I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
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I’m hoping that ALL admins across the Fediverse will defederate from Meta. At least we get to have our own separate platform then.
They shouldn’t just defederate from Meta, they should defederate from any other instances that federate with Meta. Like a firewall against late stage capitalism
But that is a double-edged sword. What if, for example, mastodon.social doesn’t defederate with Meta, but you defederate mastodon.social? Now you’ve just cut yourself off from a huge portion of the fediverse. Admins should defederate from Meta if their community wants to do that, but defederating from other instances that didn’t do that is going a bit too far, in my opinion.
A small price to pay for salvation from Meta.
I’ve already blocked mastodon.social.
Why?
Because the size of it, the sheer centralization around it, it creeps me out.
Why? If you have blocked meta shouldn’t you already be exempt from seeing comments and posts by their users on other instances? Why is this punitive approach needed
Edit: (Alongside downvoting, an explanation might be better suited to change people’s minds, I just eant to know the advantage of this approach since you are excluding yourself from many users and you would have already blocked meta in this scenario)
If you have blocked meta shouldn’t you already be exempt from seeing comments and posts by their users on other instances?
Yes, at least that’s how it is explained in How the beehaw defederation affects us, Back then, beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
Third instance communities
Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.
- https://beehaw.org/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That’s because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the “true” version, and we get all updates from the “true” version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn’t have the most “true” version of this community.
Translated into the current context:
- beehaw.org = your instance, which defederates from Threads
- lemmy.world = Threads (sorry folks, just to eplain the mechanics)
- lemmy.ml = another instance, which is federated with both, your instance and Threads
Conclusions:
- You wont see posts or commens from Threads users in that remote community. You also won’t see reactions to those activities from anyone, anywhere. It’s as if comment chains started by Threads users don’t exist.
- Threads will not see posts and comments from you, even if done in communities from instances which are federated with Threads.
Or what do you think, @amiuhle@feddit.de?
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: !asklemmy@beehaw.org, !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
You’d see comments and posts from their users on other instances that don’t block Meta.
It’s unclear how many users you would actually exclude, I think a lot of users who are on the fediverse right now don’t want to have anything to do with Meta.
As the fediverse grows, there will be different bubbles with not much interaction between those, mainly because some instances won’t be moderated while others will try to create discrimination free environments.
Just so I understand, blocking an instance:
Does:
- block people from that instance from interactinh with yours
- blocks people from your own indtance being able to search theirs
- blocks communities from that instance to appear on /all
It doesn’t:
- Block comments if done on non blockef instance
- Block posts if done on non blocked instance
Is that right? I was under the impression that defederating would block them completely, as that is how it worked over at mastodon, if it doesn’t that seems like a serious oversight.
That will just drive many Fedi-users to Meta.
Different instances will make different decisions and users will go to the instances that suit their preferences. That’a how it is supposed to work and the only way it hurts the Fediverse is if we get flooded with threads complaining that other people have different preference, dammit.
I feel like this will just hurt us more then help.
I don’t see why this would hurt us. But even if it did, I would rather take the blow than associate with Big Tech again.
Meta willingly under-moderated across large swaths of east Asia and Africa, leading to unchecked rumors and tangible acts of genocide. Zuckerberg has compared himself to Augustus Caesar.
I think it’s acceptable to cut off a wildfire before it spreads.
Gotta love the fact Meta contributed to how my country got a murderer and the son of a dictator as presidents. Real great and trustworthy company there /s
I’m not asking you to trust them, I’m asking how defederating accomplishes anything? They got more users than the entire fediverse in a single day. We are not hurting them by cutting them off, we are merely making the fediverse seem more like a barren hostile place for a bunch of weirdo nerds.
The goal is not to hurt meta, but to keep meta from hurting the rest of the federated sites. Like not inviting a known their to the community barbecue because they are known to have stolen tons of food from other community meals. We aren’t keeping them from creating their own dinner or anything by not federating, just keeping them away from ours.
Except in this analogy, Meta hasn’t stolen food before. They run the largest bbq around, and have bought out previous corporate competitor bbqs, and now they’re hosting a giant bbq one way or another, they’re just suggesting you put a gate in the fence so that people can flow back and forth between the small community bbq and their large corporate one.
Is that going to make you nervous since they have such a cool giant bbq that people are inevitably going to want to go there? Yeah, but again, that’s the case regardless of whether or not the gate goes in.
Shilling for Meta is a bad look.
They steal people’s data and don’t follow data privacy laws. They draw people in with unethical business practices, not fair competition like in your example.
People are not worried about people using Meta outside of the fediverse. In your analogy Meta is already easily accessible through the internet in general and people can feel free to use both without needing a special gate.
Meta is showing up to the neighborhood bbq to shoot the cook and buy the grill from the estate sale. There also going to call it supporting the grieving family.
FB is a known source for targeted misinfo campaigns. If I log into those services right now Im pretty much gaurenteed to have misinfo on my landing page.
why federate with that?
Defederating means not interacting with the crowd Meta brings in. I have a bunch of other reasons but that’s my main one. And before you suggest blocking, you can’t possibly expect me to block all 10M of their users and the domain block is bugged. I know because I tried.
Besides, this place doesn’t look like much of a barren wasteland since we’re interacting with a bunch of people right now. I don’t mind interacting with only weirdo nerds if they’re nicer people. Quantity doesn’t mean quality after all.
For the people who want to interact with Threads because of family and friends, they should just make an account there. Just don’t let Meta destroy this small part of the internet.
Your argument entirely boils down to “domain blocking is still buggy”, when Threads doesn’t even support ActivityPub yet.
Once it launches, just block their instance.
I was gonna type out a really neat itemized response but I don’t think you’re discussing in good faith, just like Meta and Threads. I’d rather take a nap
place for a bunch of weirdo nerds.
So we don’t get a space at all?
-A Weirdo Nerd
Lemmy is run by a bunch of tankies and the entire fediverse is under-moderated.
Cutting off a ton of users and content from the fediverse is stupid and everyone in here just keeps coming up with vague generalities because they’re scared of Meta rather than have actually thought through what will happen and be able to articulate any actual harms.
People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they’re irrelevant.
We know what Meta’s goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t give them the opportunity to try anything.
We should be scared of Meta, and we should keep them as far away as possible. Anything else is reckless and stupid at best.
People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they’re irrelevant.
No, they didn’t. The harm listed was that Meta will make a shinier platform that will syphon away users, that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation, it’s a harm that’s a result of meta having more money to build a better platform.
We know what Meta’s goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t give them the opportunity to try anything.
There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising. Nothing about that conflicts with the fediverse.
Like I said, this thread is filled with a bunch of people shaking in their boots about the company who must not be named rather than actually providing sober rational assessment of what’s likely to happen.
that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation
Yes, it is. Read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising.
They can do that without integrating with the fediverse. The reason they’re going to integrate with the fediverse is to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Yeah, I’ve read that, and it’s not an example of a corporation killing a decentralized network through federation, it’s just a normal example of a corporation killing a decentralized network by having more money to make a better app.
XMPP did not die because Google used that protocol, it died because people preferred using Google Talk over any of the XMPP apps. That would be the case regardless of whether Google used XMPP or not.
Yeah, you think they give a shit about the fediverse? They’re using ActivityPub because it’s easier for them. They’re not going to want to EEE us, because there’s not enough of us to matter to them.
It’s not easier for them, and once there’s enough people to matter then it’s too late to kill it. The fediverse is growing, and they want to stop that before the fediverse is big enough to matter.
i’ll take those “tankies” over completely unaccountable thiel’s buddies any day. actual tankies seem to be contained to lemmygrad where they don’t bother anyone outside of their instance
“Boo hoo tankies bad, but big corpo run by billionaires who spread misinformation and intentionally act to topple legitimate governments in favor of their fascist agenda are akshually good”
Arguing with people like you (corporate shill) is a waste of time, so I’d rather have fun instead.
The reactions you are seeing are based off of Metas history. We will see how it works out.
i have no reason to believe anything will be different going forward, the same person is in charge and they have already stated they have the same plans here that they did on thier other projects.
why pretend its going to be “different this time”?
I didn’t mean to pretend that this will be any different. My hope is, that there will be some people who will see that there is an alternative to big tech and maybe drop Threads in favour of a real fediverse instance.
if they bomb the federation with misinfo as FB produces then its going to be interesting getting thier notice and bringing them over without turning the open network into a pit of questionable assertions. maybe airlock federations? oneway sync?
Real life is not speech and debate, and it isn’t an ad hominem to look at Meta’s past actions and to expect that they will continue in the same way.
We don’t have to have a crystal ball and be able to detail exactly what will happen and when to know that this is bad news. Expecting random internet users to outthink a mega corp and send an accurate and verified copy of their plan is absurd, and it seems like a bad faith attempt at discussion.
why shouldn’t people be scared of meta
Do people think socialists or communists are bothered by this term tankie? It’s like called a white person cracker. It’s not really the effect youre hoping for, I promise.
Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.
Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.
The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”
And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.
It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.
And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.
Exactly. Facebook is a known bad actor. There is absolutely no reason to believe their intentions are anything but evil. Pretending Threads is just another instance is both naive and dangerous. It is a cancer. If allowed to federate, it will metastacize.
Facebook is not evil, advertising is.
The people at Facebook aren’t sitting there plotting to make the world worse, they’re just sitting there figuring out how to make the numbers go up and since they’re an advertising driven business, that means engagement metrics, which leads to the vast majority of their resultant evil. The advertising / engagement driven business model is what is actually evil and what could actually be addressed by legislators.
Well said.
How is that any different from what we have now?
Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.
If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we’re in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn’t seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.
Yeah, I personally don’t want that. I want to be able to log in to mastodon or lemmy without needing a facebook account and be able to interact with my less tech savvy friends and family, as well as get news from journalists/bands/sports teams/etc.
Do you really want the Instagram crowd to interact with us…?
I’ve been on Instagram for 3 years trying to build up an art profile, sharing my artwork. I think it’s not Us vs Them, all sorts of people are spread out everywhere online.
I’m happy to be here on the fediverse with my fediverse accounts, not threads. I’m extremely despondent about threads existing.
No reason to be despondent until they actually make the leap to the fediverse and we discuss what the plan is to federate. Threads will not automatically federated with everyone. We will have a long time to look at what threads is and what kind of content they will bring
At least there would be people and content to interact with.
Based on your posts so far my friend, its becoming clearer why you think there’s no one to interact with.
Lol, ironically my comments in this thread going against the hive mind have gotten more interaction than any others
If I was interested in those people and their content I could go there. I’m here because I absolutely do not want to see any of it.
I assume you only subscribed to text based subreddits then? Never once clicked on an image or gif that came from IG / Tiktok /etc.?
My god stop being such a gatekeeping judgemental douche. Tons of reddit content was on subs like r/aww and /r/animalsbeingderps that was exactly as trite as the stuff posted on IG, if it wasn’t directly copied from it.
I am on TikTok and was on Reddit. I like my FYP on TikTok. I go on Instagram to see what old friends are up to and the suggested content is awful and mean spirited. Same with Facebook. I don’t want that crap here
I am finding plenty of content to interact with here. It just might not be my first choice, but I’m getting along fine. It’s still early
quality != quantity
How exactly will it hurt us to not be usurped by an evil megacorp?
How will not federating with them prevent that?
If we federate with Meta, we will be immediately drowned out by the huge user numbers of the Meta properties. They already have more users on day one than the entire fediverse.
I mean, if they actually subscribe to threads and discussions across instances, and isn’t that kind of the point of a social network? For users to use it? Also odd that half the arguments against it are that it will kill the fediverse and half of the arguments are that it will provide too many users to the fediverse.
I don’t think so; it won’t hurt ‘us’ anymore than we were hurt yesterday, when Threads hadn’t launched yet.
Why would that hurt us? Sorry, I’m pretty new to all this…
I feel different
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Damn, that’s a terrifying vision of the future. I was on the fence with defederating, but we probably should.
Your comment should be top.
Absolutely. We’d have to be nuts to think they’re not trying to take it over and ruin it.
I don’t think XMPP comparison is correct.
First, in my personal (subjective!) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers.
As for Google Talk - it just came and went. Because they never had proper MUCs (multi user conferences, think communities), in my own (again, personal, thus subjective - not objective!) experience it was quite the opposite to how the article paints it. Whoever participated in chatrooms I’ve been in, and had used a Google account, hated Google’s decision and moved to XMPP. I’m no fond of Google, but their impact on XMPP was not strictly negative - they contributed some useful XEPs and useful free software libraries after all. Although, of course, for those who used XMPP primarily as a classic messenger system (like MSN, AIM or ICQ) for private 1:1 chats things surely looked differently.
Now, why I think the comparison is not correct. I think Threads’ situation is different because of fundamental differences in how those systems operate. And not in favor of Threads/Meta. If Threads would be Lemmy or XMPP MUC-like system (that is, having communities/groups hosted on particular servers), then it would be a complicated story, where Fediverse could even theoretically score a net win. But as I get it, Threads is Mastodon/Twitter-like thing, and their users’ content will stay with Meta, entirely at Meta’s discretion whenever they let other systems access it, and when they pull the plug. Given that Meta is also not likely to contribute to FLOSS Fediverse projects, their Fediverse presence is of questionable benefits to say the least.
Fantastic read. Thanks for the link.
For those who don’t know, the strategy is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The phase comes from Microsoft who used this to (try to) crush competing document editors, Java implementations, browsers, and operating systems. Other big tech companies employ similar strategies.
Facebook coming to the Fediverse is the Embrace phase of this process and that makes Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, and Akkoma the competitors.
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I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they’ve done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they’re trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it’s how capitalism works.
Spot on. Anyone cooperating with them is a fool.
Well on the bright side, at least the fediverse is seen as a genuine threat to current social media. Hopefully it will stay that way.
If I wanted to see content from my racist Trumper uncle, I would just create a Facebook account. Keep Threads far away from the rest of the Fediverse. We don’t need to compete with them. Who cares if they’re way bigger with way more content if 99% of that content is garbage?
if 99% of that content is garbage?
Counterpoint: beans.
Serious note: I think the point of decentralized networks like this is that each instance will have to choose to federate with Threads or any other future corporate social media. If that sounds dangerous, welcome to the freedom of choice baybee! It sucks that the truth is that as long as we want this to be a free space where people can choose what and where they see content, that means some will choose to work with the big-easy-techgiant rather than take a harder approach because 99% of people aren’t that invested.
tbh, as a small instance, i might be defederating meta. im not a fan of the person that has everything through theft and scam.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about politics, nothing good will come by letting them in. I hope all current instances defederate, I know mine will.
Will lemmy.world defederate?
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Is there a way to block threads content?
I run my own instance here at twisti.ca and have the full intention of defederating
nice to hear that.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
How many things will we let them ruin before we finally learn that corporations cannot be trusted?
One thing I don’t understand is why would meta even federate with anyone outside of their own instances anyway?
Makes no sense to ever open up to allow any other instances in. Not like they are crying for users.
The fediverse just makes sense in their own bubble. Turn Facebook, Instagram, and their other apps into the fediverse and federate them all together.
I don’t expect them to ever open up to the actual fediverse. Same with BlueSky. I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.
On one hand, I think it could be possible that Meta is planning to federate with the fediverse with the ultimate goal of destroying it and replacing it with their own instances. Similar to what Google did with XMPP according to this article. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
On the other hand, I also think it could be possible Meta is wanting to federate with the fediverse just so it can increase it’s data collection many times quicker. Why manage servers when you can connect to other servers and suck up data as and when Threads users interact with other lemmy instances.
No idea which is more likely.
Interesting thoughts. I suppose Meta will collect what they want to collect, it’s what they do, and this is all public discussion, anyone can collect it for any reason. And I don’t doubt that their involvement in the fediverse is secretly nefarious in one way or another.
Where I think our current situation is different from the Google/XMPP thing, is that, a bunch of platforms are going down the tubes really quickly and lots of people are looking for the next thing all at the same time. It gives a lot of room for a good platform like this one to gain ground rapidly. As far as I’m concerned, if for example instagram federated, and I could browse some good feeds outside of meta’s app & privacy permissions hell, that would be a plus for me. If they subsequently pulled what Google did with XMPP and suddenly backed out, I wouldn’t react by moving to instagram exclusively and I can’t really see why any user would make such a move.
Thanks for the link about the whole google xmpp affair. Really well written. More people need to see this
You’re very welcome. I saw it in another post yesterday and have been sharing it where relevant.
I do think this sounds plausible. If they could become a dominant instance in the Fediverse, it would be easier to supplant it altogether. This is why decentralization is paramount.
Threads will be the dominant instance by a huge margin.
We don’t need them and they don’t need us.
Wasn’t Meta part of that as well with xmpp? They should not be trusted.
Not too sure if Meta was involved in the XMPP thing, but either way yes they shouldn’t be trusted.
nah zuckyfucky has always been about destroying competitors. It’s not about data, it’s about absolute dominance.
Like most big companies out there. Destroy competitors to be the main one that everyone has no choice but to go to.
Well? Apparently, they plan on making it happen. https://help.instagram.com/169559812696339
It’s a classic tactic, you open up compatibility with an open source platform so everyone moves to the fancy app that supports it all (threads) then they drop support and kill the platform (fediverse). They’ll do it and will likely be successful unless they’re blocked completely right now.
I don’t see why we can’t just stay on the fediverse, enjoy threads as long as meta wants to play ball, and then wave goodbye when they decide they don’t want to federate anymore. Nobody’s forcing anyone to move from the fediverse to meta, and I think the current demographic here is unlikely to volunteer for another walled garden experience.
Worst case scenario is we end up right back where we are now- a niche community prioritizing independence and decentralization.
The problem with federating with anything owned by meta is that it is a data syphon. I don’t think we can fully protect ourselves from that. If they want the data most of it is easy to come by by just having any ol mastodon account or running a malicious instance or just scraping what is public and inferring the rest. However we shouldn’t be inviting a threat like that into our backyard. We should definitely not be federating with them. Furthermore it gives them the opportunity to bloat things down with ads or DOS small instances with amounts of traffic and data they can’t handle and they could make it prohibitively expensive to run an instance that federates with them. Nipping those problems in the bud requires showing them the door early.
I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.
Just like they did with the Internet.
BlueSky will use their own protocol, so they will indeed be a closed bubble.
As for Meta, my (totally unjustified) hunch is that they’re expecting that other big names like Twitter, BlueSky, Google or Amazon will migrate or create their own ActivityPub services, and they want to be early adopters. If Threads is successful, I could see them migrating Facebook and Instagram too.
That’s my assessment also. This isn’t about extinguishing us, it’s about the other whales. AFAICT, they want and expect us us to be do well. (Delete could use a confirmation…)
That’s my assessment also. It’s not about us, it’s about the other whales. They actually want to see us doing well, afaict.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Once they’re federated they have full admin access. So they can see who liked posts, and lots of other info.
They could be doing this already, for all we know. We don’t know who owns all those little instances out there. Large corporations or government surveillance just need to set up a discreetly named instance or two and start subscribing, and they’ll get all the data they want. (In fact, could that be part of the reason for the explosion in silent bot accounts?)
Aw shit, yeah, obviously… The folks mining data are going to be using innocent looking nodes to do it… Okay you convinced me, I won’t pull the plug.
Oh… yeah… that’s totally it. By federating, they get to mine us for data the same as if we were on their service. Okay, I’ll pull the plug.
This reads like sarcasm but it isn’t.
They of course have no interest in growing the fediverse as an independent alternative, they want to use it for their own ends. They want to serve people the fediverse’s free content under their own umbrella and rules (and ads of course) to monetize stuff that doesn’t belong to them, or anyone else. It’s all pretty straightforward greed and capitalizing on an opportunity.
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We have to stick to our guns and keep supporting the small instances.
Admins needs to strike first and defederate from Meta before they do.
What good does that do the small instances? And how does that harm Meta?
All that happens is:
- The small instances won’t get the extra activity that Meta users might bring
- Meta will not get the small amount of existing content on those small instances
That’s more a loss for us.
Ya pretty much double-edge sword
On one hand, Instagram users can bring a ton of content, which “should” be good for the overall website
On the other, it’s Meta lol
If I wanted all of the Instagram content I would be on Instagram. I don’t want all of that content cluttering up another space and overwhelming another space.
The difference is here you can manage your own feed and pick and choose. Many folks don’t want metas apps on their device but wouldn’t mind some of the content. Folks that don’t want it don’t have to sub but those that do can benefit second hand.
I don’t want Instagram content here! If I wanted Instagram-TikTok-type content I’d be there not here. I hope that crap stays away.
And yes, it’s Meta lol
Nobody wants Meta’s manipulated content. Let’s not forget why we call them Meta.
I don’t really see how it’d be a loss. The fediverse has existed for a long time alongside big centralized social media, and Threads ostensibly having ActivityPub support doesn’t really change that.
The loss of potential growth opportunity… And all the potential negative effects happen anyway, no matter if you federate or not.
How about you do that once Meta does anything other than run their own instance and help to popularize the concept of the fediverse?
That’s the “Embrace” step
We should be warry of anything big tech embraces. For example, Facebook reportedly uses servers running Linux. For that reason, we should all stop using Linux. Since Facebook has both an ios and an android app, we basically have to stop using our phones. We should shoot ourselves in the foot if there’s a chance we might get to bleed on them /s
Nice sarcasm, very helpful for discussion. Anyhow, this has applied to Linux as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
To risk being serious here for a second- when Google+ launched, I remember being super bumbed out about how empty it felt and the fact that my friends couldn’t be on it yet because it was invite only. All the way back then, I had the idea that it would be really cool if there was a way for different social media websites to talk to each other directly instead of just users sharing links, so I could kind of take my friend group with me to Google+ even though they were still on Facebook. At the time I didn’t recognize either of them as really evil, I just though Google+ had a better interface. So all the way back then, 10+ years ago, I personally felt the lock in that established social networks had was way too strong for even well funded newcomers to overcome, and if there was some kind of standard for them to communicate with eachother, it would allow for a lot more innovation.
Today, not only is my vague idea a reality in the form of ActivityPub, the largest social media company in the world is actually embracing that open standard and funneling it’s users towards it. In the future, other huge corporate backed social media companies might feel pressured to build around it as well. We might be heading towards the commodification of social media, where you give put your social handle like an email address, and anyone who wants to follow you can do so from Kbin, Mastodon, Peertube, Threads, Tumblr, etc…
Today, I really do think of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg as genuinely evil. But I don’t look with suspicion on everything they do just because of that. For example, they typically do pay some amount of taxes. While I am suspicious that they aren’t paying enough, I don’t think theirs something inherently tainted about the money they pay with. That’s how I think about threads. It’s not currently federated. If I was suspicious of anything, it would be that being federated was a bold claim that brought a lot of attention to them, and that they might stall and even back out of ever doing it. That’s the play if you’re evil. If they actually federate, I view it as the fediverse has created such a great value proposition that supporting it enhances the value of Threads. Just because they are evil, it doesn’t mean everything they do is wrong and the opposite is right. Them being evil means they don’t do right reliably.
I think we need to accept the fact that we live in a world with Big Companies and think about how they can be better than they were before. Right now, I think Meta is actually making a socially good decision to support ActivityPub. And it might also be good for them. But just because it’s good for them, it doesn’t mean it’s bad for us. If we can find a way to structure incentives so big company’s interests end up aligning with ours, we’ll be in a much better place. Better than just saying anything Meta does is automatically wrong and nothing will be good until they are totally gone.
Currently Reddit has significantly more users than Lemmy. Has that stopped people from signing up to Lemmy? Twitter has has significantly more users than Mastodon since forever. Has that stopped people from signing up for Mastodon? Has it killed Mastodon?
The common error I see in all the “Threads will kill the Fediverse” mania is that it assumes the same people who sign up for Threads would have otherwise signed up for Mastodon/Lemmy/Kdin/etc. 99.9% of them probably never would have. They want something that’s easy and just works; and they’re willing to let a company profit off their data to have it.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
One of the things that I feel isn’t being thought about much, is that it isn’t just Meta’s ideology and policies that will harm smaller instances and the fediverse itself; but the volume of data that their userbase will generate.
For smaller instances like mine running on six vcores, 4GB of memory, 512GB storage and a 120Mbps network…I feel like all it would take is a handful of users federating with them and the data flow alone would destroy our resources at the network if not disk level.
No, I don’t plan on allowing my instance to see or interact with theirs; but the point applies to all small instances and part time hobby servers. We don’t have the means to take on the data they could throw out into the federated network.
If that’s the case, then how will it be possible for the fediverse to scale up at all? If the goal is to replace Reddit and the like, then the goal is having millions of users regardless of if they are all coming from meta or from a whole ton of small instances.
I have some headroom for growth set aside. Since my instance is virtualized, its not too hard to scale it a bit. But there are hard limits due to other projects on the host.
For a lot of smaller instances that are currently running on cheaper VPS instances, they most likely have an upper limit to what their willing to pay for scaling up as growth happens. The only way to balance that is getting tooling in place to purge older data, but that isn’t really a good idea either.
Really though, any web platform that hits the public eye is going to face these issues over time. But allowing a large company to federate with a smaller instance will accelerate the issues. You also need to keep in mind that you don’t have all the control of these instances, as your users will cause you to federate with more and more content. Sure, you can purge and defederate, but that is a cat and mouse game.
Also, I cannot speak for the goals of others; but lemmon bar isn’t run with the goal of replacing reddit. It is meant to be a point of access to the fediverse. No more, no less.
Meta WILL fuck up everything they touch with an aggressive amount of ads. I do not want this future.
Everyone is really scrambling now as if they really thought up to now that the Fediverse was immune to corpo bullshit
Well we would be if everyone just blocked them like gab or truth social etc. But I guess mainly Rothko is considering federating which is why everyone is freaking out
