I’m not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.
Here is a link if someone don’t know what Meta’s Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Yes. We should avoid them like the plague.
Yes, because we already know exactly how this is going to go. Their need to constantly make more and more money means that we know TODAY what is going to happen: EEE. We know this because of Fark, Digg, now Reddit, and to a lesser extent Slashdot and StackOverflow. The profiteers aren’t interested in federating, or having well-run communities; they’re interested in money and nothing else. We know for an absolute fact that Meta needs to make money and they’re only interested in the Fediverse because they see money in it (quite simply: because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be).
I completely get “we shouldn’t strike pre-emptively” but if you wait until the third E it’s too late. But we already know it’s not pre-emptive because they’ve already enshittified their own communities. Ever tried scrolling through Arsebook recently without FBP and uBlock Origin? Article - article - ad. Article - article - ad. One item in fucking THREE is crap you’re not interested in. That’s what they want to force onto the Fediverse. We know it today. We have seen what they have done to their own stuff. So when they come sniffing round here we are completely justified in slamming the door in their face even if they promise to be nice this time, because we already know what they want.
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” and you don’t have to look far. The influx of people into the Fediverse is directly caused by the profit-motivated enshittification of Reddit. If we don’t draw the line here then we have to retreat back from Lemmy and invent something else, which they will then want to enshittify.
“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy’s recent popularity is that people are fed up with the “if something is free, you aren’t the user, you are the product” situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).
Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy - I’m surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the “chicken and egg” problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don’t care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.
I personally like this instance very much, and I’ve been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn’t hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.
EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse
TLDR; YES.
They are just trying to pull an EEE(Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) on fediverse. Federating with Thr*ads is just putting a shotgun at the mount. Just see how Google killed XMPP
If they start to pull some EEE bullshit I’m sure 90% of the Fediverse will just nope the fuck out. I’d say give them a chance, but don’t let them start to control the Fediverse protocols.
Once they start damage is already done, I’d say treat them like they’re as radioactive as they are
XMPP is alive and well, you can use it, many do.
When Google and Facebook embraced it back then, the community was small and fresh, so their adoption of XMPP was quite the boost.
When Google quit and took its users there was a significant user base that disappeared.
The fediverse exists for almost a decade and it has a stronger user base. Meta can try to extend ActivityPub and we can only hope the devs don’t cater to their needs above anyone else’s (maybe we can learn from Mastodon’s influence). When Meta tries to extinguish it’ll only take their users with it.
They can already fetch all the public data they want without federating.
I dislike preemptiveness but everyone would have to be on their toes to react to any ill intent (like trying to change ActivityPub although that’s not really a well-defined protocol to begin with).
I’m still on the fence but leaning towards block.
I’m already a day late and I haven’t actually read all the comments because they’re surprisingly a lot here. But here is my two cents, hopefully I’m not just repeating someone else.
Do you want the fediverse to be as big as possible? Or do you want it to grow in a steady manner in a healthy way with healthy discussion?
Letting on the garbage that is popular social media giants like meta, will completely and utterly overwhelm this community. They have millions of users, we have thousands. Every single one of our posts will be drowned out by them. Say goodbye to high quality discourse, we will just become what Twitter and Facebook turned into, the same way that Reddit is going.
I do not care if we have millions of users, our higher bar of Discovery and usability means that we get people who are self-motivated to learn, learn about technology, learn about our culture, learn about our rules.
Would it be nice if it was easier to discover/join the fediverse? Sure. Would it be nice if we had millions of users? Sure. But I want to grow carefully and sustainably. I would rather have a small or medium-sized community with healthy discourse, than a worldwide gigantic social media community where conspiracy theories reign supreme, and the less techy people don’t understand how threads are different from Lemmy, and are constantly cross posting and are confused about what they’re looking at.
I can block meta communities myself, but I can’t block all the hordes of people that will jump on our threads. This is a scalability problem waiting to happen, this is a social discourse problem waiting to happen.
Lastly the only reason that I could possibly imagine that Zuckerberg wants to federate is to keep the only viable alternative to monopolistic social media conglomerates in check. The more people that can talk to us through his platform, the less people will look into and join us. If they can assert their monopolistic practices on the fediverse, they could use the EEE model to make it irrelevant. He is trying to destroy the federated social networks before they are big enough to be a real threat.
Yes, I think we should defederate. Don’t give them free content, and don’t let them monetize Fediverse.
Also, I’m not really interested in having the millions of Facebook and Instagram users here, it’s one of the worst and most bland people and content internet can offer, right behind Tik-Tokers. I don’t see how it would add any value, other than moderation issues.
YSK : Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
That’s exactly what I was worried about, and I’m really really not comfortable with. Especially because it’s the most valuable data for training ML models to manipulate with people, or to keep them interacting with a website they want, which is something that I fear the most from the current advances in AI. I know it’s already happening for a long time, but I don’t want to help them with making it even better.
So, definitely defederate. I’d even say that there should be an option implemented that would allow the users to defederate on their own, which would not allow their posts or comments to show on other instances they’ve defederated with, while also not showing them any content from said instances.
You make a good point. My initial Reddit interactions, for example, consisted of involvement. Before the API thing it had become the same thing as 9Gag: a place to just doom scroll for the entire time spent.
The content becomes samey, or repost central.
Pertaining to the discussion in case you missed it https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
It really helps to hear a historical perspective on this. The issue is not a matter of, “let’s give them a chance and see how it goes.” It’s more like, “we know this has gone very badly in the past and the incentives are clear for Meta to sabotage us.”
yep. And as an XMPP networks op, I wish we had figured-out the technical measures to avoid it in the meantime. Practically, it boils down to preventing a single actor from consolidating a “greater than X” share of the network, while retaining the desirable aspects like “promoting the better services for the most users”.
I have had similar thoughts about breaking monopolies in the Fediverse. Similar to a multi-national alliance, it should be possible to have federation-wide agreement that one instance population cannot grow beyond a certain share of the whole, the consequence being defederation. And I think that would include limiting each admin to a single instance within the federation.
I only fear this rule would be too harsh in practice and penalize the wrong enthusiasts.
Such an alliance could be the achieved organically by listing-out instances passing a certain set of requirements, like: https://providers.xmpp.net/ , and constraining new joiners to route their account creation through it. But several aspects of this consist of undoing major benefits of decentralization/federation. There’s no free lunch :)
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All good questions I don’t have good answers to.
Especially when you compare entirely different software (Lemmy vs Mastodon) that happen to both use ActivityPub. So there is already an imbalance. And the imbalance has also started within Lemmy where larger instances have a sort of snowball effect.
I think ideally the “too large” instances would find more admins and split the instance into smaller ones. But that might not be feasible today with the existing technology and human resources.
Another option is to “stop the bleeding” by locking an instance to new accounts to give others a chance to grow. This should have already happened on lemmy.ml IMO. The instance performs very poorly (as of a week ago).
how would you catch / block a no user relay node that relays data to a quarantined node?
I don’t know the technical details of ActivityPub well enough to propose a real solution. Sounds like an arms race situation.
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One of the biggest challenges of federated systems is discovery of content.
Yea I honestly think this will just get better over time. People will start by drinking from a firehose to get their disparate-yet-related content, but eventually these groups will consolidate. And if they don’t, that’s OK too. A feature like “community groups” or hashtags could help with this.
Subscribing to everything on lemmy.world while being on another site is… not entirely polite. […] Consider that for smaller instances (with smaller storage backends and network pipes), if the users there subscribe to everything on lemmy.world - the storage and network requirements will be similar to what lemmy.world has which the smaller instances may not be able to support well.
I’m not convinced that watching your “subscribed” feed on programming.dev which contains a lot of lemmy.world communities is just as bad (or even close) to signing up on lemmy.world. The egress bandwidth requirements for lemmy.world are strictly much higher than for programming.dev, because the number of active users (clients) is so much higher. programming.dev is able to cache only what programming.dev users are viewing and that only needs to be fetched from lemmy.world once on a cache miss then forwarded to a significantly smaller set of clients. Even if programming.dev gained a lot of popularity from users on lemmy.world, programming.dev would only need to send content to lemmy.world when it’s not already cached, and that doesn’t happen for every lemmy.world user, just once every cache miss.
^ That’s just my theoretical understanding of the problem, but I don’t know enough details about ActivityPub to say if that’s accurate, so take it with some salt.
The “too large” instances are, in some ways, better for the fediverse just as living in a city tends to have a lower emission footprint per person than living in the country… but that also runs up against the sensibilities of federate and decentralize that many users have.
Economy of scale is definitely a boon, but a monopolized network runs too great a risk to the long-term health of the network itself. I think we can achieve good efficiency with “large enough” instances that are appropriately balanced across the network.
It is trivial to have a program that is federated with some instances just subscribe to everything and have that data pushed - its even simpler than trying to scrape it or use an API to access it.
Yea TBH I’m far less concerned about the privacy of the information that I’m knowingly posting publicly than I am about the social network graph effects of large instances. So the whole “issue” of a relay node sending data to places I didn’t anticipate is not a “problem” I care to solve.___
Really good write-up!
It persuaded me that federating with any corporation is not a good move at such early stages.
Very informative, thanks for sharing.
The author is definitely qualified to speak on XMPP and ActivityPub but one thing I noticed is all protocols and technologies mentioned really had no other alternatives for communication. Users flocked because there was nowhere else to go.
Imagine Lemmy.world was owned by Meta and today decided to federate only with those who paid it.
It is in the power of users to host their content on instances that will not turn on them - which unfortunately means not holding discourse on monitized instances
So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta’s Threads?
That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.
Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they’ll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they’re launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:
- We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
- We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.
What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the “fediverse” are people without resources, then what’s even the point? Who wants an email service that can’t send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?
The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I’d prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.
EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:
We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.
Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:
- Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
- Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
- Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
- Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
- Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.
That’s all well and good.
But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.
Well just look at what happened with XMPP and google: https://lemmy.world/comment/906346
And even if we don’t defederate, I doubt anyone in threads will notice us local instance users and contribute at all to our growth. There are 30 million+ of them backed by Instagram and like what, 10k of us? They just have too much weight to throw around.
Hell I’m not even convinced reddit is going to die and Lemmy is going to continue to grow. Just look at their front page. Absolute nonsensical drivel still gets several thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments, while any Lemmy instance is lucky to get 100 upvotes and 10 comments on a popular post
I’ve read that XMPP article before, but it doesn’t convince me.
Yes, Meta may “kill” the fediverse. That’s a risk. But either we take that risk, or we “kill” the fediverse ourselves by defederating. That’s my opinion.
EDIT: Besides, defederating just hands them more users. Wouldn’t you rather keep the users, and allow them to see Meta content? Maybe even attract some Meta users here by inviting them? The launch of a Meta competitor is what’s causing the risk to the fediverse. Federating with them is how we can mitigate that risk.
I read your edit, you make very good points there and here. We really should leave the power in the hands of users/sub/community mods to decide what they want, rather than instance owners acting like sub mods and making blanket decisions for all their users. That’s the reddit model.
I assume filtering requirements requires changes to the Lemmy code base, which if they don’t already exist is surprising.
This is an interesting take on the matter, and you do have pretty good points. For me personally, I don’t think that bringing in the Meta crowd would bring us much value, as I’ve already stated in the other comment. I’m not interested in the style of content both Facebook and Instagram provides, and I don’t really like the userbase - but that’s also only my personal view, and it’s not something that would warrant defederation.
I’m worried that due to sheer amount of people they have, it would simply drown any content from other instances and would make it harder to find (and also really hard to moderate - Meta has significant resources to moderate that many millions of users, something smaller instances can never reach). Hot and Top would simply be filled by influencers, and it would take significant effort to just unsubscribe or block all of them (I’m actually not sure here how does the frontpage works, if you select all instances - is it like All on Reddit, or like frontpage with a set of default communities, but not everything shows there?), while also making it pretty hard to find smaller communities with different crowd - which is what I like on Lemmy as of the current state.
As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
I don’t really agree with this. It’s only my own take on things, but I don’t believe in the slightest that Meta wants to contribute to the Fediverse or has any of it’s interests in mind. Nothing good will come out of it, Meta will only exploit the Fediverse for free content they don’t have to host or pay for to kickstart their own platform, and then slowly bring users over there with QoL they have resources to implement for their instance. I’m not worried that they will bring down the Fediverse - that’s where the decentralization will work as it should since other instances can defederate as soon as a problem appears, and keep their content and their userbase. What I think is an issue is that unless we defederate soon enough, Meta will exploit Fediverse for their gain only, slowly make people used to the QoL they are providing and have resources for, and when it finally gets bad enough that instances decide to start defederating from them, it will be too late, and Fediverse will loose users and content creators, because they were used to and interacting with communities on Meta’s instance - which were the best choice simply due to a high number of users coming from Meta’s userbase. Which brings me to
That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.
This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation. As I’ve said in the previous paragraph - Meta’s communities will be larger and have more content, and more people will leave once we defederate because they are used to those communities, including people that would not leave there now.
And the last issue is the fact that it serves so much data about users and their interactions right into Meta’s algorithms, without them having to make any effort for it. And I really don’t like that, and it’s the reason why I’m avoiding anything Meta even touches. But then again - that’s my personal issue.
To sum it up - some commenters said that it’s a risk that we should try and take to see how it will go - I’d personally rather not risk it, and just keep Meta or any other multi-billion corporations out of this ecosystem. You can be sure that they don’t have anyone’s best interest in heart, and will only exploit it for monetary gain. And they have teams of experts in the field already working on strategies about how to exploit us as much as possible. I say don’t give them a chance, this is something we cannot win and it will only make everything worse.
I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven’t convinced me yet :)
I’m in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit “the fediverse” for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.
But… my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all. And, even if it does, it’s not as valuable to me that way, so I’ll be leaving. What’s the value of a fediverse if it doesn’t even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?
This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.
I honestly don’t think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don’t call it a “fediverse”. It’s just a forum. Would we say that it’s fair for Google to say “From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don’t agree with them”?
EDIT 1: I haven’t made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.
EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.
I see your point, and I think that we both simply have different views on what is more important, and there’s no need to convince eachother. For me, one of the main advantages of the Fediverse is that you’re not directly feeding analytics and algorithms of a large company that is trying to monetize and manipulate you through content that you see - a company which business model is literally to change your behavior (which is a hyperbole, but still a quite from Social Dillema), and it’s really important for me to not give them any chance to do that. And I don’t see a scenario under which we would federate with Meta (or another multi-billion company) and this would not happen - and even if they wouldn’t be able to directly affect what you see in your feed, your data and behavior will still help them train their models and AIs to be better at it, even if you didn’t interact with the instance. I simply don’t see anything of value federating with meta would provide, that would be worth this, along with the really probable risk that Meta is simply going for EEE, as mentioned in the other comments. And I think this was the main idea of Fediverse - to have a network of community-ran instances, where you are not the product, but the actors are indeed benevolent and selfless.
But I also understand your point of view, because you are right that defederating with them by default goes against some of the principles of decentralized ecosystems, and that there is a lot of content and userbase that we would be missing on. For me, I don’t really mind if the growth of Fediverse is slower, but the community has similiar values as I hold, and I’d rather see it fail because it tried to uphold them, than see it turn into, or be destroyed by, Meta. Be it planned as part of EEE, or only a casualty. But then again, that’s my point of view and so I vote to defederate, but It’s good that there’s someone like you with opposite side of view. I also don’t think that either side is wrong, we just have different views about what the Fediverse should be.
And one last thing - I don’t feel like the example with email is fair, because it’s comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users, and none of the risks there are with Meta federating would apply. I’ve tried comming up with a better comparison, but couldn’t come up with anything for quite some time, so I’ll just leave it as is. Maybe someone else can think of something.
Absolutely fair enough. Am happy to agree to disagree. I enjoyed the debate haha!
And yes, you have a good point: Meta would indeed get value through federation, and perhaps you don’t want to support Meta’s goals, so you don’t want to allow them to proceed. Perhaps we could enhance our user/community level moderation tools to achieve these goals? Maybe you as a user could say something like “never shall any of my posts be sent to Meta’s instance”. Or maybe community mods could say “Meta users can’t join/post/see our community”. I’m even happy if instances enable such filters by default! I just don’t think defederation is the right tool for the job, because it defeats the vision of a connected universe.
I don’t feel like the example with email is fair, because it’s comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users
Yeah, but I believe the principle holds.
Again, thanks for the opposing viewpoint. Glad we had the debate. Cheers!
I’ve just stumbled upon something that I think makes a pretty solid argument that federating with Meta goes directly against the idea of Fediverse (because I was actually intrigued about whether I’m not just projecting my dislike for Meta into it).
Take a look at https://www.fediverse.to/ (which I’m actually not sure if it’s the official main page, but it is the first search result), this is literally the first selling point, written in (absolutely hideous :D) large font on the landing page:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.
Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
I think that with that in mind, there’s no way how we should even consider federating with them. That is, of course, unless it’s what majority of people wants.
Good point. I guess my vision differs somewhat from that quote there. Dang.
Welp, good find! I still think my idea for federation would be more resilient, but either way, we’re all wishing the best for this instance, and I really appreciate these discussions we’re having. Cheers to that!
If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all.
I, unfortunately have this thought unironically… I (in the midst of a tumultuous social media period), just don’t see non"large company" sites living long and prospering… And I don’t want to willingly give Meta even more… (in the “activating the ‘instagram’ threads” account. God that’s confusing)
It’s making me question my very existence on the “internet” in more than the “technical documentation vacuum” that I tend to be when I’m not reading
ReddLemmy…
Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
I’d be interested to hear how Facebook would seek to alleviate those concern, regardless of weather such concerns are realisticly founded or not, as social networks inherently deal with humans and public opinions.
- What kind of technical solution from Facebook do you think would best help appease concerned users in the Fediverse?
- Could there be a technical solution to resolve the social dilemma of (real or appearance of) power imbalance between Facebook and the rest of the Fediverse?
I’m trying to think of how Facebook could gracefully relinquish control over its platform while guaranteeing Facebook could not later subvert those concessions. Would that ever be in Facebook’s best interests? I guess improved user trust and positive PR could help abate the calls for regulation and monopoly busting.
There are skeptic rumours that Facebook is hoping to leverage the Fediverse as a relief valve for regulatory pressure due to EU’s DMA:
- Theory: the only reason Meta cares about the fediverse / ActivityPub is so that threads isn’t labeled a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act”
- https://lemmy.world/post/1105955
I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.
But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so.
Hmm, that sounds fairly applicable to the Paradox of Tolerance, where the we are beholden to be inclusive to an industry that has a repeated history of running afoul in society.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toleranceWell, Meta has a history of bad behavior in terms of how they treat users on their own systems, but no history at all for how they treat federated systems. You could even go the other way a bit and say that Meta has contributed meaningfully to the open source community with projects like React. (Obviously this is short on parallels as it doesn’t involve their main income streams.)
I would absolutely say that users should not join Threads directly. Meta is already hoovering everything they possibly can about their users. But the mechanism for that hoovering is the app, not the protocol. Any data they get about users that are not on Threads directly is data they were going to get anyway because that’s the design of the protocol; anyone can get that data.
It seems that members of a federated system can’t decide how to treat an entity until that entity interacts with other members. You assess the nature of those interactions, and if they turn out to be bad, you defederate.
What the Mastodon community is doing now looks a bit like “this person drives over the speed limit all the time, so they’re obviously going to steal food if we let them volunteer at the homeless shelter!” But we have no evidence for such unwanted behavior whatsoever.
edit: I saw on another thread that apparently Meta reached out to some Mastodon instances to try to get them to sign NDAs. If true, that’s inexcusable and signals intent pretty clearly. Public protocols must be developed publicly.
Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.
My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:
- Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
- Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.
I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.
The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.
Honestly you sound really naive. You seem to be under this delusion that people who hold intolerant ideas are only doing so out of honest ignorance and they can simply be convinced otherwise. Have you ever interacted with an anti-vaxxer? A covid-denier? A religious fanatic? A slavery apologist? The world is absolutely filled to the brim with incredibly unreasonable people who will ignore all evidence for things that don’t fit their world view. They aren’t looking to be convinced otherwise.
How do you plan on “respectfully asking” a homophobe to stop hating gay people, for instance? What if they just want to post about how much they wish gay people would die, what argument do you think would sway someone dedicated to their religion? Since its just speech and not action, they should be free to hate as much as they want according to you.
Your whole point doesn’t make any sense either, the idea that people would jump ship to make threads accounts if they were defederated is absurd. The fediverse is an incredibly niche corner of social media, the only reason you would specifically search out for communities here is if you were disatisfied with corporate social media (like threads) to begin with.
You’re positing we not try to convince people who hold wrong worldviews?
No, I’m saying some people won’t let themselves be convinced either way and that should be taken into account. You didn’t respond with how you would convince homophobic people not to hate gays for instance, it sounds like you want people to waste their breaths arguing with the unreasonable just so you can maintain some moral high ground of being oh-so-much-more tolerant than the rest.
Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper’s quote in the wiki article above:
… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …
Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.
I’ll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.
I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- etc
… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …
If we can’t convince people of our point of view, then that’s our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we’re saying “we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to”. That doesn’t seem appropriate.
corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.
If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it’s hosted. If we don’t do that, we’re not really a fediverse.
I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:
That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they’d all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become “too big”. The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****
I don’t agree that defederating with Meta is against the definition of Fediverse.
This is the header on fediverse.to:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics. Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
Meta-owned instances go directly against every one of those points. For me, Fediverse should always be run by people not doing it for monetary gains. The main advantage of fediverse is not that you can and should connect with anyone, but that it’s a community that is not ran for profit, and the servers are run for the people with good and self-less intentions, instead of users being heavily monetized and their behavior fed into algorithms to manipulate them even further with the content they are shown. And the federation is there mostly to alleviate a problem that usually happens in such comunities - people move on, servers die, admins can’t run an instance any more. With fediverse, this is not that big of an issue, thanks to the way it’s designed.
Allowing Meta, or any large company in that regard, in will destroy this idea of community run and privacy-centric social network for everyone, and only result in Meta profiting from it and the content the users create.
You’ve officially changed my mind.
Up until now, I’ve been harping on the concept of “controlling interest” in which a single entity is large enough to control the direction taken. But I hadn’t considered that the new direction might be one that limits the potential for a negative result.
Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it’s a risk we have to take. If this federation experiment fails, then what is learned can be used in the next experiment.
Now to track down and add a note to all those comments I made…
Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it’s a risk we have to take.
If we had to white board a decision matrix on Facebook federation, what would be the number of risk’s and rewards for either approach? How would you weight or quantify them? Just trying to approach this from a little more of an analytical angle, given most of us are developers anyway.
I appreciate the push to be more analytical. I thought that I was being analytical, but this challenge to my thinking has made me realize that I’ve not been thorough.
Edit: speaking of thorough, I missed including the founding principles of privacy-centric and ad-free. That would seem to disqualify Meta right out of the gate, just as most people seem to prefer.
Ethically, it would seem that admins are limited by that, although I suppose technically, they should wait and see what an instance does before making the decision to defederate.
Anyway, here’s what I came up with should anyone decide to depart from the founding principles.
What our root concerns? I could be wrong but I think they are advertising, accuracy, and civility. Some people are concerned about sheer volume of new entrants, but I don’t know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to address that concern.
Accuracy and civility are both moderation problems that the fediverse has to deal with whether Meta joins or not. Yes, there may be issues of scale and volume, but if the fediverse is to go mainstream, those problems need to be solved anyway.
There are forms of advertising that I think we could all live with in moderate amounts, but surveillance ads and malware have pretty much destroyed any tolerance for ads.
Okay, so how would ads get distributed in the fediverse?
- Any instance could push ads of any type, in any volume to anyone registered on that instance. Any instance could collect data from anyone registered on that instance for serving surveillance ads on that instance or for direct sale to data brokers.
- Any instance could push ads to anyone who subscribed to communities hosted on that instance, but would be severely limited in data collection without data sharing agreements between instances.
- Anyone accessing an instance via web page could be served ads, including surveillance ads, whether logged in or not.
- Anyone using a fediverse client could be served ads by that client, including surveillance ads.
1 through 4 are all instance-specific and can be avoided by any user who wishes to. There will always be nooks and crannies inside the fediverse that are free of ads and surveillance. The very existence of the fediverse is evidence that there is a critical mass of people to keep those spaces alive.
5, the client, has nothing to do with any instance or, in a sense, the fediverse. Clients can always do what a client wants. It’s up to individuals to choose wisely.
So what are the potential benefits? If Meta comes it at Meta scale, then anyone currently using both Meta properties and the fediverse might be able to keep the value of both while using only a single platform. If people using a Meta property follow Meta into the fediverse, that can increase the variety of communities and make very niche communities viable.
My take is that the fediverse can cope with an entity like meta because nobody is forced to join their instance or interact with anything or anyone hosted on Meta.
There are a couple of caveats:
- As previously noted, I don’t know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to assess the risk of a very large influx of people over a very short period of time.
- If “embrace, extend, extinguish” is truly a concern, then I think being vigilant with respect to “extend” will prevent “extinguish.”
Risks/rewards for whom?
For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.
But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.
Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:
- Let users block all @meta.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
- Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
- Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
- Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user’s post or a @meta.com community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities. That’s all well and good.
But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.”. As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.
I think that it mostly boils down to what most of the users see as the “Fediverse vision”. For me, what’s most important is that you have communities and users that are providing content to each other selflessly and with good intentions, instead of them being a product that is heavily monetized and manipulated through the content they are served. The Fediverse helps in this regard that it alleviates the problem with such communities - that they come and go, servers die or people hosting them move on. By being part of a fediverse, you distribute this between multiple such volunteers, so a server disappearing isn’t that much of an issue.
However, letting Meta in goes directly against this vision, and makes it even worse by letting Meta feed on and monetize content of every user on the platform. That goes directly against what I see as a main advantage of the Fediverse, and it will probably make me reconsider whether I want to participate. But that’s only my, pretty selfish and gatekeepin opinion. But my dislike for corporations such as Meta is deep enough, that I simply don’t want to have anything to do with them.
But other users may have a different opinion, which I respect, and that’s what this discussion is about. It’s also possible that I may have misinterpreted what Fediverse was supposed to be about, and I was just projecting what I would like it to be. I guess that we will see how will the Meta situation eventually turn out. I guess that Fediverse will probably split into Metaverse with instances that did federate, and Fediverse that didn’t. All that remains to be seen is how large will be the communities left on either side. (Now that I think about it, maybe I have it wrong, and you can for example defederate from Meta, but still be federated with i.e metalovers.lm that are federated with Meta? How does that even work, actually? Will we be able to interact with Meta users through that instance, but not with their posts, or never message them?)
I appreciate your reconsidering your position! Thanks for taking my argument in good faith hahaha. I was worried I’d get some hate for it.
Cheers!
I’ve already made my view on the issue known in other comments, but I’ve just stumbled upon an argument that I think is really important to consider, and should make de-federation an absolute must.
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/
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.
Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
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.
Here are some good articles and responses I’ve seen on this topic:
- https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
- counter argument
- https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/john-gruber-no-understand/
- rebuttals to counter
- https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- historic precedent and prevailing trends with open protocols
Looks like the author of the last article above posted a follow up yesterday:
- https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html
- argument for local communities and against universal social networks
And so it begins. Second largest Lemmy instance preemptively un-friends Facebook:
- Lemmy.ml has now blocked threads.net / Meta
- https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html
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Nah, that one can be left hidden. It’s a rambling and whiny mess with e-begging at the end. The Ploum.net article describing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in practice with Google/XMPP and Microsoft/DOC file formats is the strongest argument against allowing corporations into open software communities.
deleted by creator
- https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
Absolutely, yes. It’s hard for me to see federating with corporations such as
FacebookMeta much differently than doing so with an instance run by spammers.Yes, refuse to federate from the get-go. By the time the hostilities become open, it’ll be far too late not only to attempt to repair any existing damage, but even to avoid further damage coming down the line like a juggernaut.
Plenty of large corporations have shown time and again that SOP is to take over and kill any potential threats before they can develop. When a corporation finds another corporation using their resources for gain, even while still following terms and conditions, the lawyers come out and the fur flies. Why should we be pushovers just because we’re not rich and don’t have a legal fiction to hide behind?
The Fediverse is a direct competitor to monolithic social networks. That’s definitely how they see us, and it’s how we should see them. I know that there’s a “share and share alike” ethos behind all of this, and that blocking any entity arbitrarily feels wrong and unfair, but it really isn’t. I also know that, assuming that things go well, one day there will be successful business ventures that evolve naturally from the Fediverse, and the community is going to have to decide how to respond to those situations in time. But right now we’re a group of little pigs playing in a somewhat secure pen, and a huge, voracious wolf is asking us to open the gate so it can join in our game. By the time we realize that we haven’t seen Jerry or Louise for a while, the wolf will have changed the lock on the gate and spread rumors about us to the other animals.
If people still feel uncomfortable with refusing a large corporation “just because”, then make a policy: “Due to the dangers inherent in unequal business relationships, it is our general policy to refuse federation with any entity with an average annual turnover in excess of US$200,000.” You can always make exceptions, and even change the policy later, but it can ease your conscience that you aren’t unfairly targeting one entity without justification; you’re sticking to a sensible policy.
Yes, defederate. Facebook/Meta have show time and time again that they are up to no good.
Yes
Yes
