I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
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I’m hoping that ALL admins across the Fediverse will defederate from Meta. At least we get to have our own separate platform then.
They shouldn’t just defederate from Meta, they should defederate from any other instances that federate with Meta. Like a firewall against late stage capitalism
That will just drive many Fedi-users to Meta.
Different instances will make different decisions and users will go to the instances that suit their preferences. That’a how it is supposed to work and the only way it hurts the Fediverse is if we get flooded with threads complaining that other people have different preference, dammit.
I feel like this will just hurt us more then help.
Do you really want the Instagram crowd to interact with us…?
At least there would be people and content to interact with.
Based on your posts so far my friend, its becoming clearer why you think there’s no one to interact with.
Meta willingly under-moderated across large swaths of east Asia and Africa, leading to unchecked rumors and tangible acts of genocide. Zuckerberg has compared himself to Augustus Caesar.
I think it’s acceptable to cut off a wildfire before it spreads.
Lemmy is run by a bunch of tankies and the entire fediverse is under-moderated.
Cutting off a ton of users and content from the fediverse is stupid and everyone in here just keeps coming up with vague generalities because they’re scared of Meta rather than have actually thought through what will happen and be able to articulate any actual harms.
i’ll take those “tankies” over completely unaccountable thiel’s buddies any day. actual tankies seem to be contained to lemmygrad where they don’t bother anyone outside of their instance
“Boo hoo tankies bad, but big corpo run by billionaires who spread misinformation and intentionally act to topple legitimate governments in favor of their fascist agenda are akshually good”
Arguing with people like you (corporate shill) is a waste of time, so I’d rather have fun instead.
The reactions you are seeing are based off of Metas history. We will see how it works out.
Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.
Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.
The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”
And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.
It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.
And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.
I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they’ve done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they’re trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it’s how capitalism works.
Spot on. Anyone cooperating with them is a fool.
For those who don’t know, the strategy is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The phase comes from Microsoft who used this to (try to) crush competing document editors, Java implementations, browsers, and operating systems. Other big tech companies employ similar strategies.
Facebook coming to the Fediverse is the Embrace phase of this process and that makes Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, and Akkoma the competitors.
If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won’t see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don’t matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it’s like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.
I don’t see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn’t stay on shit they control.
And if you’re worried about their app collecting data: then don’t fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else’s phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.
If I wanted to see content from my racist Trumper uncle, I would just create a Facebook account. Keep Threads far away from the rest of the Fediverse. We don’t need to compete with them. Who cares if they’re way bigger with way more content if 99% of that content is garbage?
if 99% of that content is garbage?
Counterpoint: beans.
Serious note: I think the point of decentralized networks like this is that each instance will have to choose to federate with Threads or any other future corporate social media. If that sounds dangerous, welcome to the freedom of choice baybee! It sucks that the truth is that as long as we want this to be a free space where people can choose what and where they see content, that means some will choose to work with the big-easy-techgiant rather than take a harder approach because 99% of people aren’t that invested.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Fantastic read. Thanks for the link.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about politics, nothing good will come by letting them in. I hope all current instances defederate, I know mine will.
Love the dialogue here but you always have to follow the money trail. The best way to keep what we love is to bankroll our instances to keep them running and scalable to additional users without ads. Remember, if you aren’t paying for the product then you become the product. Meta has nothing without selling ads or monetizing user data. That’s their business model. As long as we chip in we can always maintain our independence. I’m fine with never seeing or interacting with content from Threads.
I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don’t think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.
Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.
If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.
Honestly, I still have more hope for Signal compared to Lemmy/fediverse. As much as I like it here, Signal is just so much more user-friendly and explainable. I am also slowly making people around me set it up.
Were you previously messaging everyone you know through reddit?
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I also think they don’t care about us, I doubt they even know we exist.
That doesn’t change that they would destroy us unintentionally. Like Vogons.
Luckily, they can’t force federated access to be slow. Once you federate with them, their content is copied to your instance. It’s not necessary for every fediverse user to contact Threads, it’ll just be served from each user’s home instance
Yet
There’s no yet about it. The architecture of how federation works makes it impossible. They can potentially make images load slow, but for the rest of the content it is fundamentally impossible
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
Maybe they want to use Activity Pub so that they can influence further development of it. I don’t know procedure how w3c is makeing decisions and updates to it, but I doubt someone that is not using it can have influence.
The content I want to have will never be on a meta server. And even if, I will not federate with them and not use them.
For the exact same reasons I also don’t use Facebook.
You won’t necessarily know if the person you are interacting with at say @guy@buddy.net is being hosted by threads.
We will have block list like with ads, if necessary.
Simple as that, of some instances federate with them I will not use them.
