To answer the question in post directly - I think it's a bit daft. I understand and support the intention. In fact, I've already blocked threads.net, assuming that's going to be the actual endpoint. But the pact itself I find useless and a tad childish.
The design on that "pact" is... wow. Really putting our best feet forward there. Just needs a geocities logo and a visitor counter.
If they cannot collect my personal info any more than any other Lemmy or KBin instance can, then honestly I don’t care. If they want to make it interoperable, ok good, I’m sure somebody will be happy. I will not be signing up for an account, and if I don’t go out looking for the content I may not ever even see it.
All instances can collect some level of info about you. Only one decided it's entitled to distribute it to third parties, use it to train its algorithms, and generally speaking make as much money as possible out of it.
Are you meaning it as they would just try to scrape all of the user info off all of the instances they can see or just for gather info from people that interact with their users?
If it’s the former, what would stop a company from setting up a private lemmy instance and start doing that for all other federated servers? Services like ChatGPT and Bard may already be doing that and we would not know.
If the latter, then I guess just don’t interact with those users?
On the former, there is always a risk for the scraper. For example, you could scrape 100% of Youtube, but good luck spreading any piece of video out there.
My concern is on the latter and you don't need to do anything: if one user from Threads decides to follow you, you implicitly gave Threads permission to proceed, because the instances are federated. If I misunderstood their terms and conditions, I will happily welcome the correction.
If we could ensure 100% compliance with a meta-blockade then I'd be for it.
However, that isn't going to happen and any instances that do federate with Meta will be the part of the Fediverse that exists to billions of people. Those instances will become the dominate instances on the Fediverse for people who want to get away from Meta but still access the Fediverse services. Lemmy, as it stands now, is only a few million people at most. We simply do not have the weight to throw around on this issue.
It is inevitable that commercial interests join the Fediverse and the conversation should be around how we deal with that inevitability rather than attempting to use de-federation as a tool to 'fix' every issue.
I don't see why they would bother with the fediverse as it exists to be honest. To me it seems like a liability from their point of view. Not sure if they've spoken more about this but Facebook getting in more shit by having their users exposed to stuff that they don't explicitly control doesn't seem like something they'd want.
That being said, I feel like defederating with them if needed is a solid idea but their sheer size may make that decision difficult for instances that are looking to grow given that they've already amassed twice the accounts of the Lemmy fediverse in a few hours. Now not all growth is good growth like you've mentioned but there's no partial defederation so either you leech on some of their userbase or you don't.
I see some places going for growth if that's an option which may not necessarily be a bad choice (unless they impose strict rules to follow if you want to federate with them) given that facebook has the capital to bury us with if they choose to so our compliance probably won't have a very big impact on how things play out in the long run.
It's because companies like Meta want all the power they can get. As you said, there's no reason for them to join the fediverse, other than to control it or kill it off, that is.
I'm not against Threads existing, especially with the way Twitter is going. People need an alternative and I don't believe that Mastodon is the answer for many.
But Threads and the fediverse can absolutely exist separately, and is why I support defederation.
I think we should preemptively add them to the defederated list at least until we get more info on what exactly they are doing. We are already having enough sync issues in the fedverse. We can come back to the subject in like a month with an agora vote on refederation.
Don't like it personally you can't trust these companies to do anything but be malicious actors, it might drive more users to the rest of the fedverse but there are huge risks and these companies have already broken laws time and time again.
Honestly, this would be a non-issue if we could block instances at the user level. Since they’re not federated yet, and User-level instance blocking should be coming, I say we wait and see.
I wish there was a way to grey-list an instance, to where a user has to seek out and subscribe to content that admins don‘t want spamming users by default, so it doesn‘t get added to the „ALL“ feed for everyone else.
Just give users more control.
Companies invading the fediverse was always going to happen, it's not necessarily a bad thing. You get more users, a rock solid instance, possibly more support in coding, and maybe more. There's no reason to have bots essentially copying content from a place that offers federation
There's also definite downsides, federating could be expensive for smaller instances to handle all that content, potential pressure for more tracking/less porn/more ad friendly code built into the system, making communities better through proprietary extensions to slowly cannibalize the rest of the instances.
Blanket decisions to block corporate instances is probably a bad move, though keeping a short leash is wise.
But think of the type of content meta/IG is going to be creating. It's going to be a ton of garbage self centered wanna be influencer posts. A never ending content generation machine. If the entire feed of IG was federated, the All view would be squashed with IG garbage.
Of course you're gonna have "low quality influencers", but if you're attracting THOSE people, you've already attracted a massive audience of other people. Those low quality influencers wouldn't be coming over in the first place if there wasn't a massive audience to appeal to in the first place. And if there is a big audience on these platforms, then you're gonna have the higher quality creators come over.
I make YouTube videos, but I'm hesitant to fully dump Twitter because I'm losing out on a critical connection pathway with my (admittedly small) audience. If I could know that a majority of my audience was on mastodon AND that I could collaborate with other creators in my niche, I'd fully switch over and delete Twitter from my phone in a heartbeat.
But I can't do that because everyone uses Twitter.
Threads is letting people get their foot in the door for the Fediverse. And I think it's really sucky that, if I want to reach the biggest audience, I might just have to make an account on Threads, because practically all the instances out there are defederating from it.
Lemmy/Mastodon et al basically exist on a principle of ethics that outweighs the desire of "wanting to reach the biggest audience". People have deliberately chosen this platform over twitter and reddit, deliberately gone from high traffic social media to a platform with a much more limited userbase, because of those principles. Of course the hope is that one day this platform will grow as big or bigger than the old platforms, but organically and on its own principles.
It seems counterproductive to suddenly ignore those principles for the sake of traffic, just because a major corporate player suddenly wants a bite of this platform as well.
If you want visibility and a big audience on account of your career then by all means set up accounts on every platform you can think of, that is all part of that game, but don't try to force this platform to become one of them just because of that desire for visibility.
Exactly. No offense but I don't care about your business.
If I walk into a bar,I just want a drink. I'm not looking to get advertised to. If I go to a park, why would I want to see fifteen billboards advertising to me?
Is there really nowhere to go where we aren't always the product? Lemmy and the fediverse at large are basically saying that since we are the content creators and the users and chip in to keep it all going that we aren't being mined for data and swamped by bullshit. I'm good with that.
Meta is a garabge company in so many ways. But I think that we need to allow these giant companies experience full extent of the fediverse. That will hopefully bring more pople on the fediverse, populorize is and make it more widely known / used which is a good thing. But we need to be cautious.
It won't bring people, please read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
