I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create “better” front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
Not related to the topic, but if I can give one piece of feedback, it would be to stop using ^.^ and .<.
And if I can give one piece of feedback for your reply, it would be to stop telling people how to behave. One of the things that really bothered me about Reddit was this expectation that everyone needs to write the exact same way. We can do without that here. It doesn’t hurt anyone to use emoticons, emojis, and anything else that might make a post more fun, so what’s the problem?
He is merely helping the guy be more readable and impactful. Especially since it wasn’t a “fun” post. Posts educating people are in fact best served by removing the clutter. Chill.
I’d like to go against the grain and be against defederating. I have so many friends who couldnt give less of a fuck about this stuff and because I care I am forced to isolate myself from all their mainstream services. I would love for once to be able to see the same posts they see and share stuff with them and maybe show them that its not so bad over here.
… you can still spin up your own instance if you really want to expose yourself to facebook’s social manipulation? Or you could make an account on there.
But you can also show people it’s fine over here by posting links, talking about it, sharing lemmy memes, etc.
Letting them in on any large scale is a losing proposition, as explained in my Original Post ^.^
What about when the communities get so intertwined, then Meta starts trying to impose their rules on those outside communities? If lemmy.world chooses to federate with Threads and they do the same, it’s only a matter of time before their rules become our rules or lemmy.world gets the boot. If they don’t adopt them, it’s safe to assume the lemmy.world userbase would leave for Threads after having been a part of it for some time.
My expectation is that Threads will be too permissive with rules rather than too strict. They’re pretty happy to have LibsOfTikTok on there so they can make money from the stochastic terrorism. The problem I see is that their size means defederation for insufficient moderation isn’t a real threat, so federating instances are stuck with per-user moderation and will be overwhelmed with Threads trolls.
I suppose it ends up being “their rules are our rules”, but in a “there are no rules and you’ll accept it” sort of way, rather than “adhere to our community standards or we’ll take away 90% of your users”.
My expectation is that Threads will be too permissive with rules rather than too strict. They’re pretty happy to have LibsOfTikTok on there so they can make money from the stochastic terrorism.
I can see that being an issue until they want to monetize it with advertisers. I imagine they’re crack down harder, although still not hard enough, on the hate speech and misinformation at that point. At which point the rules they impose become the rules every other instance that federates with them has to impose or risk being ostracized. This is speculation of course but I cannot imagine a scenario where they 1) don’t monetize the platform and 2) those advertisers are cool with their ads being right above a post, from a different instance that cannot be moderated by Threads admins, that show users how to pirate that same content.
I suppose it ends up being “their rules are our rules”, but in a “there are no rules and you’ll accept it” sort of way, rather than “adhere to our community standards or we’ll take away 90% of your users”.
Either one is not good for the Fediverse but now you definitely have me questioning which one it will be. I really appreciate you bringing that point up as I really hadn’t considered it at all.
OP stated Meta/Threads users would still be able to see posts, but they wouldn’t be able to interact. If M/T were an unbiased player, they could easily allow Lemmy users to interact on Threads with their Lemmy accounts (not giving any of your personal info over to Meta), but we all know that won’t happen.
I can’t see a positive reason to invite the weasel into the chicken coop
Creating another account over at their instance would do the thing too I guess?
If the fediverse can’t survive meta it can’t survive. If decentralization’s Achilles heel is corporations then decentralization is not viable strategy in the current world and we should give up on it now.
Threads wasn’t first, and it’s going to be very very far from last. There is no escape from corporate interests in any g7 nation - other than being deemed too small to matter
Defed every corporation. McDonald’s starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.
I disagree. I fully understand the harsh feelings towards Meta/Facebook. They have brought it upon themselves. I am not making excuses for them at all. However, this is likely the only real shot that the fediverse has for widespread growth and adoption.
I am so looking forward to following Threads users on Mastodon. I’ll have the ad-free chronological timeline on Mastodon, and I’ll still be able to keep up with sports writers, teams, and other users that would likely never even try Mastodon.
Currently, not enough people understand federated social media. We will eventually sway some of those Threads users over to Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. once they realize the advantages these platforms have to offer.
I can see the disadvantages, but I do think the pros outweigh the cons. You are not hurting Meta by defederating from Threads. They will succeed regardless of the choices of a few instances.
This is an incredible opportunity to inform more people about the fediverse. The beauty of an open, decentralized platform is that if you want nothing to do with Meta/Threads, you are free to move to a server that chooses to defederate.
