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Are we defederating from Threads?
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Admins are in agreement that we don't want federation with Meta.
I don't see us currently federating with them - https://lemmy.ca/instances
We'll make sure it stays that way! I've added threads.net to our blocklist.
Great to have an official answer. Thank you!
I decided to sign on here because of this stance. Also I missed the company of my fellow Canucks ;)
Welcome, good to see ya!
Cheers bud! 🍻
Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn't the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn't the only thing you're accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you're just making yourselves invisible by a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?
We're all still protected, no?
Personal take - I don't think it's reasonable to assume the meta will operate in good faith. I don't have confidence that they will moderate their users, and I believe their only interest will be in slurping up 3rd party data to make their platform more appealing and decrease the chance a user will go elsewhere to find things. They don't want you going anywhere else for that juicy ad revenue.
Yeah I'm assuming they're operating is as-bad of faith as possible myself.
As far as moderating their users, I'm don't necessarily know to what extent you mean. But I would assume that since they're a publicly traded company who wants to foster their relationships with ad providers, that they wouldn't let it devolve into something newsworthy; that's bad for business.
Sorry if I'm repeating myself too much (I mentioned this in another comment below), but if the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. If we tested the waters and decided it wasn't for us after some interaction, I imagine the non-corporate federation could grow immensely by that point. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
For moderating users, I mean all the bullshit conspiracy theories. My dad lives on Facebook and has gone completely off the deep end, we need to start actively fighting against this instead of being tolerant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Same with mine and probably many others.
Yeah I noticed that FB is already linking out a lot of articles taken from Reddit shit etc as it is
If you spend any amount of time in the comment sections on Facebook or Instagram these days it's pretty clear that meta doesn't have the capacity or will to actually moderate. You can report things to them only to get a response a few weeks later that they didn't look into it but also didn't remove the content.
We don't want to make the same mistake that was made with XMPP and Google.
They want to avoid Meta from repeating history:
Embrace, Extend and Extinguish
I'm aware of that concept, but I'm having a hard time understanding how that applies to the Fediverse. It seems like we have an inherent protection from that tactic, even if we disregard defederation as an option.
You know how Apple has extended SMS with iMessage? Like that.
In other words, they take something open and established like activitypub, and then build all sorts of cool features on top of it, but those features impose lock-in.
Eg. Maybe they make it so there's some way of attaching media directly to posts, but only if the post is both posted and viewed from a Meta instance. And then, in a few years once they've become dominant due to everyone switching over to their platform out of fomo of those features, they break compatibility with activitypub and ruin the underlying structure of the fediverse.
Wouldn't that just mean Facebook splits away from the fediverse into their own thing? The rest of the fediverse that don't want anything to do with them would still keep existing just like it does now?
To be honest I really don't mind if the users that want to use Facebook leave Lemmy and go to Threads. That just means that there's less people here but the ones that stay have values closer to mine.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Here’s an article that explains how it can still happen with decentralized platforms
That actually doesn't seem to give any context of HOW it could work for the Fediverse. All I see is "we are certain to lose", but doesn't go into what sort of mechanisms or tactics could be implemented to do a takeover.
Am I missing something?
What I would do if I were Zuck is the following: First I'd federate and leech a little bit off the pre-existing community. Then, I'd start buffing out my version. I could outpace the open source team easily if I wanted, adding things like video hosting, that are too resource-intensive for smaller Instances. I'd basically compete in features and polish, which are very important to less tech savvy consumers.
In the meantime, I'd be tinkering with my own Instance, seeing how much more data can be squeezed out of the Fediverse. I'd probably buy some of the largest Instances and assimilate them, just to keep the rest of the space feeling small compared to mine. Let brand loyalty do the rest.
Any time they come up with a new feature I like, I take it. I don't share mine though, I don't share anything I'm not forced to. The goal is to cap their growth, basically squashing awareness of them by making sure that when average people think Fediverse, they think Meta. The rest of it is just weird tech hobby junk for nerds.
Which is irrational. Threads already has five times more users than the fediverse. There's literally no reason for them to waste time trying to harm ActivityPub. Personally, I won't be surprised if they shelf and ultimately cancel their plans to implement ActivityPub because there's literally no reason for them to waste them time, especially when everyone in the community is throwing shade at them.
Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don't know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yeah, I'm already a little offput by how lemmy.world seems so dominant.
Yes, I've started looking for instances that I think represent the "natural home" for communities I'm interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don't like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
I guess browser extension would be well suited to add account-switching/aggregating. Likewise mobile apps.
The mobile client I'm using, Liftoff, does an excellent job of both account and instance switching.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can't keep a large instance controlled by "the enemy" from destroying what we've got, then we just have to do better next time.
It's also about the content threads will bring
Think about all the dimwits, grifters, and douchebags on Instagram. Think about how shitty front page reddit posts were. Do you want that here?
EXACTLY. Quality over Quantity. I mean even Reddit pre-exodus, like there was great intelligent conversations and threads… but sooooo much garbage in between. The signal to noise ratio sucked. I’m loving the small but high quality posts and conversations im seeing on Lemmy in comparison.
For this reason I tend to lean towards defederating because I genuine don't think your average Facebook user brings much value here - quite the opposite.
I just feel like people don't quite understand what defederating actually does and I don't claim to undestand either. However the little that I think I do undestand leads me to believe defederating isn't going to "cut them out" the way we're hoping. They can still see all the content here.
From what I understand, if we defederate from them, they can't see our posts either. See what happened when Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works .
They could still be see the content by creating another instance, or by getting it from lemmy.ca directly. I doubt they'll do that though, especially with Lemmy. Lemmy communities look weird when seen from mastodon, and I doubt they'd look much better from threads.net.
Also I hate how they called it Threads. That's already a word used for other things in this space. Theres a thing called the threadiverse, and it doesn't include Facebook/meta/instagram threads?
Yeah but Beehaw defederated them, not the other way around. If threads.net defederates with us then they can't see any of our new content but if we defederate with them then the flow of content only stops from Threads to us, right?
Beehaw defederated lemmy.world.
If you go to any community on Beehaw viewed from lemmy.world, you can see that new content isn't available. Only posts & comments from lemmy.world users show up.
If you go to any community on lemmy.world viewed from Beehaw, you can see the same thing.
As soon as one defederates the other, all communication between them stops, afaik. The content isn't federated in either direction.
Edit: I might be somewhat wrong, since there are a few posts by users from other instances, but it's only a few, almost all posts and comments aren't available. I dont know what's going on here, disregard what I said.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !technology@lemmy.world, !lemmyworld@beehaw.org
Yeah I don't claim to understand this fully either but I've learned that the best way to get right answer for something on the internet is to say something that's wrong and so far people don't seem to be rushing to tell me I'm wrong at this so I think I have it somewhat right. I don't know which instances defederate with mine so I can't really explore it further
The difference in comment quality on the big subs versus niche ones was immense. I'd have week long discussions about free will on a tiny sub and get a lot of good-faith arguments for and against my view but trying to have a reasonable conversations on places like askreddit was a complete fools errand.
Thank you!!
This is great news—thank you!
I know lemmy.world isn't blocking any instances but they aren't federating meta's Threads.net yet.
It would be nice to see a post detailing why you are defederating this instance from threads.net
It would be great if you could explain why threads.net is being blocked.
Because f*ck Meta? Isn't that enough?
Whatever reason they have is enough. But it would be nice if it was stated.