Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
From what I have read, I think it’s all of the above.
-
a space is wanted free from corps, ads, data perversion
-
people are fearful that 30 million people joining threads has automatically made it the largest instance. Once it integrates with ActivityPub and can federate, it will dominate the space and produce the majority of the content. People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content and content production with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
-
many believe meta will not act in good faith and is doing this to appease European courts and laws
Because of all of this people likely believe keeping threads quarantined right off the bat is the best solution to mitigate the amount of damage they can do to what’s already been established.
Edit: I am adding to this post as I just stumbled across a post from the host of the lemm.ee instance (which I am a big fan of). He has also listed some great cons of Facebook stepping into the fediverse:
-there is nothing stopping facebook from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores which would ensure they end up on the front page of “all” for federated servers
-threads already has more users than all of Lemmy’s instances… therefore, they can completely control what the front page looks like by dictating what their users see and vote on
-moderation does not seem like a priority for threads which would increase workload for smaller instances
-REVENUE FOCUSED
I paraphrased a lot of this but as this is getting some traction I wanted to provide additional visibility to the cons of federating with the Facebook.
Pretty much this, and I’d like to emphasize the part where Threads userbase outnumber the Fediverse 30 to 1 after only one day.
Lemmy is evolving into a very nice place so far because of the type of users it’s attracted, and the fear is that the atmosphere would shift on a dime when the voices here get drowned out by hundreds of millions of commenters from Instagram and Facebook.
A few years ago, Reddit strategically banned two terrible subreddits during one of their shitstorms (the whole AMA firing scandal), just as Voat was getting popular. It turned from a decent community that was starting to grow and challenge Reddit’s presence, to a right-wing extremist cesspool overnight.
You also see this sort of thing happen to subreddits all the time. Some of them go from a good community, and either slowly or quickly, shifts into a much more terrible version of itself. Russian bots/ops have transformed subs to push their own agenda.
The community matters, and how that community evolves matters a great deal. Communities can live or die from massive migrations like this.
I started a community to track the H5N1 global outbreak but I do NOT want to moderate it long term; if it picks up, the anti-vax/Plandemic people are going to start showing up (they already do sometimes in the subreddit for it). I feel like opening the doors to Threads is going to hasten that.
Meta taking their ball and going home some time a ways down the road is much less an issue than them dominating content by being there in the first place. They will have their own moderation and content rules that will shape the content that flows out from them, which will shape each community that interacts with it. Considering the very mercenary approach they have to that, it means that content will be far more monetized and monetizable. Which means both sanitization and pandering, neither of which benefits freedom of thought and discussion.
Considering the huge influx of people coming to places like Lemmy or Kbin to escape that kind of situation (reddit), it may mean the death of the community that has grown so far, before Meta even considers leaving.
Just to play devil’s advocate:
There could be some downsides to defederating it too:
-
threads could be a gateway to bring more people into the rest of the fediverse in a user friendly way.
-
It might cause the rest of the fediverse outside of threads to be more fragmented if some defedarate it and some don’t.
Absolutely agree. The optimist in me wants to be excited for what this means and how this could impact the future of, well, the Internet.
But then I remember this is Meta we’re taking about. They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta. As someone who doesn’t use meta products, this brings concern.
This is such a blatantly obvious truth that I’m starting to suspect some users here are astroturfing, peddling this bullshit feigned naivety about the rampant unethical practices of FB/Meta. There’s enough history that we don’t need to question it or give Meta a chance.
I’ve been working on building the !vans@lemmy.world community, but I may look into moving it to another instance if lemmy.world doesn’t change their mind on federating with Threads.
Edit: I guess they’ve only stated their plan for Mastodon, which is wait and see.
They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta.
They definitely do things selfishly in a way that maximises benefits to meta and ignore any downsides to anyone else, but while thier impact is probably mostly negative, there’s some small positive aspects to some things they do, sometimes…
I’ve pointed it out a few times, but I think it still bears repeating.
Meta have done a lot of open source development, and in that way you’re using “meta” products daily. They are the people behind React and GraphQL, for example.
React (and React native, also them) is one of the biggest JavaScript frameworks, and GraphQL is an alternative to REST api’s that brings solutions to many problems around REST api’s.
I can almost guarantee you that some of the pages you visit in a day use at least one of those.
They also have a lot of other things. You might have heard of pytorch, a major library for developing and running AI projects.
Just have a look at https://github.com/facebook and https://github.com/facebookresearch/
Edit: to clarify, my point is that maybe meta only thinks of itself, but technology wise they do it pretty altruistic and help the related technological communities a lot.
In addition to what you said, I think additional aspects to consider are the open standards and protocols Facebook/Meta have already abandoned once it became convenient to do so:
- XMPP access for Messenger/Chat
- RSS feeds for any newsfeed source. They even continued to use the RSS badge (which is unofficial as far as I’m aware) for their follow icon even after they removed RSS feeds.
The bare minimum price of Meta’s integration into the Fediverse should be nothing less than the return of those standards, and honestly even that may not be enough.
People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
I don’t see how that could possibly happen. It’s not like they can buy the Fediverse. Seems to me far more likely that the Fediverse will be gain interest from people wishing to follow/interact with Meta users without being beholden to Meta and if/when Meta decouples from it again the Fediverse will be larger than before. Sure, some may come and go, but others will find interests outside of Meta.
Like everyone is pointing out, they already will be the largest instance. They are not going to gain that much by trying to trying to absorb the rest of people who are likely in the Fediverse from dissatisfaction with Big Tech and wanting to break free from their algorithms and restrictions.
I think you’re underestimating evil.
Nah, I know they are evil, but I also know that there are things people want that they will never provide because they want full control and an advertiser friendly environment.
Like say, where would NSFW artists be more at ease? The Fediverse or an Instagram offshoot? Especially in the wake of Twitter falling apart.
Let’s also not overestimate the scheming of tech tycoons are either. I believe Meta is making a blunder and I don’t think we should stop them.
- while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
- users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
- whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
- existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.
Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it’s own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.
Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it’s communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.
Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.
I do still think this is a good thing, but it’s a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren’t starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.
I am extremely skeptical of 2 and 3, because it means people who already decided to drop mainstream social media platforms will go back on their decision, and it suggests that people want instances to be more like Meta, rather than for it to function in a user driven way that provides things that Meta will never be willing to offer.
If people can be tempted off of the Fediverse so easily, the problem is not Meta. Keep in mind that right now people are already choosing not to engage with Facebook. I’m not naive to assume that they won’t have appeal and influence and dirty tricks. but seems to me like such a complete lack of faith in the Fediverse to assume that if Meta merely exists alongside the ecosystem, it’s inevitable that everyone will jump ship. That sounds like what they wanted was a Big Tech-driven platform all along.
I don’t think that’s right.
Comes to mind also that Mastodon has had many years of headstart. How much of a slow growth does it still need?
. It’s not like they can buy the Fediverse.
They don’t need to. They only need to buy the admins. And we know that some admins have annouced they are for sale.
Anything that lands on Meta’s servers is open for Meta’s use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we’re anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that’s helping them.
If by algorithms you mean things like GPT, all data on the fediverse is effectively public and arguably even easier to be collected than the likes of reddit, and is almost definitely going to be used to train models whenever or not the fediverse federates with threads.
There’s still significance in defederating though, specially when it comes to preventing “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”
Being publicly viewable doesn’t make it public domain. We each maintain our copyright. Our posts are our personal intellectual property.
We can’t stop them from using them, but that doesn’t make them theirs, and it doesn’t mean we should just hand them over freely.
If they’re going to use them, they can at least make the effort to take them.
Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Defederating from Meta changes nothing in this regard.
They can take. That doesn’t mean we need be ok with giving. Just because they’re ok with theft IP doesn’t mean we need to be ok with them doing it.
What “IP theft”? By using a service built on ActivityPub you are inherently and deliberately broadcasting your posts to the public. Meta has just as much right to read those posts as I do.
Isn’t it subject to the same GDPR rules that the whole of fediverse pretends they don’t exist? All it takes is asking facebook what they have on you and unlike some “depersonalized” identifier you can ask for your data based on the activitypub id. It’s actually much easier to go after a big corp with such a request as opposed to some random mastodon or lemmy instance.
There’s a reason Meta can’t operate Threads in Europe. They don’t abide by the GDPR.
I’m pretty sure the parent company knows how to deal with GDPR between facebook, whatsapp, and instagram. Whatever issues they faced in EU (most probably the EU’s Digital Markets Act) isn’t directly related to GDPR, because if it was for GDPR compliance alone I guarantee they’d be in the appstore by this evening.
I would suggest you to sent a GDPR request to facebook (if you’re in a position to be covered by GDPR and have a facebook account) and to your lemmy instance (being lemmy.world).
Facebook will have a bunch more data on you, undoubtedly, but it will take no time for them to process the request.
Lemmy? Good luck with that. First try finding their privacy page and see what data they actually collect on you. Whom they send it to process. Try reaching the admins maybe? Lemmy has no tooling whatsoever to help with that so they will have to get their hands dirty with postgresql, too.
I like fb no more than anyone in this thread but let’s be realistic. They do have a much better story of complying with GDPR specifically than anything in fediverse.
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO’s actions. The last thing we’re interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
I would add as most important: psychologically unhealthy behaviour their algorithms are promoting.
It starts normally, but algorithm is rewording unhealthy posts and soon whole network is full of it, it happens since they are just hunting “engagement”, click, time in the app and basically addiction.
The Algorithm only happens in their app, though. They aren’t forcing it on every Mastodon server, and definitely not on anything Lemmy.
And, yes, The Algorithm is truly awful.
Sure, but their algorithm in their app will be steering their users to content across the fediverse chosen specifically to engage enrage those users. Even if the broader fediverse isn’t being fed directly by their algorithm, the worst of the Threads user base will be showing up in our communities and comment sections.
As far as privacy and tracking go, can you unpack that a little more? Isn’t everything you post on the fediverse totally public to begin with- isn’t even already likely that they have spun up servers to test ActivityPub integration with, that have already pulled your fediverse posts? This just seems like a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Yes, my posts can be scraped easily, but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation. All they can do is scrape me saying things like:
“Targeted or general advertising for any product indicates to me that the company paying for the ad makes a low quality product that is over priced to pay for spam marketing. I will always seek out the better priced or better quality alternatives that do not fund advertising like this. I have never click or followed direct marketed advertising, except when it interrupts me in an annoying way. Then I will duplicate the tab, click the ad, go the the landing page, let it load, click a link on the page, and let it sit in the background while I use the old tab to go about my day. I close their tab and automatically wipe all cookies at the end of every browsing session or after leaving the tab open for a few minutes to ensure it costs an order of magnitude more than the ad impression did. I will make sure I cost them a full ad click for pissing me off. I never use my browsing/social media devices to make purchases. They are not even on the same network and VPN.”
Data miners are more than welcome to scrape this post, and show it to all of their advertisers please.
what I voted for and how
I think you’re mistaken, as far as I understand, any server that federates with your home lemmy instance has access to what posts/comments you’ve up/downvoted: https://lemmy.world/comment/704895
This by itself makes it very easy for “malicious” server operators to profile users.
kbin makes it very clear through the /votes/up /votes/down pages attached to each post/comment - lemmy doesn’t show this information in the UI, but you can get it easily by federating your own server with the instance of the user you want to profile.
Agree with the rest.
but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation.
You’re under the mistaken impression that lemmy.world actually gives a shit about your privacy. They don’t. One day, they will do the same thing to you that Facebook does to its users. And disconnecting from lemmy.world and signing up to another instance won’t change the data they already have.
Don’t trust Facebook. Don’t trust any of the corpos. Don’t trust Lemmy, Mastadon, KBin servers you log into. If you want privacy, keep that shit to yourself, in your own home, under lock and key.
I’d say the biggest reason is culture and identity. The threadiverse is small at present - about 120k - and the microblogverse is bigger - 8m - but still smaller than the Threads.net 70m already and potential 1bn if meta leverages instagram. Why would a smaller and growing new independent social media platform want to be swamped by a commercial tidal wave? There isn’t really a benefit to the independent parts of the Fediverse.
It’s better for the independent parts of the fediverse to grow organically, remain independent and grow it’s own identity rather than disappear into useless oblivion.
Also if I understand it correctly, the Threads.net is a microblogging site so while they may both use ActivityPub, Lemmy does not support microblog content. For Lemmy, it would mainly be the Lemmy content appearing within Threads.net. Federating with Threads.net is more of an issue for Kbin (which does both Threadiverse and Microblogverse content) and Mastodon (which does Microblogverse content) - the content would be visible in both directions. So for Lemmy it might be a big influx of users so may be manageable, but for Kbin & Mastodon it may also be a flood of content which might not be mangeable. But correct me if I’m wrong on that.
You said threadiverse a couple of times when I think you meant fediverse.
