I blogged about what happened in June, and the financial overview.
Can we please have a statement about your financial involvements, or lack of, with meta?
502 bad gateway
Yeah there were a bit too many people wanting to view that at once :-) I restarted Writefreely.
Appreciate your update and I’m glad to see more people donating.
I’ve been outspoken on my disinterest and resistance to Threads, but you and your team should not have been harrased like that…
That’s wrong regardless, but you guys have clearly been working your asses off to create this space for everyone, and people need to respect that you are doing this on your own free time for the benefit of others.
I feel I’ve leveled heavy criticism against federating with Threads, but this is something to be addressed with open discussion, not emotional reasoning and vitriol…
I see so many users acting like your team has already announced definitively to federate with Threads and that it’s implementation is immediately around the corner. That’s just not true… Instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing threats and tantrums, users should actually voice their concerns if they want them heard… That means arguing points, not threatening or insulting others…
I appreciate everything you guys have done and I’m sorry for how some in our community have acted. With that said, I still desperately hope that Threads is not federated with. But that’s a topic that should continue to be fleshed out within the community in a healthy manner.
Thank you. Nothing is decided yet, but because of moderation limitations on Lemmy and the fact people can’t block domains for their account, I would say chances are we would defederate as soon as they do federate with Lemmy. For Mastodon these 2 arguments aren’t valid so decision might be different.
Totally understandable. I thought the admin response post laid that all out very clearly. I think a lot of users probably only skimmed it/didn’t read it, or were too influenced by their emotional state to have a more objective interpretation.
I think a lot of the users here have such strong emotions because of coming here from reddit, and feeling like they’ve found a new home they like even better, but view the possibility of Threads federation as a threat to their new space.
When there’s strong emotions tied to something, it’s easy for people to lose rationality and slip into emotional reasoning instead of logical reasoning. That’s when a normally well-adjusted person will start insulting, threatening, acting irrationally. That is, if you subscribe to the person-brain model.
The scene in Bad Grampa with the penguin guy is a great example of someone who has lost rationality. He acts in bizarre ways that he otherwise never would have. You can see that he’s rational in how he first starts interacting with Knoxville, but his rationality is eroded as he becomes more upset by Knoxville’s responses.
This kind of response happens with simple discourse online all the time, and it’s so unhealthy… I think it’s just such an emotionally charged topic for some users that they pass their threshold for rationality very quickly.
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I think many users of reddit did not have a good opinion of Meta prior to any Reddit migration. And despite the dislike for Reddit now it is still a site where using it you know you are not going to be directly exposed to Meta or in direct partnership with them. At best it’s people reuploading Meta content but not direct access to Meta services. And I don’t think Meta is forcing Reddit to sign NDAs to talk to them either.
So Reddit for all its criticisms is still a Meta free place. So leaving Reddit then running into the hands of a partnered Meta instance can be an off putting prospect. If people had to choose between using a Meta affiliated instance or reddit I think many would prefer to go back to reddit.
I think people against it want more degrees of separation from Meta where separate accounts are needed to utilize their services. It’s not like there isn’t over a decade of Meta’s track record to look at or even more recent examples like theit app requirements and permissions to use threads that raises red flags and makes people not want to use them even if it is indirectly through a fediverse alternative.
Hi Ruud, you mention in the linked Lemmy thread that you don’t see how Meta could ever EEE Lemmy.
I was wondering whether you’ve read the following blog post. If not, please do give it a read. It goes over how XMPP was embraced and then killed by Google, and the risks that same strategy poses for the Fediverse. I found it very enlightening.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Hi, thanks! Yes I’ve read that, and I don’t see how that could happen to Lemmy or Mastodon. I’ve see comments that people will follow their friends on Threads and then when Threads disconnects, people will leave Fediverse and join Threads. My question is why would they be on Fediverse and not on Twitter/Facebook, where their friends are now.
I mean I see what happened to XMPP but I don’t see that happening to Lemmy. It’s not the same. But feel free to chat with me about this, maybe I’m wrong and someone can convince me. My Matrix account is in my profile or just use DM.
So I wrote down some of my thoughts below, if you want to chat about it, feel free to leave a comment or DM me. (I don’t have Matrix, sorry)
So the core component of any social network is the network effect. In short, the reason we use Lemmy is because others also use Lemmy. We wouldn’t use it if there was nobody here (with thanks to Spez).
Indeed, that’s why people still use Reddit, Facebook, or any social medium: they don’t care about the platform, but about the people.
If Threads federates with Lemmy, they will instantly dominate the entire space: the most popular communities and most of the user activity will all be over there. (There are already 100M Threads users compared to under 2M Lemmy users, so this is essentially inevitable.)
If Meta would then later decide to defederate, the majority of Lemmings will be cut off from their communities. If in the meantime those communities had become important to them, their hand may be forced to sign up for Threads. Lemmy will survive, but it won’t be the same for most of its users.
Essentially, we have a choice to make: either we welcome Threads and accept that we will be at the whims of Meta for >90% of our communities and content (given their massively higher user count), OR we choose to be independent at the cost of having smaller communities and less content.
I would argue though, that having smaller communities may even be a pro rather than a con. I’ve seen many comments that the smaller scale of the Fediverse feels like a breath of fresh air compared to Reddit (and personally I agree with that).
That would be true if Threads would support communities. Which they don’t. If they ever would (which I don’t think) then this would be a valid point and need consideration.
I think question to ask is what does Meta have to gain by joining the fediverse? They don’t need to. Their strength has been their large user base who are too dependent on their services to quit, and this small population is of no interest. So then why? What could be the reason a multi billion dollar organization would join the fediverse with a history of data mining and buying out other companies to increase their influence? Is forming a partnership with them to access their user base really a great idea? Why did people run from Reddit to jump into the arms of Meta? Is Zuckerberg really that much more trusting than Spez just because he doesn’t go on public tantrums and is using this open source tech? Do people want to be that connected with what Meta has to offer despite having been so adamant about deleting material from reddit and leaving behind their communities there? Is gaining influence in the space before the platform even becomes remotely mainstream friendly a strategic move on their part to stop it before it even happens?
It’s been hard enough trying to reform communities after leaving reddit and then finding to yet again try to reform communities on another instance and hoping people move there may be a hurdle that leads people back to Reddit where at least it is a more separate experience from meta. It does make me glad though that slowly communities are starting to become more spread out like Android forming their own instance just in case another migration from a big place happens. But, those are some of the concerns people have had where despite the ire towards Reddit recently they are still way better than Meta. I want see this place grow as something separate from corporate entities, but if many instances start partnering with then too then aside from use of small independent instances it starts feeling pointless to replace full time for the corporate experience.
