I didn’t realise that Meta was becoming/is already compatible with the Fediverse.
I deleted my Facebook account long ago, I saw what it was becoming and decided I didn’t need that in my life.
What are everyone’s thoughts on this.
See: this post for where I first read about it.
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I would prefer not to federate with them. Their track record is abysmal and the privacy invasion is horrendous. One of the people over on Mastodon recorded more than 200 queries from the app within an hour of installing it - they are determined to scrape every last detail of your life into their advertising database and, well, fuck that.
Mastodon.nz announced a week or so back that they have no intention of federating with them and I found that to be reassuring: we’re all here because we specifically Do Not Want a corporate body throwing adverts and algorithms at us.
It wouldn’t surprise me if blasting the fediverse with millions of users is specifically designed to weaken smaller instances, just to oh-so-graciously offer their users and ‘safer, more stable’ place to set up.
I agree on not federating with them. In addition to the EEE threat, the fediverse has a lot of growing pains just from the reddit exodus, so adding a shitload of users would break instances and make moderation basically impossible.
This is why I agree with avoiding federation with them for now. We need a more granular federation model than the current All or Nothing setup, to cut down on the whole data sponge thing from the corps. And there’s a need for moderation toolkits that don’t yet exist.
I think if those things existed, federation would be good because one of the shittier things about the corporate walled garden of social media is that their users can’t see outside the walls. If they could, they might choose a different ecosystem.
I’ve become less worried about this over time (this is something that’s been debated on the Fediverse for quite a while… people have known about Threads and its goal of adopting ActivityPub for a few weeks).
I still have some concerns, but a few things worth noting:
- Threads launched this week, and doesn’t currently federate with anything. We don’t know when federation will be turned on, and it may never be turned on
- Threads already has many millions more users than the whole Fediverse. The Fediverse user count is a rounding error for Meta.
- Federating would be a nightmare to manage for Meta. They would have to decide which servers to federate with/defederate from. They don’t want to audit all the fediverse servers, but they also don’t want to let the fascist servers in. They can’t apply their moderation policies to federated servers. Their users will likely get confused (e.g. some posts won’t be visible to them, as often happens on Mastodon due to federation differences).
- The social links between the fediverse and Threads are likely to be limited. Threads is catering to an Instagram audience, celebrities/influencers and their followers, which couldn’t be further removed from most of the discussion on the fediverse (including Lemmy). Have a look at this post to see some of the BS discussion on Threads: https://lemmy.nz/post/281577
- In my view, Meta has 0 interest of intentionally taking out the Fediverse by EEE. It’s just too small and different from their core audience to care about.
So why is Meta even talking about federation? Most likely because of regulatory scrutiny. They are leveraging their market power of Instagram to create a Twitter rival, most likely with the goal of destroying Twitter. If they can say “but we’re embracing open standards” that will help ease the pressure. They may not flick the AP switch until and unless they think they really need to. And there’s a good chance they won’t need to.
There’s still a risk that they will federate, and that it will do damage to the Fediverse. We’ll need to be vigilant if that happens, but I don’t believe pro-active defederation is necessary (although a lot of Mastodon servers say they will do this). In any case the risk is probably low for Lemmy, but more of a factor for Mastodon.
Really good take. If federation happens (and I actually don’t really think it will), the impact will be pretty minimal.
Worst case scenario: their sheer scale means they can swamp fediverse with their spam, in which case we defederate and get back to living the good life.
Best case scenario: it enables us to follow them, and them to follow us, and it just helps things grow.
I reckon the best approach is a wait-and-see. Threads already looks pretty goofy, and I’m not sure it will have the same legs fediverse does.
My vote would be not to federate with them, for the reasons others have already said - privacy issues etc.
Personally one of the things I love about Lemmy/Fediverse is that it doesn’t have any of that crap!
Honest question, could threads federating backfire? If meta federates, suddenly everyone in EU will want a mastodon to be able to view Threads content, and mastodon has lots of much nicer and more mature apps, not to mention privacy concerns. I think it’s possible allowing Threads to federate could be very good for fediverse adoption in the short term at least.
I guess it could be possible, but looking at the XMPP <-> GoogleTalk situation, it is very unlikely.
- Embrace the open standard
- Extend it with some propriety add-on, and because you have 1000 times users, you now become the “standard”
- Extinguish the open version of the standard because users expect that all the things should work together; and now the open versions are considered “less” because they cannot work with the propriety bits.
