I cam here to get away from all the corporate BS, but suddenly people want to welcome Facebook/Meta to the fediverse? I cannot fathom how people see their intentions as pure or innocent, especially since they aim to profit off of the open source software everyone has worked so hard on.
I just don’t see how the fediverse survives if it decides to let these massive companies make their instances. It feels like it’ll be a repeat of the rise of social media, where all the smaller forms got wiped out by large, consolidated social media platforms.
I for one would like to defederate from any and all corporations.
I love the idea that profit isn’t a focus of the fediverse.
Same. I’ve already added Threads.net to my “Blocked Domains” list on Mastodon. Hoping to be able to do that with Lemmy as well.
Hard disagree. I want to interact with the grandma’s and family that aren’t tech savvy. The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power. I don’t see how Meta will change that. All I see is that the Oklahoma asshole who wants to debate will get ads and I won’t. Commerical sponsors of the Fediverse is validation of the idea, so let it happen. Yes, Meta will see my username and will try to make ads happen, but thats not what Meta needs or wants: they need high quality content and will accept that some of it they can’t monetize. But if they can monetize those users in their corner, then they see value.
“The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power today.” ftfy
The concern people in the fediverse have with companies like Meta joining, is that:
- Embrace: they will “start off” by making the fediverse easy to access for the masses. There will actually be great growth in the fediverse. People will flock to Meta as their choice platform because they will be faster and more reliable than self-hosted fediverse servers.
- Extend: Big companies will begin to introduce new features, some of it will be added for the open source community to use. Eventually, there will be new proprietary features added (integration with WhatsApp for example) . This means that Meta’s Fediverse will be different from the open source fediverse. It’ll probably start out as something innocent like “needing a Facebook account to post a message / comment in their channels.” Then it gets worse…
- Extinguish: Now the masses have flocked to Meta because it’s fast and stable. This results in many/most of the Self-hosted services to become extinct. Then Meta starts to add more" security", like a fediverse “reputation”. Meaning, if your self-hosted service submits “enough” posts/comments that are not spam, then your allowed to read/post on their platform. This means if your self-hosted and/or a smaller member you will be barred from accessing/posting content. Thus, the fediverse is now owned by big corps and you need to use their platforms (and watch their ads or subscribe) to access content.
Source: Compare the history of e-mail (the original fediverse) before Gmail and Hotmail compared to what we have today. I (as an individual) can run my own mail server, but most of my messages will be marked as “spam”, if I send it to a friend who has a Gmail address, because my reputation is too low. This forces me to “pay” for email.
Setting up an email server at home is almost impossible because domestic ISPs block port 25 and you need a reverse DNS to make your mail look legit. But set up a mail server on a leased VPS it’s not a big deal if you know your way between SPF and dkim.
Running a legitimate mail server is hard because of SPAM, not because of corporate greed.
The embrace/extend/extinguish arguments are all FUD arguments. Arguments 2 and 3 boil down to Threads effectively walling off their side, which would more or less mean de-federation. And what happens when your now free Lemmy instances starts requiring you to pay $8/month? Or what if some of the larger instances decide to commercialize and sell data? FUD is not a compelling argument: the same arguments were made about Microsoft and their open source embrace. And there are plenty of FUD arguments to make against Lemmy.
I would argue that federation with commercial entities will make for a better Fediverse. Sure Meta is subjectively Evil, but it’s motives are clearer than some random dude’s Lemmy instances. And by Federation there is ability to get high quality news, science and technology information. In less than a day, major players joined and were posting to Threads.
The email analogy is a false dichotomy. The reason behind the large email providers is because the cost of the running and maintaining an email server is cheaper than running your own. But you could run a trusted email service if you set up your DNS records correctly.
A pretty good blog about the situation I think you should read - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Take an upvote, but I think the situation I’d very different from the XMPP and the office standards or even kerberos. In each of those cases, it was a standard.
For the XMPP case, XMPP use for Google was primary business users. The XMPP case ignores the rise of other, more convient, more engaged communication like Facebook Messenger, discord and free text messaging. For the open standard of OOXML, Microsoft’s aim was to sell Office. And for Kerberos, the AD changed were driven by business reasons. Regular kerberos is insane to admin, and Microsoft made it easy; it doesnt help that Novell’s eDitectiry failed.
With Federation, the story is different. The engagement isn’t like XMPP of connecting to people you know, or the security reasons of AD or even the standards of OOXML. In a sense, Federation is more like DNS or a web server: it’s just about connecting communities.
I hadn’t thought about it this way until I read your comment, but why not let them join the party? If they’re federating like Lemmy and Mastodon, isn’t that an acknowledgment that federation is a valid competitor? And if they’re re-modeling themselves to act like this, doesn’t that indicate we’re on the path to the future and we should welcome as many converts as they want to make?
Edit: Let’s move further discussion here: https://lemm.ee/post/851217
I don’t see any Lemmy <-> Threads interoperability happening in the near future anyway. I haven’t looked at Threads very much, but from what I can tell, it’s mainly going to be a problem for Mastodon rather than Lemmy. Even from a UX standpoint, it does not seem like Threads is really designed to show Lemmy content (and vice versa).
Having said that, Facebook has shown countless times that it’s actively harmful to its users as a platform, so there’s not much reason to believe that Threads would be any different. If Threads ever becomes interoperable with Lemmy, then I think defederation would be completely justified, unless they can somehow completely change their approach to ads, user tracking and feed algorithms. If that day ever comes, I will make a decision together with the lemm.ee community on how to proceed. But for now, it’s not an issue - there is nothing to even defederate yet.
Can’t you put threads.net on the defederation list anyway, even if there’s nothing to federate yet? That way, there’s not even a chance for it happening.
What I mean is, how exactly would you know that Threads now has users participating with our posts? It probably wouldn’t be instantly, I wouldn’t bet on there being an announcement on Threads’ side, they might just start showing the content and comments from their users start showing up, and then you’d have this conversation you’re talking about.
Why not just nip it in the bud immediately by pre-emptively defederating so that can’t even happen? I certainly would welcome it.
I would prefer to have a conversation later about federating with Threads in case of those things you mentioned instead of the conversation being about defederating.
Please have this conversation with the lemm.ee community now about pre-emptively defederating. We can still have the other conversation about federating later as well.
Can’t you put threads.net on the defederation list anyway, even if there’s nothing to federate yet? That way, there’s not even a chance for it happening.
Well, at this point, we don’t even know for sure if threads.net will become their ActivityPub domain, so we can’t guarantee anything by doing this. But I will make a post about this topic.
I didn’t think about that threads.net might not be their domain. I still wouldn’t think it’d be bad to just put it there since that domain would very likely be it, but then it’d definitely be fine for me to wait for the actual domain.
The risk is not so much Threads having access to our data, but thst Threads, with millions of users and teams of full time devs, becomes the standard, allowing Meta to control the development of the open source protocol, and browbeating everyone into using their instance/version/servers.
Companies hate competition more than anything. If meta gets its tentacles in the fediverse, it’ll do its best to be the only option available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I’m pretty sure that, under the hood, they become evil towards their users and don’t change from that. And will never reconsider rescinding the things we’re grateful to not have in the fediverse: profits fueled by advertising rather than donations, tracking sensitive information (including that one can and will use against you), selling that information, and obscure, closed algorithms.
But what you said may be right. Those goddamn C&D orders backed by powerful lawyers…
The network effects are hard to overcome for a majority of people and they shouldn’t be punished for it. I think most of the people in charge of large fediverse instances are hyper aware of the embrace-extend-extinguish mindset and will be wary buying into corporate versions of the fediverse. Personally, I’ll remain skeptical but I won’t advocate for defederating or any punitive actions without cause.
I feel like past experience should inform the decision. Why give em another chance to shit things up?
This was my first reaction as well but it felt like collective punishment. I think the best path forward should be setting the example we would want them to emulate even if it’s naively optimistic.
I think you are indeed being a bit naive if you think Meta will have any interest in following any good example the Fediverse sets. They only care about profit. They will eat this place if possible.
It survives through the way it works. If they suck enough, they’ll end up being cut off from the rest of it. At the very least, people can choose an instance not ran by them. Even start their own.
My concern is content originating from Threads is going to be tainted by their sorting algorithms.
It’s not direct no, the concern I have regarding Meta’s algorithm stems from their size. By being so large, what is popular on Meta’s side would spill over. And I feel the way Meta shapes conversations through their algorithms always ends up in the most dumb and harmful content.
I’m honestly just kinda hoping it won’t be me scrolling on Lemm.ee and all the sudden see the type of shit I can view on Facebook because one person went and visited a Thread made up of Instagram users who just got enrolled in “the new Twitter”.
Then don’t use the platform sorting content by those algorithms? But I see your point. A facebook-sized community would drown us out if they didn’t purposefully expose the rest of the fediverse to our communities and magazines. But, it is my hope that Meta has learned how to do their research, and knows what it is about the fediverse that attracts people, and would build as minimally invasive a filter as possible to allow smaller niche content to bubble up (and not force Lemmy’s hot feed to look exactly like threads.net). I would hope they plan to engraciate themselves with the established communities on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin so that those very vocally anti-corporate groups (and they must know this) would at least tentatively allow content from their platform into the “wider” fediverse.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and see my point. At this point I want a ten foot pole between me and Meta.
But yes, it would be the ability for Meta to drown out and saturate content. It would start all nice and friendly between Meta and the rest. But Meta has to Meta and slowly start pumping things to drive eyes to a way that makes them money.
What I really don’t like is how it seems all of these recent corporate decisions are based on a companies viewing ANY eyeballs that are not looking at their content is a threat that has to be taken out. The sheer entitlement to a human being time. To go out of your way because you feel that they are costing you money because they don’t want to play with you.
