[Discussion] Pre-emptive Threads defederation
Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?
Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.
Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.
What do you think should be done?
EDIT: correction
EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.
my take on it is that i am completely against any kind of bridging between the platforms. i do think the fediverse in general is in danger, by being a victim of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy
as many on lemmy, i use this platform because of its decentralized, open-source, not-for-profit nature, and think the whole fediverse community would be in jeopardy if we don't act
Exactly. I'm almost always against defederation, but the risk of EEE is why I'm in favor of preemptively defederating.
would like to had this more informed and well articulated take on why federation with Threads would be bad
And that is why I am voting to defed.
Defederation is meaningless, what matters is the dev side. Federating doesn't give them anything they couldn't get other ways for slightly more effort. The problems come if you allow contributions the greater community doesn't want to the code itself.
My bigger concern is content being overwhelmed by a flood of accounts that have a different online culture from what has grown and is still developing here.
I'm less concerned about the culture aspect, but there's probably some room to improve how federation works at a technical level so smaller instances aren't crushed if someone subscribes to large communities.
This feels like an uninformed take. Have you interacted with people on Mastodon via a Lemmy instance? They're clueless about the fact that they are replying to a forum post or that there's more than one thread of the conversation going on that most people can see and interact with. The conversations tend to be awkward.
it seems they are already testing the integration
I’m in favour of anything that prevents Meta’s enshittification of everything.
Facebook should be quarantined as much as possible.
I'm for the preemptive de-federation.
Yep. Defederate.
I have no interest in welcoming Facebook/Meta/Zuckerburg's Big Goddamn Fucky Wucky Company to the Fediverse. I would vote to defederate from Threads and any instance federated with them.
If and when Meta becomes “federated”, I 100% will be on team DEFEDERATE.
How would another instance inject ads and tracking into this instance? If that's possible, then that's a serious security issue far bigger than Facebook, and is the real thing we should be discussing
Sponsored posts.
Interesting. I mean they could do this, but would need votes to make it to people's feeds. Would they spam fake votes to game it? I doubt it; at least as a first run.
Otherwise I guess unless people sort by newest, they wouldn't interfere.
A middle ground for them would be sponsored posted via certain accounts that people could block if they didn't want to see them. But like I mean a specific set of accounts and not ones they can just add and remove to make new sponsored posts appear. Maybe a sponsored account type that could be blocked at a user level.
Though all of this is what ifs: I'd say defederate if they don't play ball responsibly. They aren't even targeting Lemmy stuff atm. More like Mastodon.
Honestly federating with threads makes me more likely to use Mastodon. Otherwise very few people I know or care about are on it (Mastodon).
Why not? They already manipulate their feed on Facebook, why not do it on Threads as well? Yeah, they probably wouldn't do it at launch, but they'll probably work it in later.
That's not really what I'm worried about though, I'm more worried about my content being used to manipulate other users. I still don't want to see ads though.
They'll probably just pay regular users to shill stuff. So ads won't be "buy X," but instead "X is great, I use it every day!"
I doubt they'd make something easily blockable like a unique account type visible to lemmy. Why would they? That would reduce their reach.
Sure, but it's not like there isn't a ton of evidence to be skeptical. Meta makes almost all of its money through advertising. So they're going to make advertising a major part of any product they make. That's what they do, and calling that a "what if" is silly.
The real question is not if, but how much it'll impact lemmy. I don't see any reason to think they won't try to monetize lemmy users, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?
I'm taking off my admin hat and commenting as a user...
One minor correction to OP's post: Threads is a X/Twitter clone, not a Reddit clone.
I'm in the wait-and-see camp. If Threads someday links to Lemmy, and if it becomes problematic for the function or culture of the platform, then I will be in favor of cutting them off.
As @[email protected] mentioned, the real risk is that Meta starts steering Lemmy development in its favor. I don't foresee that happening given that dessalines and nutomic oversee code contributions, and they certainly won't allow it.
As an aside, I'm not convinced Threads will last long to begin with. It isn't looking like the X killer that Meta seemed to be hoping for. Meta has been trying to artificially drive engagement by creating shadow accounts for Facebook/Instagram users, and sticking Threads posts in people's Facebook feeds. Integrating with Mastodon feels like a further attempt to entice Meta users to adopt a microblogging app that nobody asked for. At this rate it may fizzle and die before they ever get around to interacting with Lemmy.
can threads not just kill all other instances with their huge number of posts that would come through and hide everything else?
Yeah, even if Meta acts with 100% good will, and the Threads users are wonderful and respectful, Threads is about 50x as big as the entire Fediverse, and Lemmy is a fraction of that Fediverse.
https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/494473
Starting out with the floodgates open could lead to Lemmy getting overwhelmed. (Plus, it could cause server costs to skyrocket.)
It makes the most sense to start out with Threads blocked, then (if Meta is behaving) to allow a trickle in to see how that goes.
This is my main concern. The admins and mods are not ready for floodgates to open like this. And people using and enjoying Lemmy despite its imperfections will be soured quickly by the experience.
This is my exact take as well. Defed if there is an issue, but wait and see first. I hate the kneejwrk reaction to circle the wagons here. I have been hating on Facebook for as long as anyone l, but this place badly needs content and users so I am willing to see where this goes.
Ask yourself why do they want to join the fediverse if they don't get anything out of it? Also, what would they be contributing to the fediverse besides more people. Every time I see more people, it's not great people, or thoughtful people or even shitty stars, it's just more people. Crowds help the fediverse how? It's like going to your quiet cafe and being overwhelmed by the sound of it.
You've probably seen this analogy because I've posted it way too much, but I think it really holds true:
Defederate pls
Wait and see. As much as I hate Meta, i don't think we have much to gain by being a walled garden. Maybe we have also much to lose if we federate, who knows. I would not complain much if we defederate. If we do federate, there should be a zero-tolerance policy. If Meta tries some bullshit, or if there's the slightest doubt, we should defederate immediately.
This. Lemmy feels too small. If we get decent content from Threads, it'll be a boost to our communities.
If threads had decent content, why are they federating?
Unless we get access to internal documents from Meta, we can only guess at their reasoning.
As such, their goal shouldn't directly factor into our decision. If federating with Threads is good for our community, we should do it. If it's bad, we should either not do it, or defederate.
I still haven't seen any reasons anyone thought were positive besides more people.
More people is pretty significant. AFAIU the Lemmy monthly user base is in slow decline.
At this point, most of my Everywhere feed is bots with occasional posts from people. A minority of posts have comments. I see the same few dozen users commenting on stories.
Granted, that's an effect of the instances my host pulls from, but it seems like a bad sign.
You could make the argument that Threads users might have different interests, but (IMO) that's secondary to the lack of organic content.
It's not in serious decline though, I don't know what numbers you're talking about. Also, Meta lost 80% in their first month, which I think would make them 20 million users. I looked the other day to find actual numbers, they must be super low because I couldn't find any, zilch, nada that were current. We're at around 1.5 million, we're doing fine. Next reddit fuck-up will probably double it. We honestly couldn't handle too much more anyway plus threads doesn't provide us any with content, we're the zoo.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=12
The "Active Users Monthly" stat shows a slow decline after the Reddit migration.
Posts by month is going up, as is comments. Which is good.
I wonder how much information they can farm by federating? Facebook and Twitter both have recorded history of significant federal government involvement in their platforms, and collect an ungodly amount of information for commercial purposes too.
Is there any useful information they could gather if federated that they can't just gather with crawlers?
Not clear but I imagine a decent amount can get crawled. Honestly I think the much bigger threat is the history of big tech using EEE to crush any potential competition.
For those out of the loop, Mark Zuckerberg recently made an announcement on Threads
oh shhh...people, today is friday, the day to open up votes here in The Agora. but this discussion has only been up for less than 2 days
is it too soon to start a vote? should we wait for the next week? i don't want to press anyone but feel some urgency about this issues since, in case we defederate, it should be done at rhe start od this process, it seems to me
I don't see how rushing a vote would have been better.
I can't bring myself to care whether or not someone using a Facebook app can get a shit post in their feed.
Wut
Federate, let them get a taste of sweet Lemmy content, then cut them off. Will make the Threads experience feel broken for native Threads users.
Genuinely, why would you want that? It seems pointlessly hostile. Shouldn't we welcome more users?
For the lulz, obviously. I legitimately forgot Threads exists until this post came up so I'd be hard pressed to honestly claim any meaningful level of investment in the topic.
Serious question - I’m not up to speed on what kind of effort goes into defederating/refederating. If it’s easy, then is “wait and see” an option?
Alternatively, is preemptively defederating now and refederating later if we want also an option?
If both options are on the table, I say wait and see just because it’s unexplored territory though I agree that it probably won’t be great. If it’s a big pain in the ass to change our stance, also wait and see; that way we only have to do the PITA thing once.
It is, there's basically a setting on the server to block certain instances. So the admin would just update that setting to enable/disable federation. However, defederation doesn't delete any data on either side, it just stops the flow of new data.
So if you care about Meta having a copy of all content for some period, the better option is to defederate now and refederate later if they somehow play nice. There is a risk that Threads could defederate from any instances that blocked it, but I'm guessing they're not going to bother, I think they're just looking for data to scrape.
It's actually relatively trivial to scrape the public data of any instance. If Meta really cared (which I highly doubt), there's nothing stopping them spinning up a temporary instance with a bot that auto-subscribes to all communities it knows about.
Defederating from threads doesn't change the fact that all information on any instance is pseudonymous, but very public.
Sure, but they have to actively do that, whereas federation just gives it to them. I want them to have to put in the work to scrape the various instances, not get it for free.
Couldn't they just get an intern to spend an afternoon actively doing that? It can't be that hard. I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that if someone has the proficiency to set up an instance, they would have the proficiency to set up crawlers.
Probably, but they'll want to integrate it somehow as well. One of the main points of federation is to get access to more content, which means your users have more stuff to look at, which means you get more data to link interests to ads to improve click-through. Scraping it would just give them the data, but they'd have to recreate it for their users to consume.
So scraping is only half the battle here.
Both are an option and easy enough.
Honestly, and that's my personal take as a user not as an admin... I'm in the "wait and see" boat, but I'm nor particularly full of trust about this so my goto would be:
Don't defederate immediately, but do it automatically three months after threads goes live if users don't explicitly vote to keep it around. I wouldn't mind seeing how it goes at first.
Defederate
I was just checking this point before registering here, and this instance pleases me :)
Welcome aboard then.
As you can imagine, we're not counting votes from accounts made after the vote thread was created because that opens up a bunch of shenanigans. You're welcome to discuss here though. Thanks,
You. are. awesome.
Thanks, you're awesome too
I don't get the point of pre-emptively de-federating. This would allow lemmy to have a wider reach amongst a general audience rather than be a niche community. We should only defederate after seeing if it's a problem or not to be federated with them.
We've seen this multiple times before. This will not give Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever more reach, it will connect us to the metaverse and then after we have invested in it they will pull the rug. This is classic big tech vs OSS, using EEE to attack the competition.
Good news is this means they see us as a threat
I don't see how they can get us invested in something that they can take away. The whole point of this system is that each instance fundamentally does not rely on a third party, right?
Do you really want to be the one testing how they're going to fuck with the system? This instance didn't update to .19 because they wanted the bugs out. I don't think we know yet how much and how hard meta is going to try and use our system and/or break it.
What are the concrete reasons a wider reach would be better? Are there any other reasons why it would be better to have them or not?
It offers a completely different perspective than what people on lemmy provide, which is usually people in the tech sector. So many smaller subreddits exist on reddit because of it's wider reach. Look at ![email protected] for example, the last post in "hot" was from a month ago, current numbers on lemmy just can't sustain smaller subs like that.
I don't mean this in a rude way, but shouldn't you hang there then?
I mean by that logic no one should be using lemmy then, we all should stay on Reddit. This instance was created due to Reddit corporate greed, not because Reddit had “normies”
Your logic seems to be:
My logic
Here's my low int take: more people means more discussions, which is the whole reason we use this service in the first place
Completely agree. If it is really an issue, we can always defederate later.
I think there should be some instances that at least try federating with Threads just to see how it goes, but I don't want it to be this instance. The existence of voting in the Agora alone is a reason not to want a massive influx of new users from Instagram. This instance is uniquely vulnerable to the threat Threads may pose.
Would you mind expanding on that? Why do you think that? If that refers to voting in the Agora, then I'd like to mention that users from other instances can't vote in the Agora. That is only for users of sh.itjust.works.
On the one hand this is true, but on the other hand making an account here is trivially easy. I can't speak to whether integration would lead to an influx of new SJW accounts from Threads to brigade these polls, but I can see why someone might be concerned.
That can happen with or without federation.
Stay federated and if it's annoying, then defederate.
As much as I hate Meta/Facebook, we need activity and content to keep Lemmy alive, and Meta can potentially help provide that. If after federation, it turns out to be overwhelmingly toxic or the users provide no value at all, then defederate. If nothing else, doing it later will encourage Meta users to try other insrances.
The fun option would be to flood threads with shitposts and make them defederate from us when they start to lose advertisers
They will just hide that content in their platform
The way Threads works currently from what I understand is that they can send content to other instances, but not receive. Makes it seem even more useless if it's one-sided.
Ahh, nevermind then
Please defederate from threads.
It kinda defeats the entire point of the fediverse. It couldn't be more obvious what they want to do, and that's control it, or destroy it.
What do you see as the risks to the larger fediverse in having Meta federated?
What benefit does Meta hope to see?
for me the main risk would be the loss of freedom, as in the open way it is developed. if threads is openly weaved to the fediverse, their closed development methodology will dictate it's future by virtue of its monopoly and the way for that future will not be defined by the interests of the larger community - as it generally is now with the fediverse's platforms and apps open standards
a second important risk is the quality of the conversation will likely drop abruplty. the dominance of the userbase will be too big too fast. i'd like for e.g. Lemmy to grow and keep on growing (not that i care that much about it) but i think this would not be the way to do it
the benefit any company seeks with any new product or implementation: to increase it's bottom-line, AKA money
how? one way is using everything that's going on in the fediverse as 'content' for their users - who they'd be "milking" for said bottom-line. and that content's upkeep, that would bring them said profit, would not cost them a thing
EDIT: grammar
They get to claim to have less of a monopoly. Plus try to snuff Mastodon.
Defederate
Defederate
Defederate.
We should defederate the internet. LAN not WAN!
I don't plan on staying here if you defederate with Threads, but I respect your right to do it. The move seems unnecessarily reactionary and premature. I think the open web has more to gain from encouraging companies to invest in ActivityPub than it does siloing itself off from anyone who represents real growth in the space.
If you want the community to remain small, fair enough. I believe in a world in which every social media service is using ActivityPub; I don't care what or who they are. I don't even really understand what the anti-EEE crowd is afraid of? The protocol is run by a neutral party (W3C), I can't imagine any features that would compel major change, nobody that's already on the Fediverse is going to leave, you can always decide later to defederate... The system already seems pretty well protected against hostile action.
My concerns have mostly been voiced already. EEE is a very valid strat used by larger companies. Additionally, I am super concerned that integrating will cause a flood effect and drown out and replace the existing communities. Just look at what happend with Reddit's purge for a good example, while I wasn't here prior, everyone I've chatted with who was has stated it annihilated a lot of the existing ideology that existed prior to the exodus.
Nothing.
I was thinking about this some more, and now I think this entire conversation and vote is entirely irrelevant. Not just not worth having, but actually completely makes no difference.
A big company like Meta is gonna want to control what content is on it. Which means they're almost certainly not going to use a blacklist model, they're going to use a whitelist. This allows them to carefully control who they're federated with.
Their federation list will likely be a who's who of big influential mastodon servers, maybe some pixelfed servers. They probably don't even know that Lemmy exists, let alone the 8th largest instance. If/when they realize Lemmy is a thing in a few years, they might approach lemmy.world and/or lemm.ee.
All of this to say, I don't think this vote matters.
Disclaimer: I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but despise what I said in my message, I am not strongly for or against federation with Threads. I just feel it’s better to give another point of view to the situation (there is no harm, people who disagree with this instance final decision will just migrate somewhere else, regardless of the choice).
—
I don’t think we should treat Threads differently than any other instance. If they cause no harm, they should be allowed. As a consequence, I would personally not defederate immediately.
I am more concerned at a more general level, in the sense that federating with a large instance can be difficult / impossible to handle moderation-wise (which is not specific to Threads). This could be solved by simply putting the charge on Meta (just like any instance): if they can’t moderate their content, we will defederate (and revise the decision if changes are made on their side).
I also don’t really see why this would hurt the fediverse: it’s not like they can’t already get all the data they want from the fediverse, and the moment they will push ads to the fediverse, the instances will just defederate.
People will just follow the content they seek. If they have to migrate towards another instance federating with Threads (or directly leave for Threads), they will (which might not be an issue for the fediverse).
If you are hosting another instance, and have not had a vote, do it before the Threads bots vote for everyone.
You do realize that any votes from outside our instance get auto-removed, right?
My suggestion was to anyone who runs across this and runs their own instance but has not yet held a vote for their users. 😉
Just like every other time these things have been posted, I wholly oppose defederation.