Sorry. I know it’s getting a bit annoying with all these posts obsessing over this subject but still…
Just to make my position absolutely clear from the start of this - I think the entire fediverse should defed from anything under any form of commercial control, which clearly includes Threads (when/if it enables ActivityPub).
I see a lot of instance admins are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to defederating from Threads. With respect, I’d like to ask them - what are you waiting to see? Evidence that Meta is an immoral organisation? Surely you can’t be that naive?
Or is it evidence that Threads will attempt dodgy things with the ActivityPub codebase? That they will attempt Embrace-Extend-Extinguish? If that’s so, I again ask you with respect, surely you can’t be that naive? When Meta start introducing little, disarmingly helpful, tweaks to ActivityPub, will your ‘wait and see’ stance continue? And when Meta role out their own version of the protocol, urging Mastodon, Lemmy etc to adopt it - its free! Its better! - will you still continue to ‘wait and see’?
The privacy thing I don’t feel is (currently) much of an issue. Meta could easily scrape all our data tomorrow if they felt like it. What I fear is privacy after they’ve introduced all their ‘improvements’ to ActivityPub and released their own version. Maybe we’ll end up with a two-state fediverse where one state is happy to federate with Meta and the other is not.
The fediverse was built on the principles of open standards and open source, by people, not commercial orgs. It is slow growing, slow to react and in some areas slow to change. These are, in my opinion, amongst its greatest strengths. There is no endless money pot provided by investors, admins are volunteers running instances on VPS’s, software creators are people doing it as a hobby. This is people power, not money power. There’s no profit motive. The second such a massive profit driven org gets a foothold - and is allowed to - that changes. It’s simply inevitable.
Is the fediverse perfect? Of course not. But I believe the problems it faces can be overcome with patience and persistent forward thinking.
Then there is the fact that some instances (and hopefully increasingly more) are seen as safe areas for gay people, trans people, non-white people, women. Opening the door to Meta means opening the door to a whole shit storm of awful people whom we currently don’t have the tools to protect communities from. Is ‘wait and see’ really a good idea given the fact this almost certainly will happen? I mean ‘wait and see’ what exactly? And yes, I know we have our home-grown awful people here and guess what? We struggle to contain them already! Threads got more signups in the first 12 hours of its existence than the entire current population of the whole fediverse. You want to ‘wait and see’ how many of those people are cunts? Because the answer is ‘a lot’.
The fact is - the fediverse doesn’t need Threads, or any corporate involvement. Yes, its already smaller than Threads, it’s smaller than Twitter, it’s smaller than Reddit. But, at the risk of leaving myself open to obvious jokes, why does size matter? There’s already, in my opinion, enough people throughout the fediverse, esp on Mastodon and Lemmy, to have created places where their is good, lively, vibrant discourse. I’d much rather have quality over quantity. There’s nothing actually wrong with slower, more manageable growth. We’ve all got sucked into believing the bigger something is the better it must be and that unchecked growth is healthy. If we’re growing uh, ‘house plants’ then that might be the case, but we’re not. Because the fediverse is not (currently) motivated by profit, we don’t need unchecked growth. I’ve seen so many reddit refugees recently talking about how much better the ‘feel’ is on Lemmy, how much less pressure and angst and nastiness there is. I can’t think of a single scenario in which instantly adding double the amount of people, some of whom are pretty terrible, without decent tools to manage them, all operating under the control of a company known to embrace/extend/extinguish and who’s sole motivation is profit at all costs can be beneficial to the fediverse.
Imagine how few people would be using email if all the regional ISP’s decided that they were going to preventatively block their users from being able to send / receive email from larger providers like Yahoo or Gmail.
Imagine starting a new communication service that would replace email and not preemptively blocking known bad actors like email companies that hosted scams. How many people are going to want to use that?
But imagine if 95% of everyone you know used the evil crappy corporate email, and not the super-utiopian one.
Because both are “free”, the reality is that almost everyone will use the email that actually lets them email other people.
On lemmy, I’m not here for everyone I know. If I wanted to be in touch with them I’d probably still have a Facebook account.
Spam largely does not originate from these email providers, instead the open nature of email allows for spammers to easily spin up their own SMPT servers and go wild. Have you used email before?
Sure, I get that. I was thinking of the largely corporate spam that do use large providers protocols to send their email.
It’s SMTP by the way, not SMPT.
If we could, in retrospective do that, maybe we wouldn’t be in a state where if you want to send an email and be sure it gets delivered, you need to use one of 2/3 providers or a mail delivery service. The email example is perfect to show how big companies did kill the openness of the protocol, without any need to make it closed.
Email is about a single source propogating information to many, which is analogous to Twitter/Mastodon/Threads
Lemmy is not like email. It is about communities of shared interests. The relationship is many to many
If I created a many to many community based platform, I would not measure success by how many speakers on another type of platform were able to interoperate
Emails are not the same as a social platform.
One is sending letters to each other, the other is opening up a discussion to the user base.
I think the entire fediverse should defed from anything under any form of commercial control
I disagree with this point. If there was say a server about github content - news, posts about projects, questions and help for github related things would it matter if the server was ran by a independent community or github itself? I think a server ran like that would be a positive thing overall.
That said, facebook/meta/threads is out for there profiteering off the community, squeezing anyone for what anything they can get out of you and have a huge history of doing the wrong thing in the goal of profit. A company like that should not be allowed in.
Github owned by Microsoft you mean? That Github?
Glib reply aside (sorry), in my opinion, any commercially owned entity has one sole reason for its existence - profit. And in the name of pursuing that, they’ll do literally anything to achieve it. I don’t see that as a healthy thing for the fediverse.
Defederation requests need to be on a cool down timer Benoit they’re considered unless there’s an immediate threat. Otherwise it opens up the doors to using the equivalent of a nuke in impulsive decisions or pressure. Your instance admin might at this very moment be thinking about this even if they’re not vocal about it.
Threads won’t federate any time soon and even when they do, I suspect they’ll operate in whitelist mode. All my instances allow NSFW content, which threads doesn’t.
But in general, just because admins aren’t defederating yet does not mean that they’ll just wait and see.
I already know of one admin of a very large Mastodon instance who’s already stated they’re not going to defed and are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach.
Also, Meta/Facebook tweaking the codebase is not necessary a bad thing. While being mostly evil, it has made significant contributions to open source, maybe wait and see will allow us to copy good ideas… before defederating them, because sooner or later they will get defederated.
I don’t see them as a good Fediverse player, but preemptive defederation, before they even start to show their colors, seems like almost unfair.
They don’t contribute to open source where it would impact their core business of capturing your attention to feed you ads, only where they know the benefits of open source will be applied to their backend tech stack
There’s also no reason to think they will play by the rules if users start magically moving to other fediverse platforms (as many believe could happen), they can easily mollify regulators about interoperability by pointing to their adherence to MetaPub, the incompatible ActivityPub fork they could make in an instant
How exactly is Threads going to EEE Lemmy?
I can totally see arguing this re: Mastodon. But there are some serious hoops that need to be jumped through for a user to even be able to see Mastodon-type content as a Lemmy post. Doing Mastodon on Lemmy feels like eating soup with a fork. You can technically do it with enough time and effort, but should you?
Pitchfork mobs going after Lemmy admins because they haven’t already blocked Threads makes me think that maybe the mob doesn’t really know what it is they’re against, besides just “corporations bad”.
You might need to re-read my post. I don’t believe I said Threads was going to EEE Lemmy. I referred (repeatedly) to ActivityPub. So, it’s a bit misleading to say I’m inciting a pitchfork mob.
You’re right to say Mastodon and Lemmy don’t operate seamlessly, but Mastodon users can already follow and post to Lemmy Communities. They see Communities as just another User. And the more fediverse tools develop, I’m sure this will only strengthen.
I’m also not saying ‘corporations bad’. I’m saying ‘corporations are unnecessary for the fediverse to exist and probably will do bad things’.
I read it. And one thing I definitely agree is that Meta shouldn’t be allowed to make changes to ActivityPub protocols, themselves, that make it easier for them to do bad stuff.
And while you, personally, might not be inciting the pitchfork mobs, they’re out there. There was a post last night where lemmy.ml announced that they already blocked Threads. People were definitely out to get lemmy.world in those comments for not making the same announcement.
This post about how lemmy.world had “bent the knee to corporations”? Yeah, that was a painful thread to read - the Fediverse is just getting started and already many of its users are keen to tear it apart in the pursuit of some kind of “purity.”
Let’s see how it goes. The developers are all on alert for any funny business, there’s no need to preemptively start blasting at shadows in every direction.
A lot of people here seem to disagree with this point of view. Now I’m not a very smart guy but, I think you make good points and keeping profit motive out of the fediverse is a great idea. I can’t speak for anyone else but it’s the whole reason I joined lemmy in the first place (tho the whole reddit thing didn’t help) and ever since I’ve been transitioning to similar platforms for all my social media (mastodon, pixelfed, etc.).
Honestly my friend, if I was at all worried about people disagreeing with me I never would’ve got married.
