority might not be a good thing. What if the content is good? What if it's stuff you actually want to see?
Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
...i don't really see how that's the case. Since using Threads requires an Instagram account, that's already an okay protection against bots. As for trolls, you can use the federation to your advantage, to make tools on non-Threads platforms like bots to handle it. If anything, the main Threads instance itself will be way less moderated than smaller ones. Also the only difference between trolls/bots on Threads and other platforms is the amount, you can do bad shit here too.
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.
Then don't use Threads itself. That's the entire fucking point of the Fediverse. You can use whatdver instance you want. If you don't use Meta's instance, all they can collect is publically available data they could get without the existence of Threads no issue. They cant shove in ads that aren't actual posts which likely won't get interactions and can be blocked, and if they put ads as actual posts with inflated numbers then it's perfectly fair to defederate. Assuming they go the EEE route, you can still enjoy Threads while it's at the first E, and then not follow with them when they go for the 2nd.
However
By defederating, you're locking out everyone on Threads. While that might sound like a good thing to some, that's still thousands if not millions of people that would be interested in the content here and would post. There's a good chance they won't know they can just make an account somewhere else, and just miss out. Why punish the user for what the company did?
You should at least give Threads a chance, at least as an early bird before they look into ads. When they start turning it profitable, then is the actual discussion for whether you should defederate, which will likely go through. We could even take this as an occasion to get Threads users off of Threads, off of Facebook.
Or I could just be a clown for giving Meta a chance. Only the future will tell
Edit: I have since changed my mind on this, and I want to explain why
I forgot we're talking about Meta here. Obviously they won't make this in a way that's mutually beneficial. They want to make money off of it. So when time comes to ad adds, they'll obviously make sure everyone sees them. And if we keep them for now, when we inevitability have to federate because Threads becomes profit driven, things will suck way more than if we never federated, because users from over here will lose access to content they were interested in on Threads, and vice versa. By embracing the first E, all we're doing is welcoming Facebook in the one place meant to keep distance from them.
I completely forgot the point of the fediverse is for it to not be controlled by a single entity. And while Threads can't replace the fediverse, they can definitely conquer it, and since we're talking about Meta, if they can they will, and Mark "they trust me, dumb fucks" Zuckerberk will obviously find a way to monetize users on non-Threads fediverse if given the chance.
They have given many chances in the past, unfortunately it won't be different this time.
It's the same revenue strategy but in a different name.
Zuck won't start a "playground" project in recession time. They need the money, they need data, he wants control.
Idk. I'm not lemm.ee user but I think allowing meta is a bad idea. I think it should be rejected before it even gets a chance. Force threads users to join Lemmy. That's my take. On the other hand, maybe the relationship between Lemmy and meta will be that like Microsoft and Linux? I heard it helped with Linux. At least some. Idk.
You got downvotes and I don't know if you also got a rebutall,, but here is a simple one: This seems to be an extremely naive take on the situation and all over the fediverse you can find detailed write ups of why taking a "wait and see" approach could prove disastrous for the entire experiment, but I'm not going to do your homework for you. I just wanted to give you some idea of why your take isn't very popular.
Takes like the one you are responding to me, and other common stances shared since the news of Threads hit the fediverse, can't help but remind me of the cautionary tale of the turtle and the scorpion (I think it was). The corporation is going to attack and kill the smaller entity, because that is its nature, just like the Scorpion riding on the turtle's back did. Let's not be the turtle.
What else could be the goal of a multi billion dollar corporations that views the user base as information to be sold and influence through algorithms? Suddenly with threads they are going to turn a new leaf? The permissions required from their apps is of no concern either?
One fear that people have is that by then, it will already be too late - people will have joined Lemmy for the sole purpose of using it as a proxy for Threads, and any defederation later on would cause serious disruptions to existing users.
They start sending adds out into the fediverse and I would be the fists to drop them. Common sense tells me you will only see adds if you use threads directly but who knows.
I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don't think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.
Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.
If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.
I think that if we lord the fact that our platform is open for everyone, we need to walk the talk.
Also, when people realise that there is a way to enjoy the same content as Threads but ad-free, they'll switch over.
Also, what's the issue with remaining federated with Meta? The app privacy concerns don't apply to us if we use Lemmy apps. They can't push ads to us. Our entire userbase is a rounding error for them. At least give it a chance, and don't be pretentious.
I wasn't speaking directly for lemm.ee but for ActivityPub in general. I'm all for banning people when they break the rules, but they haven't done that yet, have they?