Why Defederating from Facebook/Meta is So Important
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!)
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.htmlOpen linkView original on infosec.pub
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.
Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
Yes, reputation is very important. The cluster of people known as Meta has proven it is nefarious at best.
It's good to consider the case-by-case basis instead of just making general rules.
Like if Lowes wanted to make an instance I wouldn't worry much about its corporate influence. But Meta is actually an evil organization.
(Though their React docs are some of the best docs I've ever read)
It's strange how Mastodon is so willingly letting them in. Fishy... Fishy and hairy. Like a fish with some nice bangs. Maybe a mullet. A little mustache too, recently brushed with a little mustache brush.
This make me chuckle.
I mean, they aren’t fucking wrong. Half life 3 has a federated communication system built into multiplayer? Go do it Gabe.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
I'm right there with you. I can already foresee that their apps will be prioritizing monetized users like content creators and everything in there will be a transaction of some sort. Who cares, you just have to block their instances and go about your merry way.
I've never had any problems at McDonald's with their ice cream / milkshake machines in Europe. Maybe the US simply gets the faulty machines?
It’s a pretty well established anecdote that most of the time a McDonalds tells you the ice cream machine is broken, it’s because they’ve already cleaned it for the night and if they use it again they’ll need to reclean it. It’s easier to say it’s broken rather than make one dessert and then have to reclean it all over again.
To be fair, I did say “well established anecdote” and not “well established fact”.
I was a manager at a McDonald's In the UK for five years. Can honestly say our shake/I've cream machine never once broke down.
We never took it off early for the nightly clean though, that only took a matter of minutes.
But the regular deap clean, we took it off for that, usually a Monday or Tuesday night as they were quiet, and we were straight up with customers and said it was being cleaned
That's not why at all. Watch the video @danielton posted below.
You're not getting the real McDonalds experience
The company that maintains the machines has a contractually enforced monopoly over the franchisee's. This means it's impossible to get parts or fix the machines outside of them doing it.
There’s heaps of vids on yt about the MacDonald’s ice cream machine racket.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
Whats wrong with steam?
It's a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Isnt that based on the assumption that Valves public comment about removing the drm in the case they go under is a lie. It becomes a trust issue then, and to the public view, many put trust in them.
They have no reason to honor that, and are a corporation. I don't consider that binding or realistic.
There are many things that happen for "no reason". Its fully a trust issue if you dont think it would happen.
OK. You're welcome to trust in anything you like. I believe contracts, not promises.
Yeah -- it should be in writing with the customers (ToS?) and every contract Valve signs with game developers for it to be something that can actually be performed.
We will need the judicial system to force Valve to remove the DRM.
Wait, do you need Internet access to play your offline games? If so, moving to itch.io
Depends on the game. These ones for example don't even require you to launch them through Steam.
Cool, thanks for the resource
Should Note that if a game isn't on that list, that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't DRM free. For example "Rain world" is not on that list and it is not required to launch it through Steam. So this list is by no means exhaustive.
No, not in my experience. Some games do exist that do that, but that's the choice of the developer.
I like itch, but it's no steam killer. We need a way to somehow own our digital games in a way that is not centralized to one marketplace.
What benefits could give to the user and the producer the descentralization?
Disintermediation would be nice; More of my money going directly into the hands of game developers instead of executives. Also, people who own games should be able to resell them. Can't do that with centralized platforms. A benefit of decentralized game ownership would be that the developer could be cut into the resale of their games, which shifts the incentive to a more long-term view. A game could be something that is supported by the "used" market, and therefore has a reason to invest in long-term value. No more drive to keep on reinventing the wheel and releasing new games every year, just keep on making the existing game better.
Oh, nice response, I want to be optimistic and see in the future more and more descentralization
i think nothing beats literally getting the zip file with all the contents of the game with no middleware like GOG employs. to decentralize the store further requires the devs to at least manage their own website hosting, domains, ownership status accounts for updates. the only step available beyond that is the payment methods, and i don't think there's any viable solution to be done in that case besides having more companies like Stripe and Paypal.
in that sense, Itch is handling things pretty good for devs so far,
The main thing I'm for is improved ownership rights, and currently GOG is the best of them. The only downside with it is that you can't sell it on when you're done, like old games in physical media. When digital media has none of digital media's drawbacks, then I'll leave off about the potential of NFTs.
problem there is that anti-drm and ownership of a license to download and run software don't combine while financially viable to the stores. aside from the additional problem of having to manage inventories, trades and everything that happens to break those systems, "owning" the license and allowing to sell to someone else doesn't do much if you don't employ a DRM to enforce the make-believe of you pretending you're monetarily compensating a physical larbor of transferring a given copy of a media, people will share things with each other before you can blink and not care where it comes from so long as it runs and it's clean, specially in places where people won't pay for games instead of food. only reason CSGO skins works on Steam as the original NFT system is because there's servers to enforce what people get to see you holding and what you don't own. and allowing for transferring games between accounts without a DRM is not something you'll ever see any big company doing under the liability of being accused of promoting "piracy".
Right now we're losing tons of information after snapchat bought and deleted the gyffcaf website.
Now imagine losing all games when Gabe dies and the new patron loses the company to a newfound addiction to whatever
I dont think mastodon would, but i think lemmy kbin would. The target audience is different, one is twitter and the other is reddit like. I dont think twitter user hate fb as much as we do.
They always did strike me as idiots
Idiots maybe but probably wealthy idiots once Meta is done with them.
Being stupid always costs more than being lucky makes.
This is an extremely weird ass take to have. Why would the average user give a shit?
Compared to most problems people have, the intricacies of social media platforms is not high on a lot of people’s list. They just go where the content is.
What a very insufferable opinion to have lol.
Like god damn, I knew that the early adopters will have the hardcore with em, but some of you guys need to relax.
I've been radicalized by corporate social media's deliberate harm, what can I say.
Nah, that's a prequel. What everyone wants is a conclusion to the cliffhanger that the current Half-Life story ended on. Good game though!
We need Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and then Half-Life 3.
At this point I'm half-expecting Half-Life 4 to shadow-drop some day before 3 ever does.
This
VR will remain a gimmick until it isn't a whole-ass lifestyle.
But...it doesn't have to be a whole-ass lifestyle, even right now with the current state of VR. Even with an Oculus Quest 2, you just put on the headset, play an hour or so, and then put the headset down like a normal person.
The marketing teams at Meta and Apple want to market it as a lifestyle because that's the only way they know how to promote it without going into the nerdy weeds of VR game design, etc., but from a consumer perspective, it's only a lifestyle if you choose to make it your lifestyle.
“Vr is a gimmick” -people who haven’t owned a proper vr headset
I do games research for a living and have access to pretty much every relevant VR headset made since the first Oculus.
VR is very much a gimmick. There is no killer app or feature, and the closest thing we get to one are exergames like Beat Saber. Games like HL: Alyx don't really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars. Similarly, virtual desktops are neat but really don't offer any tangible benefits compared to a large monitor to make up for the added discomfort of having to wear a VR headset. The Snow Crash-style metaverse is and always has been absolute bullshit. It's just a less convenient version of the metaverse we already have.
VR has some potential to create cool embodied experiences, but the benefits so far are so slight that the technology is looking a lot like 3D TV and HD-DVD: technically impressive, no meaningful improvement in the holistic user experience. Hence, it remains a gimmick.
There are multiple games that wouldn’t be the same without VR. A Township Tale, Gorilla Tag, Echo VR. None of these would be nearly as fun without VR. The biggest issue with VR is probably the lack of some more linear story driven AAA games that many people are used to. And you don’t need to invest several thousand dollars for VR. Stand-alone VR with the quest has been a thing for years
You're kind of making my point for me here. The games that exist for VR don't really add anything that didn't already exist but with less convenient controls. A Township Tale is fundamentally just an MMO in VR, and we have already have dozens of MMOs that are easier to play. Similarly, we have a ton of story-based games on other platforms that work perfectly well. VR as a medium doesn't really do anything for the gaming experience in those cases.
Games that make use of the inherently different interaction modalities of VR, like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag, show some promise in terms of new ways of playing games. That kind of interaction is really interesting and brings something new to the table. Unfortunately, they're also effortful to play and as such are generally difficult to play for extended periods of time. To some extent they all become exergames. Since they also need a fair amount of space to play there's a certain barrier to entry for playing them.
I think the the standalone headsets are the future of VR, mostly due to the lower instep to get started. I even own a Quest 2 that I play sometimes (admittedly mostly Beat Saber and Ragnarock). However, the standalone VR headsets are also kind of limited in terms of computational power, so there's some competition from the casual and mobile market. The mobile (and console, and PC) platforms also don't have the added baggage of physical excersion that comes with VR, which makes them more accessible than VR.
Again, there really isn't much of a case for VR beyond exergames. Games being VR can be a selling point for the true believers in VR, but for most people it's kind of a fun experience that isn't very meaningful.
A township tale is fun because of the fact that you use your hands for everything. Putting tools together, hammering nails in, fighting monsters, that’s what differentiates it from other MMOs. I don’t see a problem with VR games being physically exerting, less people sitting in a chair playing games is a good thing. In fact the physical nature of it is what makes it fun. I don’t see VR as the future of gaming or anything, I see it as another way to play. Just like I prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters and controller for platformers. The games I play in VR are games I wouldn’t like in a traditional format. The interactivity and immersion of VR is impossible to replicate in a normal game. That doesn’t mean normal games don’t have their place, they obviously do and I don’t think VR should replace them.
Yeah I really wish PCVR was still alive and well instead of the stagnant industry that it currently is. I bought both a Rift S and a Quest 2 thinking that full-length story driven games were going to become a thing, but then the hardware limitations of standalone kinda killed that. Now I don't really have any interest in buying a Quest 3 or a Vision Pro because I don't have any faith that there's going to be developers making those kinds of experiences anymore.
I don’t get why games can optimize for mobile hardware but can’t just give lower graphics settings on PC for some reason. Maybe stand-alone wouldn’t have been such a big thing if they had done that
I have to disagree with this statement. Having played through that game multiple times, it just provides a level of immersion that no other VR game has touched yet. Heck, from an immersion perspective, it pretty much beats every game I've ever played in my life.
The problem with the VR industry is that so few games approach HL: Alyx's level of immersion. Of course, it'd be hard to justify the $300-$400 asking price. VR devs are all content on making these simple arcade style games with simple graphics that can run on the Quest 2.
The problem is the size of the potential player base. A VR headset for $300-500 (and that's on the low end) is already a big ask for one game, but then you also need a gaming PC. To get the full fat immersive experience you'll need a fairly beefy PC (3070 or better, 11th gen Intel or 3000 series AMD CPU etc) and a Valve Index ($1000 iirc). The costs add up very quickly, and that's a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people. That's also why the Quest 2 is such a common target for development: it's relatively more affordable and as a result has a much bigger install base.
There's also a whole slew of physical space issues with being tied to a computer that the standalone headsets solves, but that's a broader argument beyond the cost of the headset itself.
A lot of these issues can be solved by remote streaming. The full fat immersive experience becomes far more manageable if instead of trying to cram a beefy Snapdragon SoC into a complicated headset, you just make the headset be a dedicated streaming device and then focus on bringing the price down to $200. Think Quest 2 but all it needs have is enough logic to do tracking and video decoders to process video streams.
That's just a chicken and egg problem though. We don't have a good library of PCVR titles so people find it hard to justify buying a PCVR headset. Nobody makes PCVR titles because they think no one's buying the headset, etc. I feel like a lot of people think PCVR won't work because the overall setup is too expensive. However, I think there's enough PC players who already have a gaming PC who would gladly drop an extra $200 on another peripheral if the game library was there.
Not for owners, for sure - but for prospective ones? The catalogue of possible games/uses is a bit thin for a 1k+ piece of kit... I think it would be incredible to own a HOTAS warthog but I'm not playing flying games very often right now, you know?
If I did, I probably would because at that point I want to enjoy the kit I have. Imo, that means right now, a flight sim controller set up due my use case is a bit of a gimmick - but if I already owned it I'd seek out things to utilise it, reducing its gimmicky position in 'the roster'.
Gimmicky is kind of a subjective term in that way, it's all about the individual utility offered.
But yeah - that comment was a bit snarky, I get that too.
I have no love for corporations but they’re a fact of life by this point on the internet. They drive a significant about of marketing and users and they’re what make a social media platform take off (which is why Parler and Gab fell apart).
Fediverse SHOULD be an ethical platform, but you have server admins defederating any instance that even has paid subscribers. Isn’t that going too far? Are we trying to force everyone on here into a kibbutz?
I believe the only instances that should be defederated are corporate, self-harm, profanely illegal, and political extremist instances.
Anything further than that and the whole network is going to devolve into a series of micro echo chambers.
Or maybe it won't, maybe the vast and free instances will flourish while the restrictive instances die out.
Either way, trying to control a community based on wishy washy ideology is not a good look.
I think in these early days we'll see a lot of power drunk admins who are too eager to push the button, just because they can.
To add to that maybe a general rule of thumb would be to defederate with any instances that go against the sustainability and self interest of the whole fediverse.
Absolutely, and the actions that "go against the sustainability and self-interest of the fediverse" will need to be analyzed and codified into fediverse "law."
If we make specific and firm rules about what is disallowed on an instance, it makes enforcing those rules simple.
Political extremism is part of how Lemmy got its start! The political center is crony capitalism, basically Facebook.
We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development--open source. All of our content--available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.
However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.
He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.
Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That's the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.
Another option is to make migration of everything from one instance easy and let them buy whichever instances they want but let the users go somewhere else. Turn their weaponized capitalism into free money for instance admins until they wisen up and stop throwing money at it.
Or set up the terms and services to give the instances responsibilities that must be honoured even after they get purchased by another entity such that buying them becomes unattractive. Like mandate a certain portion of the topmost parent company's profits (along with clauses to prevent Hollywood accounting from dodging that, maybe say revenue instead of profit and all related companies instead of just the topmost) must be invested back into the fediverse and that changing the TOS to remove that requires a certain number of users to agree. Set it up so that it is designed to only work if the whole point of the entity is to host a community rather than extract profit from hosted communities.
Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads' users on our discussions.
I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook's terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.
no, defederation does not “just” do those things
defederation refuses to give them an in to slowly make changes to the platform that will eventually give way to a centralized power dynamic over the whole fediverse
see also: the chrome/chromium monopoly and its effect on the modern web
I'm not sure it quite works that way. They can only make changes to their platform/instance and may thus become incompatible with everyone else but it's still up to the smaller instances wether they want to go down that road or not. They can't really steal fediverse from us - we'd have to give it to them.
what you are saying is true if you entirely ignore the power of a majority market share and the demand that puts on small developers.
even if it’s not universal demand, all you need is a slight majority.
see what happened, for example, with xmpp: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Just require users to be logged in to view posts, and then limit them to seeing a few hundred every day. That should stop them from stealing the content.
There are under the hood data that is not displayed on the site which they can scrap. FB would be broke if they only rely on the FB posts alone without all the tracking everywhere. Even your movement on the screen or where you pause on the page are tracked.
So no they dont get all the data unless we federate them.
They can do that on Facebook because it's their code and their platform. They can probably do that on their app and and instance too to some extent but I don't think they can grab much more than the content of your messages and your likes if you're on a different instance. Lemmy is open source; if there was a way to get that data we'd know about it.
While yes, there are ways around defederation to still get to our content, that does not mean it is not better than simply giving it to them.
Regarding their content, facebook is fucking garbage content. You actually want that? Why are you here then?
I'm not advocating for either or. Just stating the facts. Defederation in no way makes it harder for them to take content from other instances. When you post into the fediverse it's for everyone to see. You can only control what's coming back at you.
Yeah, if they wanted to vacuum it up wholesale, sure. But that is not how it is usually transfered and consumed. It is generally done by users subscribing to individual communities. This is seldom done with defederated communities though, as no interaction is possible, removing the whole "social" part of social media.
So while you are technically correct, the end result will be closer to what I describe. Unless they just copy/paste it with something not too far off from repost bots, for their own local consumption.
If they do that, we may have to think of something else to help secure ourselves.
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.
Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.
Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.
If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.
Not only did I add
threads.netto my blocked instances list, I also went scorched Earth and outright blocked Facebook's entire IP range through my firewall. Don't want them "accidentally" reading any data from my server ;)For reference, their IP range is
157.240.0.0/16:Edit: Actually, I might have more IPs to block:
https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/THEFA-3/nets
100% agree. I've been shocked at what seems like extreme naivety or willful ignorance in some of the discussions on federating with corps. Corps only want profit. People are the product at meta. They just want more product.
There's either a streak of loud and stupid that started up when the NDAs came to light or some of these "Facebook would never do anything bad" people are suspicious af.
If the Lemmy admins sides with people like zuck, which they shouldn't because they're literal communists I'm going to laugh so hard, internet would pretty much be fucked lol
the big difference is Lemmy and other sites got popular now as a result of people finally realizing "wow the modernized internet is pretty much complete dogshit"
the only thing that's been basically different is people trying and rather unsuccessfully to create an alternative to the bigger sites. 9/10 most of them have failed, but with Lemmy considering how much and how dedicated the userbase has been so far.
My point was mostly "if Lemmy can be bought out" (which I really doubt) "then the internet is just blatantly fucked and there's not anywhere to go period."
Lemmy, which I'm currently using through liftoff seems like the best solution and has a rather dedicated userbase in general. I'm excited to be here but there's always the worry something could go wrong with it
From my perspective there was nowhere to go besides disparate discord communities, until I learned Lemmy existed and it got an IV injection of life from spez screwing with reddit
My gut tells me we should defed all corporate instances as a matter of policy. Our uniqueness is at jeopardy , think of threads like the borg.
Obligatory upvote for Star Trek reference That's the beauty of individual servers, isn't it? If you're on an instance that doesn't defend those corporate instances, but want to, them just move to one that does. The voices will speak.
My voices say that de-fed is best and I worry that not everyone will perceive the terrible consequences of not doing so. and yay for star trek :-)
In that case, could hear them at some point going, "We are the Threads. Deactivate your firewalls, surrender your instances. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your federated culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is Futile.", to make you think on how you are going to respond to that.
Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.
Is there a good list of admins/instances that have committed to defederating with Threads? Im totally down to bail on Lemmy.world if they don't defederate.
https://fedipact.online/
Warning: very bright
Eyes have to adjust after looking at that site
Everything looks wrong for a minute or two afterwards
I can only hope that in some senior Meta management meeting they pulled this website up as an issue/concern, and a bunch of overpaid middle managers had to stare at the pinkness for hours upon end in a depressing corporate boardroom.
Is lemmy.world admin on there? Wefwef acts like it will let me search the page on my iOS device but then it does nothing.
No, neither Is his mastadon server
The fact they’ve been silent makes me think they are going to let them in and they don’t want the blowback from users like us
Considering the hate and threats that the admin of Universeodon got for just doing due diligence in meeting with Meta might explain that.
They’re going to have to let us know eventually
I'm with you, already tired of this constant whining about Meta. I hope they don't de federate until it makes sense, this is just scare mongering.
Did you read any of my arguments?
I don’t know if the person is an ex-redditor but if they are, their comment is appallingly short sighted and is reminiscent of German appeasement in the lead up to WWII. “They took Poland, you all are just scare mongering that they will come for France.”Lemmy is growing because corporate fucks fucked reddit. Now corporate fucks are trying to fuck lemmy and mastodon, and their best take is “y’all are fear mongering” despite mountains of evidence that corporate fucks will fuck anything they are allowed to fuck.
Reddit and twitters recent moves were the driving force behind me switching to mastadon and lemmy, but I ditched meta/Facebook services long ago. Adding those back into this fold really makes the choice for me kind of easy. Inviting meta to the party is just a non starter.
The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:
Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook's Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups
I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume
The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I've used the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Consume", to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.
They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they're so big, most instances will comply in the service of "content".
Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.
Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation
One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it's users and non-users.
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @[email protected]) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.
We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):
@threads.<whatever their url>Instance Admins, and the "Friendliness" of Meta
Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do "due dilligence", but I've seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.
I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn't make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.
Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta's orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.
I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they'd probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).
Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!
Note on This Post
I've realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don't have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p
More Random Shit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-29/facebook-whistleblower-sophie-zhang-government-manipulation/100103408
Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn't matter whether you're on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.
Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.
OP is correct. We have very little to to gain and everything to lose.
I'm still baffled that some people can argue "why are you so worried?" about this. We have twenty years of history of shit hitting the fan, how much more do you need to not trust Facebook/Meta?
Tl;dr - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is how google killed XMPP
XMPP is still alive, and is just what it was before Google used it. I don't understand this argument.
Agreed. It's not cowardly or "anti-competitive" to choose to avoid stepping in crap. Because that's what Facebook and Twitter are. Single ownership of an entire social media is a terrible idea, because that platform will always be promoting and protecting the interests of its owners, not its users.
For what it's worth, I'd like to put my voice. Out here in support of defederating them.
Our goals and their goals are like parallel Lines, They'll never cross.
Definitely defederate. I did not come here to let Meta monetize my content on their platform. Also - Facebook and Instagram crowd is among the worst userbase on the internet, with the blandest cotent, right behind Tik-Toc. I don't think it has much value, and it would make everything hell to moderate - it's just a lot of users.
So, defederate, I say.
I support defederation
Absolutely agree, cut them off.
The creator of Mastodon went to some kind of Meta round table meeting (couldn’t find the original thread, here’s someone declining the offer), so it’s entirely possible that he was told a bunch of lies and believed them.
That said, Meta is going to pay the admins of whatever instances Threads decides to federate with, and they’ve said that’ll be the biggest instances, which… well, that’s mastodon.social, by far the biggest Mastodon instance. So, I don’t know. I don’t have any reason to believe that he’s a bad person, but what kind of money are we talking about here? No one is immune to that kind of temptation.
I dunno, this whole situation has a weird vibe.
https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
For now, this is the best I've found. I think there's work on implementing this in actual lemmy, but this python script is the best option I know of ^.^ - you basically put your user account name and password for each account in a config file and run the script - though I'd make sure to delete the config file after you've done it, preferrably with some kind of secure-delete tool like
shredon linux.However, we don't know yet if
lemmy.worldwill defederate from Meta/FB, until the admins make some kind of statement on it nya. So I wouldn't leave yet. Though making an account on a smaller instance might be a good idea anyway for simple performance reasons :)I made this lemmy.ca account today because the admins stated specifically that they will defed and block meta. I moved from a larger instance, but that account only had a month and a bit of history to it, and I have no issue just closing up shop there.
Maybe it might be a good idea for people to reach out to the admins of lemmy.world and other instances about this issue. The sooner we know the better. Might be worth making a post on the main Communities of instances such as ![email protected] and ![email protected] as well as a few others about these issues.
As far as I know there is currently no way to migrate accounts, what I did was just scrolled through sub.rehab and signed up to all the ones I liked from there
If mastodon.social is the biggest instance, threads have been laughing for their number since the first day it was released.
Meta do not need Mastodon users at all to take off. They dont even federate at the moment.
You're 100% correct, but don't think that's enough for Meta. It's inherent to the nature of corporations to sell to grow, ie increase market share. If Meta thinks it can increase it's market share, even a little, by destroying mastodon.social it will.
Bravo. This goes straight to the main goal of Meta: they want us exposed to their manipulation, their astroturfed content and their psychological traps. They want our attention to their content, and the best defense we can have is negating them from having any of it.
A problem I haven't seen anyone discuss: What of server costs?
When even just 1% of the still growing 30 MILLION Threads users (300k) are interacting with an average Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. instance every day, just how much data do you think that will generate? As Threads scales and users are posting content that users on smaller instances try to interact with, the hosts of these smaller instances bear the brunt of the costs.
Threads need only exist, and as everything scales upward and more people join the Fediverse, their sheer mass will wipe out all the smaller players just by virtue of the smaller servers being unable to cover growing server costs. 300k users creating 1kb of content each, per day, comes out to 292 megabytes of data. (But that's not realistic. The OP contains 5,171 characters, or roughly 5kb of data.) This does not account for images, or videos, which also cost money to store. If 1% of those 300k users (1% of the 1%, 3,000 people out of 30 million) are posting images, if we assume the maximum file size Mastodon can store (8mb per image) and arbitrarily set the file size at 1mb to try to be conservative, we're still adding an additional 3,000 megabytes of data per day in addition to the original 292, or 3.21 gigabytes of data. We're not even yet accounting for the additional data to store the database references for all of this either, keep in mind.
Those numbers are small. They don't include videos, and they vastly underestimate the amount of users interacting with any of our smaller instances. Every time a reply containing an image or video is posted to Threads, if smaller instances want to keep a copy for their own users to reply to or interact with, they have to store that data.
Server owners will be buried under the server costs -- costs which Meta can easily subsidize with Instagram and Facebook revenue, not unlike Walmart intentionally under-pricing everything in a new branch in a small town right up until every local store ceases to exist, at which point they jack up the prices and put another new store somewhere else.
Good points. The musings of Lemmy/kbin/other users will be lost in the mass of karen posts, soccer moms, extremist views, god knows what else.
It's pretty obvious that those who came here from Reddit or wherevee are looking for a place that is not dictated to by commercial interests, and if threads attaches onto these communities, I guess we'll leave for somewhere else.
Seal the doors! Mark/Meta’s obsession over user base and data control has to be put in check. They’re like a social culture vulture. Riding the next wave but the attempt ends up being stale, killing the mood for everyone that just wanted to enjoy something to themselves.
I'm 100% in favor of defederating and completely blocking communications with whatever Meta, Bluesky and other big companies throw.
More importantly, I was not aware of how Google killed XMPP, and that's the most important thing that every Mastodon and Akkoma admin should read about. Their instances will slowly stop working with Threads, people in their instances might eventually migrate back into Meta owned shit, thus slowly killing their instances.
Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.
People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.
Yeah, absolutely defederate. Nothing good can come from interacting with Meta.
There's nothing good coming out of Facebook or any for-profit public enterprise. F* Zuck, Musk & all billionaire scums.
Never underestimate what corporate greed can and willing to do.
Ban meta and its instance on a firewall level
By sheer user count allowing them to federate would mean the end of non-Meta content on the All feed. Threads is already much bigger than the entire combined Fediverse so the total engagement would drown any Lemmy content, unless of course driven by Meta comments itself. This would no longer be Lemmy, it would be Threads that you could use your Lemmy account for. Maybe not if the algorithm was changed to filter out posts from Threads from the All feed, but you'd still get your communities flooded with Facebook comments.
This is in addition to the rest of the problematic issues with Meta as a company.
I’m fine with threads federating with mastodon as it means more content which means people won’t immediately dismiss mastodon because it’s too boring for them, but I don’t want Lemmy to federate with Lemmy any more than I want to read tweets on reddit. They’re different types of platforms for different things.
This is what I've been thinking lately. There's no way to unring that bell after an influx of several million people "join" Mastodon through Threads.
Plus threads has an entire team of engineers who can be abused to get out better looking apps, sys admins who ensure the threads servers are running at minimal load - ensuring a top tier Fediverse experience. Already we've seen a burst of indie developers for Lemmy and Mastodon, but what if I'm not concerned that my microblog app needs to know health biometric data - threads is up when my niche instance goes down.
That's how they get you. Come to threads for a "better user experience"! You can still follow the weird Bean memes, but with a better UI/UX! Don't worry, we at Facebook won't defederate with everyone else once we hit critical mass!
Users can still block instances though with Lemmy, yeah? So even if admins of instances don't block Threads, I'd imagine users would be able to. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the capabilities of the software, however.
You can block communities at user level but not whole instances yet, it's been requested as a feature I think, though.
While lemmy.world is not my main instance, so I have no say in whether you defederate or not, I would like to bring this arugment into the discussion, because it's applicable for all instances, and make de-federation an absolute must for every instance.
Allowing Meta in goes directly against the idea of Fediverse, and we should fight it as much as possible.
This is a literal quote from the main header on https://www.fediverse.to/
I've seen a lot of comments mentioning that defederating with Meta goes against the principles and main ideas of the Fediverse, that it should be inclusive and allow people to connect. But, judging by this main selling point of the Fediverse, it sounds to me like Meta shouldn't be in the Fediverse do begin with.
Defederate from those ass holes, zuck can get bent and a whole slew of other bad things. Stupid ass hasn't done anything of value and still acts like the dumb ass college kid bragging about getting people to give them all their personal details to use his crummy site.
Tl:Dr the only federation we join should have Jean luc Picard in it not Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook is a company you should never interact with. They are plain evil.
Even if all evidence showed that they have good intentions, I wouldn't trust them - just based on what they have done in the past.
I'll just leave these here....
Behind the Bastards Part One: Let's Look at the Facebook Papers
Behind the Bastards Part Two: Let's Look at the Facebook Papers
I’m all for defederation. It might seem alright in the beginning but slowly the problems would arise to a point that being on Facebook’s Threads would be easier. At that point they won because the rest of Fediverse would be deserted and thus killed. Just remember what happened with XMPP and Google Talk. It’s so incredibly sad that the Internet feels like a battlefield again. We free users who would like to enjoy a nice service without any enshittification and without being commodified vs another faceless corporation that would like to make money out of us all.
I absolutely support not allowing the ZuckFuck and his corporate shills any access to the fediverse. Defederate them!
What's the point of joining the fediverse when other antisocial network are abundantly available? They are well marketed in front of the public. I see nothing good coming out of integrating fediverse when you know they don't really care about you.
Cat: Yeah, don't give Meta a single inch. They need to GTFO.
This one is easy. I remember the 90s when microsoft pretended to play nice with everyone while they simultaneously did their damndest to destroy any competitor by their embrace and extend tactic. I also remember when AOL opened up their walled garden and the amount of garbage that flooded every usenet group. Im aware that the redditpocalypse probably had the same effect on lemmy but I still support defederation.
We have a moral and ethical obligation as humans to exclude any participation from Facebook or Meta. Facebook knew their algorithm increased suicide rates among it's users, but actively suppressed this information because they also knew their algorithm made them more money. The more depressed and addicted Facebook users became, the more money Facebook made. And when they went before Congress to answer for this, Zuckerberg just did nothing, took no accountability, and nothing changed.
This isn't about boycotting and trying to do some kind of ethical capitalism, it's about not letting Hitler submit changes to your git repo regardless of what those changes technically are. They could be the most technically brilliant changes ever made to an open source project, but they would still be Hitler's changes.
It's guaranteed that they'll use their instance to datamine and further build profiles on people in other federated instances as well.
I don't trust them at all with their handling of data besides their ability to track people who aren't even on their platforms. Also it's almost impossible to reach out to them unless you buy their shitty VR headset, as you will find out if someone ever fraudulently takes your account to buy ads with your money and gets your FB account banned.
Fuck the Zuck.
While I don't support preemptive defederation and was willing to give them a chance, it should be clear by now that Facebook is uninterested in being good actors, and allowing a nearly unmoderated large instance with hate groups and also collects this much info from their users is dangerous regardless of who runs it.
I support defed due to malicious behavior, although I still think Threads is going to fail regardless of what any of us does.
Facebook sucks, there's nothing but dumb boomers on there now. And the amount of data they harvest from their users is insane. If they think you're a bot, they'll demand to see your government issued ID or your SSN to "verify" you and totally not to get deeper insight into who you are and how to sell shit to you.
Meta can Zuck it.
Everyone here talking about XMPP and EEE.
I only joined Lemmy because of its open source, non-manipulative, not-for-profit nature. If Meta joins it will be a good reason for me to quit. Hell, even Reddit would be better than a Fediverse with Meta IMO.
Hopefully .world decides to defederate Threads and Meta, but if they refuse you can migrate to another instance that does defederate them. The solution here should be to refuse Meta, not give up on Lemmy and the Fediverse.
They won't be able to bribe every instance without making it known to the world but another mass migration even if within the same federation would discourage a lot of new users from joining/staying though.
This makes me so fucking angry that these fuckers wouldn't even let us have a small corner of the internet to ourselves.
I feel like defederating is a good short term solution, but the events described with XMPP could have happened in any number of ways.
The real focus should be on how to make ActivityPub robust enough to prevent the events from the article from happening again.
Nope. Im out. Im not waiting for admins to do the right thing. I did that with reddit and we all see where that went.
Google didn't kill XMPP, it died on its own. XMPP still lacks encryption by default and proper file transfers (there are 3 implementations of file transfers and all of them suck). The problem is that XMPP never had a normal protocol, and as a result, clients were forced to implement the features themselves through extensions which were not supported by all clients and servers. So it's hard to blame Google for starting to do their own implementation of features. Matrix did everything better, but for some reason people don't use it. They don't, because there's Telegram, Discord and so on.
Don't defend XMPP. It's obsolete. If you want a federation, use Matrix.
I think I fall on the side of preemptive defederation, not just because of data harvesting etc but also because the incoming communities will be huge and dwarf anything already here - look at what has happened here already as communities try to merge and establish. Everything dominant will become meta along with whatever mods and rules etc they already have in place. Scary.
Agreed. More instances should defederate from anything related to Meta. Im here because a corporate entity utterly destroyed something I liked. I don't want that again.
I am sure this might have been mentioned by someone else but my concern - someone that is financially motivated and saavy could work on becoming one of the larger instances in hopes Meta will buy them out. Similar to a startup, make a good product (community) and hope to get bought out for big bucks.
This means we need to trust instance owners and they in turn, as they get larger, need to be over transparent of their motivations, goals, and actions
Quesion: I don't know if the tech limits this, but if an instance owner flips to the dark side- could past posts and content be opened up for Meta mandated data scraping? Or would any code change like that not be retroactive? Aka if we select an instance that turns bad could we be feeding the machine in the future without knowing it today?
There must never be a single dominant instance. If one instance becomes too large, they end up having too much influential power. And with all that power, big corporations or power tripping admins will use that power to coerce other instances to do certain things. "Don't want to follow our unilaterally-imposed rule? We're gonna cut off your entire instance and your users will lose access to our communities."
If Meta doesn't get defederated, they will become the dominant instance. They already have the most amount of users since I'm assuming you can use your Facebook/Instagram account, they'll have the most amount of user activity, and of course the most amount of power.
I'm imagining Zuckerbot finding your post and his eye screen going red and it has your name and photo with a big flashing red PRIMARY TARGET
And all of us in this thread: SECONDARY TARGETS
lmfao
I’m still getting used to this platform, so this might be a stupid question. Are we able to see their content/can they see ours?
If we defederate, they can technically pull our content because it's public, but it's difficult, and their users won't be able to interact with it.
We would not be able to see theirs unless you manually went to their site.
Right now, they still haven't turned federation on, so we can't do that. If we do federate, we will be able to (easily) see and interact with their content, and they will be able to (easily) see and interact with our content. If we defederate, we can technically see each other's content by visiting their site (or them visiting ours), but we wouldn't be able to usefully interact with them and vice-versa without making an account on their site (or vice-versa) ^.^
Is that because federation involves actively pushing content, versus "pulling" meaning polling/scraping? How much of a barrier is it?
This makes sense to me: it's just they're unauthorized to POST/PUT/PATCH data right?
Yep! ^.^
It's not super difficult to pull content, but you ofc can't push back content.
Why wouldn't they be able to interact with it, at least within their own ecosystem? The way I understand, if I defederate with them on my instance they can still see my content but I can't see theirs. There's nothing stopping Metta from taking that public data anyways and allow only their users to interact with it in their own sealed space. With how many users they have, it's possible it wouldn't even be noticed by the average threads user
Well, theoretically we could do the same. Host shadow-Threads content. That's essentially what's going on with reddit repost-bots, after all. But if you look at those they usually have no comments and for Facebook in particular, I would argue that enabling their ability to spread their content to the Fediverse is dangerous even if we don't interact with it.
And the same is true for Threads - they could actually do that kind of re-posting, in theory, but then it's pretty much just them reposting a link to some post on the Fediverse with their own silo. We wouldn't see any of them at that point. I'm arguing for defederating on the basis that it protects us from Meta/Facebook, not on the basis that it would stop Threads users from seeing some parts of Fediverse content (essentially posted as links) ^.^.
But theyve got the numbers to support their own echo chambers. I'm not saying what meta is doing isn't a threat, but isn't it better to be in the same room as their users to have a conversation with them than have them exist in their own echo chamber thinking the fediverse is only what meta wants them to think it is?
I don't think the average threads user would even notice if it's a repost. They'd see the content, and have the interaction. From what I know, if I defederate with threads, a user subed to one of my communities would still have the meta server pull in content from mine. I'm fairly certain their engineers can make it look more organic and allow seamless interaction between the 30 million threads users.
It still seems to me because of this, we would be doing ourselves more harm by defederating. At least right now. Even in light of embrace, extend, extinguish.
In a room where Facebook/Meta controls the entire algorithm, who gets to see what, and any astroturfing efforts they make? And where the fraction of people who will ever see your post is so tiny as to be insignificant? No. Facebook have over a decade of brazen, malicious psychological manipulation experience - as well as lots of money - that they have used to attempt to agglomerate more and more control over the way people communicate and engage in horrific behaviour (like the stuff listed in my Original Post).
Trying to play the game on their field is a losing proposition in every case, when it's with a company that has much more than a decade of information warfare and manipulation capabilities and hundreds of times more users (plus probably 100s of thousands of times the financial resources). The Fediverse is far too small to compete with that at the moment.
If you really need to sell the idea of the Fediverse to Threads users, you can still make a Threads account, or spin up an instance for yourself to do that. Exposing the Fediverse as a whole to the metastatic organism known as Facebook/Meta is a losing proposition.
If it's either that or Im not in the space at all I'm going to take the option to try and expose the unwashed masses to the light of the fediverse.
By nature the fediverse is open. While I may not agree with exchanging my personal data to be sold to advertisersers in exchange for a fast browsing experience, if that's how people want to engage with the fediverse how is that bad? Would it be the same if a large pay for access instance arose that required members pay a fee but gave a browsing experience similar to what a large company like meta could provide?
It seems to me, unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding the concept, that defederation is a tool of last resort. It does more harm to the individual instance by nature unless the instance is proven to be disruptful or full or bad actors. I get the company meta itself meets that category, but I'm not convinced it's users or communities do. Defederation to spite an instance admin is only harmful to the instance doing the defederation.
Idk if you noticed but I am on a private instance. There is no way in hell I'd create an account on a meta server. I'd prefer to interact with them from mine and that's what I'll do. It's what makes the fediverse so great. And it's why unless there's a unified defederation camp again making it's reasons and statements known, individual instances defederating with meta will have little effect. Basically we need to unionize and I don't see that realistically happening at this stage, for better or worse.
How is it dangerous?
Meta/Facebook has 100s of times the number of users, many more times the amount of resources, the constant desire to consume other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp (or destroy the a-la Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), and well over a decade of experience in engaging in manipulation and essentially, information warfare, to get what they want and commit hienous behaviour.
Even just the quantity of users on a single, difficult to exit instance is a risk, but the continuous and long history of Facebook engaging in largescale psychological manipulation makes them many times more dangerous ^.^
In particular, you looking at their algorithmically curated posts enables them to manipulate you with their decades of refined, algorithmic experience in doing so, as they have repeatedly done in the past.
So basically their content is dangerous. Even if it's user-generated, it can be machine-curated for psychological manipulation. What seems like a natural flow of conversation could be a signal used to hack our minds.
I'm not trying to make it sound crazy by wording it that way. There are people in my life I just had to cut out because their speech was toxic to my mental health in a way I couldn't rationally object to. I just had to stop listening to them.
defed meta!
One thing that people are not talking about is that it would be fairly trivial to create communities in the fediverse on open servers and then just sync a bunch of your corporate drivel from what ever company like meta into those communities. Its already happening. Reddit was the first one to do this. There are communities where every single link goes to Reddit here on Lemmy
I think one of the ways we could combat as well as defederating them from instances is provide such a good user experience to consume content on the fediverse that threads - or whatever else - becomes just a shittier, ad-ridden version of what we use.
Look at Reddit for example, if they didn't have the power to remove our access to APIs, third party apps would still provide the best experience. Can any of the features Reddit provides that third party apps don't justify the number of ads thrown in your face? Nope.
Same here, if we focus on improving the experience of a Lemmy or kbin user and ignore whatever meta is doing, nothing is stopping us from becoming just the better way of consuming all fediverse content. Then if threads were to drop federation, we would still have the upper hand.
The only thing that might hurt us in the end is if we start giving in and host communities on their instance. But if we don't, and keep our ground, we can have the best of both worlds. See their content without their ads, and keep control of our own content, without their rules.
I certainly am not against improving the UI, but at the current scale of the Fediverse we don't have anywhere near the resources to compete directly with Facebook/Meta. It's too early. The primary defense must be defederating.
Making our UI advancements in a way that a corporation cannot - for instance, exploiting their need for advertising to make sure we have better experiences - is a good strategy in the long term. But it is a secondary strategy to immediate defederation ^.^, because Facebook is only at the start of the enshittification process for Threads and hence they won't be pumping it full of ads and their engineers can focus on having a "better" experience in the short term until they destroy us.
You can't have the best of both worlds, unfortunately. By exposing Fedi users to Meta/Facebook content, we expose ourselves to a company that has a long and continuing history of social manipulation and is able to pressure us to host communities on Threads - even if it's only done by sheer mass of users.
By letting them in, we've already almost lost. Whether by direct EEE, or by simple user agglomeration onto primarily-Threads communities, or by a deliberate campaign by Meta/Facebook, they will eventually try and gain direct control of the network.
My opinion is that the only useful response to an organisation that is openly known for direct deception and manipulation and attempting to assimilate existing networks (like e.g. what happened to Instagram and Whatsapp and XMPP, and probably others I'm not specifically aware of) is outright rejection.
Well said, I'm definitely going to switch to an instance that defederates meta if mine does not. I don't want us to get drowned in corporate nonsense. I am so happy to see Lemmy succeed and hope this wont affect us like it did XMPP
I'm having trouble conceptualizing the attack strategies here. I also lack much understanding of what (exactly, precisely, at the technical level) federation is so I don't understand how defederation is a defense against those attacks.
Would someone help me break this down conceptually? Are there any analogies? Is this like closing the gate of a castle? Is it like quarantining infected people? Like blocking a phone number? Not loaning someone money?
Please don't just say "yes to all those analogies". I'm casting about for understanding here.
How can I better understand OP's argument here? (I have a background in tech and understand passwords, certificates, signatures, etc if that helps). Is email a federated thing? What's federation precisely?
Layman here, from what I gather it sounds like federation is like one of those cups connected by lines. Federation is the equivalent of having a line connected to the web of cups and strings. Then suddenly a big cup provider comes into the mix, which at first seems great since there are more people communicating through cups. However, due to their bigger resources they greatly outpace the rest of the web, offering fancier cups and stronger wire, resulting in people moving to their cups. Then one day they cut the connections to all other cups but theirs; while the original web is still intact, the remaining users are essentially cut off from most of the cups they were connected for.
By defederating instances are basically (but probably not as effectively as Meta would) cutting that string before they get the chance to infiltrate the web.
Idk though once again I know very little
For "knowing very little", you fucking nailed that analogy. That's exactly what Instagram is trying to pull here.
So the attack is to migrate people across that connection into their space, then sever the connection, resulting in a loss of people here.
That doesn't worry me too much. I personally am here because I've had bad experiences with being silenced in big centrally-controlled places. And for me, if the only people who remain here are the ones who really despise those big special cups, I'm fine with that because I like the idea of a community of other outcasts.
But thank you for explaining the specific danger: loss of content creators into the fancier places.
I'm still curious about how those strings are implemented at the information security level.
And the fancier cups/stronger or bigger wire that Meta has the resources to build is the "Extend" part of EEE where their instance seems better than all the others, so inevitably some users (i.e. humans) will migrate if anything but out of sheer convenience. And then when it's convenient, Meta defederated, closes the data channels, and people are left in their convenient instance where they are happy with the content being fed to them. Meanwhile, Meta uses all the tactics in the book to make the rest of the fediverse seem like the dark web to scare away non-technical users.
Definitely a scary thought.
Defederation is definitely the play here at first because it doesn't give Meta a chance to Extend, but it does rely on the admins making that decision and holding that position for as long as Meta exists on the fediverse.
Can we hold? Depends on ideals, money, effort, and time.
I know that I as a user will just choose the next biggest instance to jump to as soon as the biggest instance ever federates with any corpo platform. It'll take more and more effort to vet more and more instances over time, but it's worth it.
Someone has explained the basic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy below, but I also want to comment on my own "Embrace, Extend, Consume" idea, as well as the other issues that come with Facebook.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn't complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others. They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn't comply >.<
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn't necessarily destroy the communities but essentially borgifies them and renders people unable to leave.
The other component specific to facebook is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.).
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users, and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the strings (as in the other analogy by @[email protected]) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of both.
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in specific, these are just illustrative:
@threads.<whatever their url>So it's like opening a wormhole to the borg homeworld. Not worth the effects of contact.
I think I miss something, the ActivityPub protocol is not owned or maintained by Mastodon devs. Isn't this just standard communication like an extension of HTTP? something like GraphQL (that created by Facebook itself). Quick google mentioned that ActivityPub is maintained by W3C.
So Meta can (and I think currently uses) ActivityPub, and all of your points already been possible without needing to federates with any other instances. For example, they already can say that ActivityPub doesn't work on some cases, and push W3C to do some changes on the standard
I think the critical difference is "Meta pushes for changes" vs "Meta pushes for changes with the support of thousands/millions of users".
If Meta convinces Thread users that a certain change is good for them, it's going to be that much harder for the people developing ActivityPub to push back on those changes. And even if the developers succeed, Meta can just use that to say "fine, we'll fork off and make our own ActivityPub with data collection and advertisements" and if enough instances in the Fediverse are reliant one Threads for engagement they may just switch to the Meta version of ActivityPub, taking a chunk of our community with them.
And maybe that's alright for some folks, but a lot of us don't want any of that to happen, even potentially. I think it's pretty unethical to deliver people into the maw of the beast like that, so to speak.
Thank you for this. While new to the fediverse, the activites of the large players ring true. I'll be watching.
OP I completely agree with all of your points. ESPECIALLY (BIG BOLD LETTERS) we need to create better "front-ends" Anecdotally, I put a post a on mastodon that didn't get responses (the vibe there seems a bit different on this issue, because I usually do get responses) Since the reddit migration, I've gone into a homelab frenzy. I have reached out to others. I have been in awe at the developers who worked on the overloading of servers and the jump on the creation of third party apps. The pre-existing community that explained a complicated process to many people.
We saw how many uses came over from reddit and found it too complicated. We had those discussions too. How there were solutions like simplifying what the fediverse is, what instances are, etc. etc. This took time for people who already cared about what was happening on reddit_ which is a small minority of internet uses.
And that would have been okay, right? We had our space, we could have had time to build.
I have been going on about this issue ad nauseum with my partner. I have a computer science background and work in cyber tech so this came to me a bit faster, but still a learning curve. I showed her videos, articles, walked her through the apps. But this is someone who is a social media user.
I had a fever for a few days (very irritated as it disrupted my home lab fever, pardon that pun) when my partner is comes running in thrilled**___ that she gets to be involved with my project and finally understands it because she saw Threads and the word "fediverse"
This is someone who is yes intelligent, who lives with someone who is way more involved with this issue that the average internet "normie", and still, because of the front end UI, the simplification of it. The exact quote was "this is a space on the fediverse for me"
A lot of fighting happened, lol anyways if you have made it this far, especially to OP:
How do we get this done?
All i have to say afterr reading that is: HOLLY SHIT!!! I didnt even know a fucking city tryed to go opensource, let alone Munich, and fucking MicrosoftOffice of all the fucking things prevented them from doing so. Fuck. We absofuckinglutely must keep motherfucking Meta as far fucking away from our comunities. The fucking problem is gonna be when those meta fuckers start fucking offering money to the admins, keeping a server is fucking expensive and they are gona have to get money from somewhere. Fuck, whe really need a solution for this otherwise we are fucked.
If the attention this post is getting isn't a strong indicator of what our communities want, and the direction that the fediverse and all instance admins should follow, then nothing will be.
Especially now, because of the extra obstacles of joinin the fediverse, users are on average more aware of the implications of such a thing. We should listen our people.
To be honest, federation is presently too complicated for a majority of users. Until that is solved, distributed social networks aren't going to really take off.
If you understand tech, you will get it. But lets face it, most people don't know wtf they are doing lol
I'm really out of touch here. So, Meta is joining the fediverse?
Coincidentally, I just read an article about the impact large players can have on a financial market when they create a new ETF. The article went into some detail about the various ways the market can be manipulated, and also the unintentional influences the mere presence of a new, huge, monolithic owner of a large share of a commodity can have. It's rarely a positive event for the smaller players.
There are similarities between financial markets and social media spaces, and social media should take heed from the lessons offered by the much older financial space. Unlike financial markets, the ActivityPub sphere has controls small players can exercise to counter movements like Threads. How effective they are remains to be seen, but I think you're absolutely right: the existing AP players would be better served by locking out Meta, than to allow the wolf into the playground.
I would not sing up for Meta run instance, but it is because I don't really trust it will last. In a big corporate scheme of things, it is an experiment and can be killed anytime because it is really nobodys passion project to maintain. So I really doubt a Meta run instance will be better than a multitude of community run instances in the long run.
But yeah, I'd sway for defederate. Meta is a corporation and it's intentions are what they are. It's not "fair" but also its not like Meta is comparable to another community in the fediverse.
Wasn't there a post showing how bad defederation is as a defence when other instances were doing so? Why don't we just have a bot that removes comments from META and messages the user, that in order to comment they must use another instance? This way we can use METAs own tactics against them. Drive users to our instances, regulate communities automatically and still increase overall content generated rather than styfile.
AI Summary:
This text is talking about why it is important to stop being part of the Facebook/Threads/Meta social media platforms. It says that these companies have done bad things like help with genocides and manipulate people's opinions. They have also invaded people's privacy and tried to control the internet. The text says that we shouldn't believe anything these companies say because they are not trustworthy. It also says that by leaving these platforms, we are protecting ourselves and our network. It is like our immune system fighting against harmful things. The text suggests that we should focus on making our own social media platforms better instead of relying on these big companies.
^.^
Cannot agree harder
fuck zuck, hoping kbin also defederates
Hold on, is Lemmy part of meta? Cause if it is I'm fuckin out of here as well. I do not support meta fb, or any other company like them.
No.
In layman's terms, Meta is using the technology Lemmy is based on. How they use it is the concern.
The hope is Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon are not ruined by Meta's ulterior motives.
If this is true most likely won't be long. Meta and Amazon are just cancers that spread once they have a fraction of a foot in.
@not_that_guy05 No. Lemmy is not owned by any corporation or any one person. All that federation or defederation means is whether an instance connects to another.
Oh ok. I really hope they don't allow it then. Meta is a cancer that grows once inside a body(platform).
Simply the fact that they harbor known harassers like LibsOfTikTok would be enough to de-federate pretty much any other fediverse instance. Why would their moderation have a free pass just because they're big?
Not related to the topic, but if I can give one piece of feedback, it would be to stop using
^.^and>.<.Wait... FB/Meta is going to create instances? Somehow I missed this news and I'll be trying to look this up after by post.
Anyway, yes they should not be allowed. They have a vested interest to destroy the Fediverse. How would they do this? Well, Microsoft has pioneered this strategy known as Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish. It's much harder to apply these things to opensource, but we've all seen how much Microsoft has been Embracing Linux in the past 6-7 years.
They'll start setting standards, other instances will comply, and meta will control (or destroy) the fediverse.
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.
Hey what's a good response to "can't we just 'silence' threads.net instead"?
I'll probably keep a presence on a non-threads-federated instance and one on a threads-federated instance, just to compare and to talk to grandma. I doubt I'll spend much time scrolling through whatever it is Instagram users write about but you never know.
Thanks so much for your article.
I think that this is the best take on this topic
If everyone does that and defed still isn't happening then we can sure by then that admins are already in the lizard king's pocket.
Can someone explain what it means to defederste from meta/threads? I didn't think those were federated so I'm a bit confused
"People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it."
Who gets to appoint the gatekeepers?
The gatekeepers are the instance mods/admins. The model is known to have problems....unfortunately, it's the best option we have IMO
The OP wasn’t speaking for their server though they were speaking for the fediverse. Everyone should be able to run their server how they see fit but don’t speak for other people.
I don't know, I think we have a responsibility to eachother to keep the Fediverse ecosystem healthy - Facebook/Meta isn't exactly a humanist... well, anything.
I think it's fair the white blood cells of our 'body' are calling for re-enforcements on this.
I actually support making it easier for people to join the Fediverse. For instance, by having each instance compile lists of other instances which self-determine the kinds of topics they want and pointing new users to instances that are less overloaded, and by making the signup process easier, and improving UI. Letting Facebook consume us and destroy us via EEE is not that.
The "gatekeepers" are the people willing to set up instances ^.^.
Is Meta really playing Microsoft’s EEE card with Threads?
I know tonfuck of reasons why we shouldn't have them here. Are there any advantages?
If I start seeing meta on here, I'll leave. I left facebook over a decade ago, and want nothing to do with it. This seems like an obvious no brainer.
Lemmy is federated with facebook?
Their new Twitter clone, "Threads" will likely attempt to federate with Mastodon, and therefore Lemmy and kbin unless instance operators decide to defederate their service, possibly preemptively if we can.
In my opinion they absolutely should do that there's not much good that will come out of being Federated with a Facebook/Meta product and an insane amount of bad things that will come out of it, we need to nip this in the bud just like we did with Gab (though I will admit that was for different reasons).
i agree, but will there be a way to avoid the facebook shithole twitter?
Defederating is a pretty good solution, it stops them from being able to directly communicate with your servers, preventing them and their users from posting on the instances that they have been defederated from. One example of a server that will be doing this is pawb.social I'm sure others will follow as well.
I'm not sure if it would be necessary but you could also go the extra mile and block their IP range at the firewall level on your Lemmy server. That's mainly something that you would do for spammers, but since Facebook/Meta do have a bad track record it couldn't hurt.
Not yet. And hopefully most of the instances decide to pre-emptively defederate.
Do you think it will happen?
Most of Lemmy and the associated instances seem to be very anti-Meta so far. I think it's not likely for lemmy as a whole, though we might see a minority of instances that federate with Meta. Got to wait and see ^.^
Mastodon I'm somewhat more worried about.
Where does lemmy.world stand on this?
we need to force defederation from thread's
Petition to Defederate mastodon.social and .online from Threads
https://sopuli.xyz/c/[email protected] even-though this was 2 years ago: Meta changing the search results on their platform shows what responsibility they hold to the public. And how they could abuse it "theoretically". In that sense this post is prophetic.
The corpos ruined everything, don't let them do it again.
Is Threads going to have communities like Lemmy? If not, this seems like much more of an issue for Mastodon, not as much for the “Threadiverse” part of the Fediverse.
I thought I would just chime in here if I am allowed. I looked for an official Facebook lemmy but couldn't find one.
I have become a bit satisfied with Facebook as of late. They used to allow tools for embedding social pages into private websites and whilst technically they still do their level of support for such seems to have plummeted to non existent. I don't know if that is a conscious effort by Meta to close down forum support or whether it is because they are moving more towards a "pay to play" business model. This in, my opinion, suddenly erects a huge barrier to entry, to even get started developing with their platform. It would seem to me it would have been more prudent, as a business model, to provide free support to get started but start charging when their products are established or at least have some way to talk to a support person.
What I am saying, in a roundabout way, is maybe the world is ready for a decent alternative, even in the business space, and Facebook no longer seems to be it. I really can't understand how their support has collapsed so badly for developers.
Have any of you read Daemon by Daniel Suarez? The fediverse seems like that book coming to life, without the sword wielding killer motorcycles lol!
@sapient_cogbag I hope my instance admins will take a look at this great article.
Have a nice weekend everyone @abel @wazaby
is there a good twitter app out there instead of the original for android?
This was a fascinating and well written paper. It reminded me of how Labor and social movements are co-opted historically.
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.
threads will never federate.
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
My point is that defederation is our defense against corporate interests. And Facebook isn't just "a corporation", it's specifically a known hostile actor with massive experience in social manipulation. It's not a perfect defense, but you don't resist corporate subsumation by letting them straight through the door.
This right here! The ability to defederate is what makes this community viable. We still have the power in this space to ignore corporations. Something we are losing the ability to do in real life. Corporations live and die by their ability to interact with us. Defederation is one of the strongest tools on the internet now.
How do you identify corporations? What if they buy huge instances and not tell anyone? Anyone can be bought, there isn't really any stopping this. They then can just merge it with their own branded instance.
A corporation is technically a group of people acting as a legal single entity. But in this case I’m using the more layman definition of large monied interests trying to monetize everything and crush creativity in the process. If they buy huge instances… then we make others. Just look at how many people (like me) did their research to try something new when they fell out with Reddit. Switching to a new instance is not that hard.
I think most lemmy users are against federation with meta.
Mann .. I’d spin up an instance and defederat from them if the majority of admins decided to federate with meta.
Perhaps what is eventually needed is some sort of Fediverse Alliance that operates under established usage/ethical guidelines.
To join the Alliance, an instance must sign a Terms of Agreement/Charter/Constitution that is written (and owned w/ potential for future amendment) by said alliance. It would contain all of the data usage rules and operational ethics that must be adhered to in order to be a member of the Alliance (and therefore have access/be joined to the group of allied Fediverse instances via federation).
If such an Alliance were successfully formed (especially if top-instances banded together) it becomes a powerful mechanism to filter out the bad and protect the users. For example: perhaps one charter rule is no for-profits or corporate instances?
If an instance violates the charter they would face defederation from the Alliance—perhaps by vote? ( ie group level defederation). At this point the offending instance(s) could of course create their own Alliance. However the benefits of being in the “Primary Alliance” are lost (or gained!).
Just thinking out loud.
Edit: Alliance self-governance would need to be thought of very very carefully in order to protect against corruption and hostile acts….
I think this is a really good long term strategy, and something that is already happening to some level.
Many instances are open about blocking others, and warn eachother of bad instances (like a instance full of spam bots or bigots). I could definetly see this evolving into an alliance type network like you described.
It's less of a defense and more of a stick to shove in our spokes. We can get bled to death by simple user inertia, it happens all the time. We can see it happening right here in the Fediverse as we speak, where the majority of active users just think of beehaw as "that weird server where people won't see my replies."
Threads is an aircraft carrier at full speed and we're a rowboat being attached to its side whether we like it or not. If we just cut ourselves loose we will be crushed in their wake.
This assumes that the people joining threads actually consider themselves part of the Fediverse, which I would bet is not the case. They're just using their existing IG account, and if more communities and groups start being formed on Threads than anywhere else Facebook essentially gets control over most of the fediverse, due to it's large size.
It also assumes that the instances defederating are going to be a small minority, which doesn't have to be the case at all. We already have pretty thriving communities here, we don't need Threads to grow - just improving our user experiences to grow steadily until we are as the Fediverse strong enough to seriously resist this kind of corporate agglomeration. ^.^
The only response to a corporation specifically known for mass social manipulation is to defederate rather than let them get their hooks in. In your analogy, this is using our high speed engine and maneuverability to get as far away as possible before they just obliterate us.
What does it defend us against though? The only thing we get from federating with them is more users. Lack of users is the biggest reason people won’t use mastodon. Once threads starts federating it makes it easier to convince people to move. By accessing threads content from mastodon, meta gets no data from us other than the stuff that’s already public for anyone to see. You don’t need to give them device permissions, you don’t need an instagram account. I don’t see the issue. I don’t think all instances should defederate, some should so people have the option to not see threads posts though.
Social manipulation, brazen EEE or EEC. None of this is necessarily specifically about privacy, which I explained in the post, but about open and brazen manipulation.
What is EEE and EEC
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume (my version of EEE, where an instance becomes so dominant that defederation would ruin the experience for every other instance and essentially locks them into federation to be useful).
True, not the first and definitely not the last. But (realistically) the fediverse is still in it's infancy.
Decentralization is not what makes it weak, it makes it strong, but allowing facebook and trying to keep the decentralised voice is like asking a baby to fight a lion.
Facebook is a known bad actor, they can't be trusted to join the fediverse. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Facebook is the worst non Nestle company out there, but exactly zero corporations can be classified as sheep. If Google starts sniffing around don't think they'll be any better.
I used xmpp for years before Google talk federated, and I was so excited. I thought xmpp was finally going to be mainstream, but then they used their weight to control the direction of the protocol, then cut and run. Xmpp has mostly recovered and still a great protocol, but Google kind of messed it up before kicking it to the curb.
Edit: This page no longer exists, but as recently as 2020, Google had a page about how dedicated they were to open chat standards, 7 years after they introduced hangouts, which was once again a closed/proprietary protocol.
For what it’s worth, Eugen, the fellow behind mastodon doesn’t think this is a XMPP situation:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Eugen is either naive or is in cohorts with Meta. As a tech worker, I know firsthand how foolish can techbros be. He.probably thinks he can "negotiate an advantageous position" with Meta.
This would probably relegate the fediverse to a zombie-product-status niche if this sort of policy extremism takes on. But maybe some users would prefer that. Please read the rebuttal on this view at https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking
It's not a zombie network now, but it will be if Facebook EEEs us. We don't need to grow by becoming attached to Facebook nya.
And calling engaging with an FOSS protocol immediately with NDAs suspicious is not "tinfoil hat behaviour", when we are talking about Facebook, which again, is well known for social manipulation and astroturfing.
Wouldn't creating a walled off garden ourselves bolster these corporations? There will just be more users on threads than anything else and people are already moving to threads anyways because that's where "all the people are" especially people who have a major following and want to interact with where a majority of their followers are. This would just create more harm to artists/influencers on the mastodon platform than it will help and just make Meta even more powerful than they already are. This will just take us back to where we were, a bunch of people separated by social media servers rather than unified. I don't want to have to make 3 different social media accounts just to talk to people that I've known for years. All you're relying on is assumptions on what the future will be like without actually seeing it first hand. We need to be reasonable and we need to see for ourselves how this will all go before we defederate from millions of people. Sure, Instance admins need to be cautious but the people shouldn't be separated just because of fear. You're extinguishing a service already by doing this.
At the end of the day, I will respect whatever the instance admins on the various mastodon servers decide (especially smaller instances with minority groups that do want a safe space) because I believe Open Source is the freedom to choose. I just simply think it's too cautious and the people of those major services like Threads are not willing to go use a service like Mastodon. It's too new and they'll never understand until we slowly but carefully mass educate them on what even is going on here and what even is a fediverse? We need to get people to see that mastodon is the safe space they need to be because there are people there who want specific things that threads already fails to provide (due to strict ruling and such). We need to be available for them just as mastodon is available to us.
Pretty weak show of confidence against Meta. I feel like the fediverse will become a collection if defederated sites with how quick everyone is to defederate.
Bluds read one article and shit their pants.
I disagree.
Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP "take a stand" against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.
Controvercial take: Mastodon is already build on a no trust architecture with only public stuff leaving your instance so it doesn't fucking matter and thisdebarte is fucking stupid!!! Damn I needed a Reddit like place to leave stuff like this really bad!
I don't understand what's the big deal. If they join fediverse - cool, more content for us. If they decide to quit, how is it different from a regular instance defederating? Why people think that users would abandon fediverse just to follow them? I'm still new here but I'd say that if some community vanishes, I just search for another ones that are available here or just stay with those I already have. Maybe I just can't see something but I left reddit because it decided to restrict its users, I thought the fediverse wouldn't do the same.
Maybe this is a naive take but what exactly is meta supposed to be embracing extending and extinguishing? Mastodon isn't some huge community that they're trying to consume. Facebook has a really good track record of contributing to the FOSS community (react et al). Don't get me wrong I dislike meta as much as the next guy but maybe there's something good that could come out of it. I'd like it if it was a mainstream entry into the fediverse.
You're right that mastodon isn't a huge community but fediverse social media is gaining traction and I think the sense is that by meta entering at this point can kill a lot of momentum going into mastodon/Lemmy etc. By it being a "mainstream" entry ino the fediverse they can consolidate the user base by virtue of it being where most people are, and having simple signups/interface/whatever then eventually shut out the rest of the fediverse, draining users to their ecosystem and leaving mastodon bare.
Lolol this thread and the rest are pure compium without a plan.
Without monetization this place is DoA. Either step up, start a non profit e.g Mozilla foundation, and start charging users and hitting staff.
Otherwise you're post is going to the void, accomplishing nothing.
Server performance: garbage Comment: garbage