Why are fediverse admins blocking out threads?

Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 53 points – 12 months ago

I get meta evil, but aren’t we just blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse?

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and..

YSK : Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.

Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/

That infosec post up some good points.

The issue I see is that defederating them doesn’t resolve any of the issues they pointed out. Meta is still able to see most information in the fediverse, their built in user base is so large, that it makes the fediverse look totally empty by comparison. I don’t think we realistically prevent much disinformation by walking them off (though we do prevent some)

I just think it’s such a missed opportunity to grow the fediverse. Like now we’re 100% certain that threads users won’t take part in the larger lemmy communities at all.

EEE is a real thing, but it’s a balance act. You can be embraced and extended without being extinguished as long as you do it carefully (I mean look at some of the open source projects of the past decade. Typescript, bucklescript, react, electron and even companies like GitHub, which M$ owns, but hasn’t been mucking up too badly)

Maybe defederating for now is the right move, so the fediverse has time to grow into its own, but I don’t think “meta evil” is a good enough reason to just block out potentially billions of potential fediverse participants is all.

I disagree. I think Facebook=Evil is all the reason we need to keep them at a safe distance. Let's observe them for a few years. If they behave (spoiler: They won't; see Cambridge Analytica, right-wing disinformation, Rohingya genocide, etc), then we consider federating with them.

Letting them be part enables their abuse. Not let them join, protect the fediverse and let's it grow slowly. If you focus on being big quickly, maybe you are right, but if you want to maintain and grow the fediverse for a long time... You are almost certainly wrong.