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.
So let a known criminal into your home, until they commit a crime? Wouldn’t not letting the known criminal into your home be the safer, more protective route?
I think a house isn’t the best comparison here, as a house isn’t a public space, whereas the Fediverse is. A better comparison might be a town square or a park. Anyone is welcome to be there, but if they do something bad, or it becomes obvious that they are going to do something bad, then they can be removed from that space. Otherwise they should be allowed to exist in that space.
Facebook will cause harm by its very presence.
In any event, people with your opinion may end up in one fediverse “neighborhood,” and people with my opinion will end up in another.
I’m fine with that, as the “neighborhood” I end up in will have a lot less inane garbage everywhere.
I question if cutting them off would actually hurt them that much. Like, it would hurt, but not in a project-ending way. It’s far better IMO to use the prospect as encouragement for them to not be openly disruptive in the future.
Hurting Meta shouldn’t be the goal. Not providing direct access for Meta tentacles to the userbase should be.
Hmm. Are you worried more about our data being used, or us being lured into a proprietary service?
The only thing it could hurt is us, if everyone defederates people on threads won’t even have a chance to be exposed to other parts of the fediverse, making it even easier for Meta to execute EEE
Ask yourself, in three years from now will you be thinking “it’s so nice how Meta lets me follow and interact with their enormous userbase for free, without advertising, using my own open source server and frontend”?
Remember that’s the basic expectation today for a participant in the fediverse. If this feels implausible, doing anything else is very incompatible with the fediverse’s existing values.
The problem isn’t just that it’s Meta, it’s any situation where a much larger actor comes in with different motivations. Today we have a small number of users whose servers are almost exclusively run on a “community service” model. Meta is an advertising business. They are much bigger and will define the fediverse if allowed in. If we allow them to connect, it should be much later after organic growth which means we can assimilate them properly and deflect any bad behaviour.
What might happen if Meta throws their weight around? I can predict at least three outcomes
- Proprietary variations to ActivityPub, probably starting with something that seems “understandable” like moderation reasons.
- Certain new features get centralised on Meta’s servers only (e.g. search) claiming that it’s for efficiency in the distributed environment.
- Claiming spam problems, require individual instance operators or their users to verify themselves with Meta to enable federation.
The question in my mind is whether their intention is to destroy the competition, or keep the fediverse alive as a way to claim that they are not a technical monopoly that needs to be broken up by regulators, in the same way that Google provides most of the funding for Firefox.
Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
I have been making a related point that we should be concerned about any instance capturing too large a fraction of the space. I’m less concerned about the fact that it’s Meta than I am about any one instance having a critical mass that gives them a controlling interest.
History has shown that those with a controlling interest eventually use that control for their own benefit.
That’s why I joined a small collection of focused instances and try to subscribe to communities that are hosted in their “natural homes” instead of those on generic instances.
Would you say that also applies to the largest Lemmy instances currently like lemmy.world and lemmy.ml etc.?
Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
Yes, I would. Even if they are administered by people that have the best interests everyone at heart, sheer size means that they must be taken into account as the tools and clients evolve over time.
It’s not that the system itself should be unable to cope with large instances, it’s that the only reason for the system itself to gain that capability is in response to the rise or introduction of large instances. Some of what I’ve seen discussed is the need to change the development roadmap to accommodate the seemingly unexpected rise and possible introduction of very large instances. In other words, those instances are already controlling the direction taken.
I wrote a longer take on point 3: https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/07/07/if-i-was-meta-and-wanted-to-make-fedi-implode.html
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 reason the fediverse is strong is because of lessons learnt from 10+ years of EEE and enshittification by corporate interests.
I agree, and those lessons have helped us build something that is immune to EEE and other forms of enshitification. I wholeheartedly believe if we let them join the Fediverse, there isn’t really anything they could do to ruin it.
EEE wouldn’t be effective, they can’t collect any more data than they could by just scraping the public posts on the Fediverse, and if it becomes a cesspool like Twitter, then we handle it the same way we would a Mastodon instance that becomes a cesspool and defederate (those are the only valid things I could think of, but if you have any more I’m not considering, let me know.)
But since all we can do is speculate around what they MIGHT do, we shouldn’t immediately decide to defederate a bunch of new people just because of said speculation.
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.
