Why Defederating from Facebook/Meta is So Important
I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren't some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They're a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make "facebook" most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren't able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they're on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they're not worried. Frankly, I think they're being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram's CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it's difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren't just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I've seen plenty of arguments claiming that it's "anti-open-source" to defederate, or that it means we aren't "resilient", which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn't about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn't mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I've seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn't stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it's a federation clear to the users, and doesn't end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can't host your own "Threads Server" instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user's primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create "better" front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the "slickness" of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren't yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won't manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won't engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of "better clients" is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
Defed every corporation. McDonald's starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.
Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
Yes, reputation is very important. The cluster of people known as Meta has proven it is nefarious at best.
It's good to consider the case-by-case basis instead of just making general rules.
Like if Lowes wanted to make an instance I wouldn't worry much about its corporate influence. But Meta is actually an evil organization.
(Though their React docs are some of the best docs I've ever read)
This make me chuckle.
I mean, they aren’t fucking wrong. Half life 3 has a federated communication system built into multiplayer? Go do it Gabe.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
I'm right there with you. I can already foresee that their apps will be prioritizing monetized users like content creators and everything in there will be a transaction of some sort. Who cares, you just have to block their instances and go about your merry way.
I've never had any problems at McDonald's with their ice cream / milkshake machines in Europe. Maybe the US simply gets the faulty machines?
It’s a pretty well established anecdote that most of the time a McDonalds tells you the ice cream machine is broken, it’s because they’ve already cleaned it for the night and if they use it again they’ll need to reclean it. It’s easier to say it’s broken rather than make one dessert and then have to reclean it all over again.
Bullshit. I know everybody loves a good "lazy employees" story, but American machines are designed to break down constantly so Taylor gets repair revenue from McDonald's franchise owners.
I used to work at McDonald's and got tired of the constant accusations from customers. Johnny Harris made an excellent video on this topic.
I know a good number of McDonald's employees are lazy, but that damn machine was the bane of my existence when I was a manager. It would just randomly decide not to work for the day and we had to call Taylor.
To be fair, I did say “well established anecdote” and not “well established fact”.
You're not getting the real McDonalds experience
There’s heaps of vids on yt about the MacDonald’s ice cream machine racket.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
The company that maintains the machines has a contractually enforced monopoly over the franchisee's. This means it's impossible to get parts or fix the machines outside of them doing it.
Whats wrong with steam?
It's a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Right now we're losing tons of information after snapchat bought and deleted the gyffcaf website.
Now imagine losing all games when Gabe dies and the new patron loses the company to a newfound addiction to whatever
I dont think mastodon would, but i think lemmy kbin would. The target audience is different, one is twitter and the other is reddit like. I dont think twitter user hate fb as much as we do.
They always did strike me as idiots
Agree.
But isn't half life alyx basically hl3?
Nah, that's a prequel. What everyone wants is a conclusion to the cliffhanger that the current Half-Life story ended on. Good game though!
We need Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and then Half-Life 3.
VR will remain a gimmick until it isn't a whole-ass lifestyle.
But...it doesn't have to be a whole-ass lifestyle, even right now with the current state of VR. Even with an Oculus Quest 2, you just put on the headset, play an hour or so, and then put the headset down like a normal person.
The marketing teams at Meta and Apple want to market it as a lifestyle because that's the only way they know how to promote it without going into the nerdy weeds of VR game design, etc., but from a consumer perspective, it's only a lifestyle if you choose to make it your lifestyle.
I have no love for corporations but they’re a fact of life by this point on the internet. They drive a significant about of marketing and users and they’re what make a social media platform take off (which is why Parler and Gab fell apart).
Fediverse SHOULD be an ethical platform, but you have server admins defederating any instance that even has paid subscribers. Isn’t that going too far? Are we trying to force everyone on here into a kibbutz?
I believe the only instances that should be defederated are corporate, self-harm, profanely illegal, and political extremist instances.
Anything further than that and the whole network is going to devolve into a series of micro echo chambers.
Or maybe it won't, maybe the vast and free instances will flourish while the restrictive instances die out.
Either way, trying to control a community based on wishy washy ideology is not a good look.
I think in these early days we'll see a lot of power drunk admins who are too eager to push the button, just because they can.
We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development--open source. All of our content--available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.
However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.
He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.
Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That's the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.
Another option is to make migration of everything from one instance easy and let them buy whichever instances they want but let the users go somewhere else. Turn their weaponized capitalism into free money for instance admins until they wisen up and stop throwing money at it.
Or set up the terms and services to give the instances responsibilities that must be honoured even after they get purchased by another entity such that buying them becomes unattractive. Like mandate a certain portion of the topmost parent company's profits (along with clauses to prevent Hollywood accounting from dodging that, maybe say revenue instead of profit and all related companies instead of just the topmost) must be invested back into the fediverse and that changing the TOS to remove that requires a certain number of users to agree. Set it up so that it is designed to only work if the whole point of the entity is to host a community rather than extract profit from hosted communities.
Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads' users on our discussions.
I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook's terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.
no, defederation does not “just” do those things
defederation refuses to give them an in to slowly make changes to the platform that will eventually give way to a centralized power dynamic over the whole fediverse
see also: the chrome/chromium monopoly and its effect on the modern web
Just require users to be logged in to view posts, and then limit them to seeing a few hundred every day. That should stop them from stealing the content.
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.
Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.
Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.
If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.
You're surprised Zuck has bots?
He's basically one himself.
They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.
What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.
Ultimately this is the thing to worry about. Threads will get the largest communities and as a result the main amount of attention and when/if Meta decides to defederate, it will ruin things. Also, people will generally give zero shits about federation because 99.9% of content will be on meta's instance.
Ironically, the main thing keeping fediverse from being more popular (the decentralized approach and "multiple places the same community can exist") are going to be the thing that kills it if Meta gets involved and becomes the big boy.
Idunno what is arguably worse. The fediverse being restricted to more "technical" folks who give a shit, and thus a far more limited audience than a central platform, or being suddenly disconnected from the hivemind after taking all the content.
(Fwiw, I absolutely think that the Threads fediverse plan is to totally absorb all the content and become the main place for it then possibly pull the plug but honestly at that point they won't even need to the usage stats will basically do the same thing for them.)
I don't think accepting reality is making excuses.
Comparing meta to beehaw, or really anything else, is truly coming up short. Meta is the 8 ton gorilla in the corner. If the numbers that were released about 30 mllion people on Threads is true, they instantly have 10x the total population, and that numbers going to go up as more people stumble upon it.
Point being, Threads doesn't need any other communities. People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy. These people are also the same ones who don't care about if their content is coming from a federated source, or just Threads.
And hence, defederation is a good idea.
Defederation is to protect us from them. You are absolutely right that they aren't comparable to beehaw in size - now imagine if people here start joining the communities on Threads (not formal ones cus threads doesn't have those), and we later decide to defederate, as some have proposed? Beehaw alone caused a massive clusterfuck, now imagine an instance with 10000x more users and power and concentrated community being let in?
Yup. If someone wants to see Threads content, sign up with them. Nobody's stopping them.
Seem is a perfect word - remember you have no reliable way of telling if these are legions of real people, good people, bots, etc. don’t let masses online shake you so easily! You too could be a thousand account echo chamber legion if you wanted to.
That’s how these people propagandize and brainwash societies by making use of a social mechanism we have which relies on power in numbers
You can be sure a good deal of Meta bootlickers here are astroturfing accounts. Meta's business is to manipulate public perceptions and opinions, and astroturfing is definitely one of the tools employed.
I think there are multiple illusions into using one community. I don't think people do. The average user love instagram when it was for sharing photos, facebook before it was for grandparents, vine (now tik tok) when it was for funny clips, youtube for silly content, reddit for thread format speaking, snapchat for stupid private chats. If we are talking about centralized communication I'm not so sure that is the case either. The reason all of those platforms I just mentioned got ruined for the most part is being of the growth of influencing and monetization. Once capitalism came in it completely changed the original intent of why the user liked those platforms, I doubt most of them even remember why they liked it when they joined it changed so fast. What people want, without actually realizing it, are the same services without the garbage product they've excepted and its turned into.
100% agree. I've been shocked at what seems like extreme naivety or willful ignorance in some of the discussions on federating with corps. Corps only want profit. People are the product at meta. They just want more product.
There's either a streak of loud and stupid that started up when the NDAs came to light or some of these "Facebook would never do anything bad" people are suspicious af.
If the Lemmy admins sides with people like zuck, which they shouldn't because they're literal communists I'm going to laugh so hard, internet would pretty much be fucked lol
My gut tells me we should defed all corporate instances as a matter of policy. Our uniqueness is at jeopardy , think of threads like the borg.
Obligatory upvote for Star Trek reference That's the beauty of individual servers, isn't it? If you're on an instance that doesn't defend those corporate instances, but want to, them just move to one that does. The voices will speak.
My voices say that de-fed is best and I worry that not everyone will perceive the terrible consequences of not doing so. and yay for star trek :-)
Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.
Reddit and twitters recent moves were the driving force behind me switching to mastadon and lemmy, but I ditched meta/Facebook services long ago. Adding those back into this fold really makes the choice for me kind of easy. Inviting meta to the party is just a non starter.
OP is correct. We have very little to to gain and everything to lose.
Not only did I add
threads.netto my blocked instances list, I also went scorched Earth and outright blocked Facebook's entire IP range through my firewall. Don't want them "accidentally" reading any data from my server ;)For reference, their IP range is
157.240.0.0/16:Edit: Actually, I might have more IPs to block:
https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/THEFA-3/nets
Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.
They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference
Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies...as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS
Leave the bad... Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they'll go for it
And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It's social media without an agenda - that's both rare and pretty damn important for all of us
They can't stop. There's a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can't stop - that's just what a corporation is. I'll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it'd still act like an amoral cancer on society
It's not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they're freaking huge...
This should be copied to a post so it's easier to see for other instance owners.
I did the same but went an extra mile and rooted my phone and blocked facebook domains with adaway since PiHole doesn't really work if you're using mobile data
Post saved for when I have time to do this, thanks!
Aha, have been studying for the CCNA. I understand. I FEEL SO LITERATE.
How do you block whole instances?
Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn't matter whether you're on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.
Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.
Billionaire and neolib bootlickers are one of the most disgusting things on the internet. Everything for the imperialist/corporatist agenda even when it goes against their own wellbeing.
"Defederate from the communists because sometimes they say things we don't like!"
"No, don't defederate from the people literally killing children by intentionally giving them eating disorders with unethical research! They're fine!"
"But gommunism killed TRILLIONS of people!"
We'll feel the results of neolib indoctrination (and intentional dumbing of the masses) for decades, and it's disgusting.
Nutjobs should just be ignored, as much as I dislike leftists Meta is an actual massive threat to Fedi.
They're not nutjobs, they just know which side their bread is buttered.
They oppose leftists and support corporations like Meta for the same reason. The corporate system that rules the world is literally the creation of the neoliberals. These two positions are actually in harmony for them, the only lie they consistently tell is that they do everything for moral reasons rather than self interest because they have materially benefit from that system or aspire to.
Okay, but why does your comment sound so defeatist?
Fight goddammit, this is the time when the most actual leftists will see this shit. This is an inflection point, this could be the moment that matters... Or just another missed chance
I am fighting. The point in cases like this one is to expose the neoliberals for not really being leftists whatsoever, they're centre right anywhere in the world other than america. The only way we move people away from them and towards real anti-imperialist politics and leftism is by exposing and critiquing them from their left.
is there a server somewhere that is dedicated to not defederating? i know there are a lot of reddit mod refugees here but im not here because i loved the mods on reddit. i dont want them censoring things for me i can handle it on my own. i would really like to be on a server that is using this technology but will not defederate as i know the server i use (lemmy.world) is already doing that. im not trying to get into bad shit i just dont really want to be part of that drama. it's basically like when mods from certain subs would ban users for having participated in another sub they didn't like. anyway, i am asking in earnest if anyone knows of a lemmy server that is normal but also not defederating because of dumb posts like this one.
Define "normal". The fascist servers haven't defederated, but everyone else defederates from them.
Agreed. It's not cowardly or "anti-competitive" to choose to avoid stepping in crap. Because that's what Facebook and Twitter are. Single ownership of an entire social media is a terrible idea, because that platform will always be promoting and protecting the interests of its owners, not its users.
Exactly.
I'm not sure why anyone would look at Facebook at this point and not think they're coming to manipulate and destroy external platforms.
I'm still baffled that some people can argue "why are you so worried?" about this. We have twenty years of history of shit hitting the fan, how much more do you need to not trust Facebook/Meta?
I'm struggling to understand it too, especially from instance owners. FB is diametrically opposed to FOSS and decentralized ideals. My only guess is the hopefulness people feel for decentralized internet extends to naivete about FB doing the right thing this time.
Exactly, not a hypothetical question here, we have historical evidence to show it's fact.
For what it's worth, I'd like to put my voice. Out here in support of defederating them.
Our goals and their goals are like parallel Lines, They'll never cross.
Going in 180degrees different directions
That'd be the same line, no?
Same line, we each follow in a different direction, yes.
Two parallel lines can coexist on a plane heading in opposite directions (vectors) without being the same line. They are traveling 180 degrees relative to the other line's vector, not a fixed point on one of the lines
I support defederation
Definitely defederate. I did not come here to let Meta monetize my content on their platform. Also - Facebook and Instagram crowd is among the worst userbase on the internet, with the blandest cotent, right behind Tik-Toc. I don't think it has much value, and it would make everything hell to moderate - it's just a lot of users.
So, defederate, I say.
Absolutely agree, cut them off.
I'm 100% in favor of defederating and completely blocking communications with whatever Meta, Bluesky and other big companies throw.
More importantly, I was not aware of how Google killed XMPP, and that's the most important thing that every Mastodon and Akkoma admin should read about. Their instances will slowly stop working with Threads, people in their instances might eventually migrate back into Meta owned shit, thus slowly killing their instances.
Don't even know why and how there are arguments in favor of Meta. They're bad, everyone knows it. People still use them because they're basically forced to keep up with acquaintances and family.
Well, I mean, in the United States our culture is built around "business good; much innovation" and anything to stymie corporate efforts is met with groans of "you'll understand why it must be this way when you're older." It's almost reflex for some to be apologists for corporations.
Heck, I even read some takes around that damned submarine being along the lines of "we shouldn't regulate the sub industry -- that CEO was just trying to innovate!"
I actually agree with that sentiment. Put more billionaires in tin cans and drop them in the ocean where its deepest.
Well, billionaires are wonderful people deep down.
3km deep down, preferably
The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:
Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook's Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups
I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume
The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I've used the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Consume", to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.
They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they're so big, most instances will comply in the service of "content".
Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.
Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation
One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it's users and non-users.
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.
We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):
@threads.<whatever their url>Instance Admins, and the "Friendliness" of Meta
Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do "due dilligence", but I've seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.
I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn't make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.
Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta's orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.
I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they'd probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).
Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!
Note on This Post
I've realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don't have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p
More Random Shit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-29/facebook-whistleblower-sophie-zhang-government-manipulation/100103408
Never underestimate what corporate greed can and willing to do.
You have to give them credit, they kept their XMPP servers until the last. But you're right that Google killed a lot of things.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
That is Google's graveyard
Seal the doors! Mark/Meta’s obsession over user base and data control has to be put in check. They’re like a social culture vulture. Riding the next wave but the attempt ends up being stale, killing the mood for everyone that just wanted to enjoy something to themselves.
Yeah, absolutely defederate. Nothing good can come from interacting with Meta.
Ban meta and its instance on a firewall level
Defederate from those ass holes, zuck can get bent and a whole slew of other bad things. Stupid ass hasn't done anything of value and still acts like the dumb ass college kid bragging about getting people to give them all their personal details to use his crummy site.
Tl:Dr the only federation we join should have Jean luc Picard in it not Mark Zuckerberg
Is Zuckerberg Borg then?
"We will add your
biologicaland technological distinctiveness to our own instance".Zuckerborg
While lemmy.world is not my main instance, so I have no say in whether you defederate or not, I would like to bring this arugment into the discussion, because it's applicable for all instances, and make de-federation an absolute must for every instance.
Allowing Meta in goes directly against the idea of Fediverse, and we should fight it as much as possible.
This is a literal quote from the main header on https://www.fediverse.to/
I've seen a lot of comments mentioning that defederating with Meta goes against the principles and main ideas of the Fediverse, that it should be inclusive and allow people to connect. But, judging by this main selling point of the Fediverse, it sounds to me like Meta shouldn't be in the Fediverse do begin with.
I'll just leave these here....
Behind the Bastards Part One: Let's Look at the Facebook Papers
Behind the Bastards Part Two: Let's Look at the Facebook Papers
Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.
People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.
By sheer user count allowing them to federate would mean the end of non-Meta content on the All feed. Threads is already much bigger than the entire combined Fediverse so the total engagement would drown any Lemmy content, unless of course driven by Meta comments itself. This would no longer be Lemmy, it would be Threads that you could use your Lemmy account for. Maybe not if the algorithm was changed to filter out posts from Threads from the All feed, but you'd still get your communities flooded with Facebook comments.
This is in addition to the rest of the problematic issues with Meta as a company.
I’m fine with threads federating with mastodon as it means more content which means people won’t immediately dismiss mastodon because it’s too boring for them, but I don’t want Lemmy to federate with Lemmy any more than I want to read tweets on reddit. They’re different types of platforms for different things.
This is what I've been thinking lately. There's no way to unring that bell after an influx of several million people "join" Mastodon through Threads.
Plus threads has an entire team of engineers who can be abused to get out better looking apps, sys admins who ensure the threads servers are running at minimal load - ensuring a top tier Fediverse experience. Already we've seen a burst of indie developers for Lemmy and Mastodon, but what if I'm not concerned that my microblog app needs to know health biometric data - threads is up when my niche instance goes down.
That's how they get you. Come to threads for a "better user experience"! You can still follow the weird Bean memes, but with a better UI/UX! Don't worry, we at Facebook won't defederate with everyone else once we hit critical mass!
Bravo. This goes straight to the main goal of Meta: they want us exposed to their manipulation, their astroturfed content and their psychological traps. They want our attention to their content, and the best defense we can have is negating them from having any of it.
Facebook is a company you should never interact with. They are plain evil.
Even if all evidence showed that they have good intentions, I wouldn't trust them - just based on what they have done in the past.
The creator of Mastodon went to some kind of Meta round table meeting (couldn’t find the original thread, here’s someone declining the offer), so it’s entirely possible that he was told a bunch of lies and believed them.
That said, Meta is going to pay the admins of whatever instances Threads decides to federate with, and they’ve said that’ll be the biggest instances, which… well, that’s mastodon.social, by far the biggest Mastodon instance. So, I don’t know. I don’t have any reason to believe that he’s a bad person, but what kind of money are we talking about here? No one is immune to that kind of temptation.
I dunno, this whole situation has a weird vibe.
If mastodon.social is the biggest instance, threads have been laughing for their number since the first day it was released.
Meta do not need Mastodon users at all to take off. They dont even federate at the moment.
I absolutely support not allowing the ZuckFuck and his corporate shills any access to the fediverse. Defederate them!
Cat: Yeah, don't give Meta a single inch. They need to GTFO.
This one is easy. I remember the 90s when microsoft pretended to play nice with everyone while they simultaneously did their damndest to destroy any competitor by their embrace and extend tactic. I also remember when AOL opened up their walled garden and the amount of garbage that flooded every usenet group. Im aware that the redditpocalypse probably had the same effect on lemmy but I still support defederation.
Tl;dr - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is how google killed XMPP
XMPP is still alive, and is just what it was before Google used it. I don't understand this argument.
Is it popular ? No Because it started to be popular back then.
Thanks to Google and Facebook it was more widely used. When they stopped their involvement, XMPP went back to its previous state.
The Fediverse is already popular. If Meta embrace it before leaving it, it will come back to its present state, like XMPP. But unlike XMPP, the previous state is a good one. Thus it's not something I fear.
I do tend to think that we should defederate, but the XMPP example seems irrelevant to me. It's more like an email situation. That's something I fear.
Probably go read the article that was linked.
I did, thank you. And Ploum doesn't describe the state of XMPP before Google Talk. I think this information change all the conclusions.
Thanks!
A problem I haven't seen anyone discuss: What of server costs?
When even just 1% of the still growing 30 MILLION Threads users (300k) are interacting with an average Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. instance every day, just how much data do you think that will generate? As Threads scales and users are posting content that users on smaller instances try to interact with, the hosts of these smaller instances bear the brunt of the costs.
Threads need only exist, and as everything scales upward and more people join the Fediverse, their sheer mass will wipe out all the smaller players just by virtue of the smaller servers being unable to cover growing server costs. 300k users creating 1kb of content each, per day, comes out to 292 megabytes of data. (But that's not realistic. The OP contains 5,171 characters, or roughly 5kb of data.) This does not account for images, or videos, which also cost money to store. If 1% of those 300k users (1% of the 1%, 3,000 people out of 30 million) are posting images, if we assume the maximum file size Mastodon can store (8mb per image) and arbitrarily set the file size at 1mb to try to be conservative, we're still adding an additional 3,000 megabytes of data per day in addition to the original 292, or 3.21 gigabytes of data. We're not even yet accounting for the additional data to store the database references for all of this either, keep in mind.
Those numbers are small. They don't include videos, and they vastly underestimate the amount of users interacting with any of our smaller instances. Every time a reply containing an image or video is posted to Threads, if smaller instances want to keep a copy for their own users to reply to or interact with, they have to store that data.
Server owners will be buried under the server costs -- costs which Meta can easily subsidize with Instagram and Facebook revenue, not unlike Walmart intentionally under-pricing everything in a new branch in a small town right up until every local store ceases to exist, at which point they jack up the prices and put another new store somewhere else, repeating the process.
Good points. The musings of Lemmy/kbin/other users will be lost in the mass of karen posts, soccer moms, extremist views, god knows what else.
It's pretty obvious that those who came here from Reddit or wherevee are looking for a place that is not dictated to by commercial interests, and if threads attaches onto these communities, I guess we'll leave for somewhere else.
We have a moral and ethical obligation as humans to exclude any participation from Facebook or Meta. Facebook knew their algorithm increased suicide rates among it's users, but actively suppressed this information because they also knew their algorithm made them more money. The more depressed and addicted Facebook users became, the more money Facebook made. And when they went before Congress to answer for this, Zuckerberg just did nothing, took no accountability, and nothing changed.
This isn't about boycotting and trying to do some kind of ethical capitalism, it's about not letting Hitler submit changes to your git repo regardless of what those changes technically are. They could be the most technically brilliant changes ever made to an open source project, but they would still be Hitler's changes.
While I don't support preemptive defederation and was willing to give them a chance, it should be clear by now that Facebook is uninterested in being good actors, and allowing a nearly unmoderated large instance with hate groups and also collects this much info from their users is dangerous regardless of who runs it.
I support defed due to malicious behavior, although I still think Threads is going to fail regardless of what any of us does.
Facebook sucks, there's nothing but dumb boomers on there now. And the amount of data they harvest from their users is insane. If they think you're a bot, they'll demand to see your government issued ID or your SSN to "verify" you and totally not to get deeper insight into who you are and how to sell shit to you.
Everyone here talking about XMPP and EEE.
It's guaranteed that they'll use their instance to datamine and further build profiles on people in other federated instances as well.
I don't trust them at all with their handling of data besides their ability to track people who aren't even on their platforms. Also it's almost impossible to reach out to them unless you buy their shitty VR headset, as you will find out if someone ever fraudulently takes your account to buy ads with your money and gets your FB account banned.
Fuck the Zuck.
Google didn't kill XMPP, it died on its own. XMPP still lacks encryption by default and proper file transfers (there are 3 implementations of file transfers and all of them suck). The problem is that XMPP never had a normal protocol, and as a result, clients were forced to implement the features themselves through extensions which were not supported by all clients and servers. So it's hard to blame Google for starting to do their own implementation of features. Matrix did everything better, but for some reason people don't use it. They don't, because there's Telegram, Discord and so on.
Don't defend XMPP. It's obsolete. If you want a federation, use Matrix.
Hello, I run a 5 user XMPP server for me and my friends Here is the deal in 2023 OMEMO encryption, which is forward secret, is enabled by default in most clients, and alerts you when it is broken But you are right that there are major flaws right now the need to be addressed
#1 is notifications on Apple are broken by Apple, the only solution is getting non-apple friends. That sucks !
That is the big big BIG problem
The rest are mostly quality of life issues
audio/video calls and conference calls mostly does not work
posted links do not display OpenGraph summary, it just stays a cryptic URL
OMEMO breaks serverside history, OpenGPG end-to-end encryption does not really work
There are no message reactions "User X liked this comment"
There are no message replies (User X replies to a specific comment )"
There are no message deletion/message retraction
Presence, as in the first P in XMPP is not more advanced than 1998 ICQ, online, away, dnd, invisible, offline, custom message , There is no real presence and multi-client largely breaks presence. Only good aspect of presence are message delivered / message read notification are they are spotty when using multiple clients
These are really the bare minimum that XMPP needs to just to back as a peer in the "regular people actually using instant messaging" game No doubt, the apparent one way street of Google doing embrace, extend extinguish of the XMPP community didn't help much. But it's doubtful that it is google that caused XMPP to lag behind.
And on the last note, most of the XMPP client are still under active development with regular monthly progress. Especially Conversation and Gajim are doing excellent work and I still keep my friend group on XMPP because I have hope that all the points above will get fixed at some point.
I was there and I was using XMPP. Interacting with google chat slowly became the purpose of xmpp. Everyone who was using xmpp eventually found themselves talking mostly to google users. Then Google killed the link and every xmpp instance instantly became useless.
We can (and are) building a community without facebook. Or we can link to facebook and find that they quickly through sheer mass become the center of the lemmy community. And then comes the knife.
I feel like defederating is a good short term solution, but the events described with XMPP could have happened in any number of ways.
The real focus should be on how to make ActivityPub robust enough to prevent the events from the article from happening again.
I only joined Lemmy because of its open source, non-manipulative, not-for-profit nature. If Meta joins it will be a good reason for me to quit. Hell, even Reddit would be better than a Fediverse with Meta IMO.
Hopefully .world decides to defederate Threads and Meta, but if they refuse you can migrate to another instance that does defederate them. The solution here should be to refuse Meta, not give up on Lemmy and the Fediverse.
They won't be able to bribe every instance without making it known to the world but another mass migration even if within the same federation would discourage a lot of new users from joining/staying though.
This makes me so fucking angry that these fuckers wouldn't even let us have a small corner of the internet to ourselves.
I think I fall on the side of preemptive defederation, not just because of data harvesting etc but also because the incoming communities will be huge and dwarf anything already here - look at what has happened here already as communities try to merge and establish. Everything dominant will become meta along with whatever mods and rules etc they already have in place. Scary.
Meta can Zuck it.
Agreed. More instances should defederate from anything related to Meta. Im here because a corporate entity utterly destroyed something I liked. I don't want that again.
There's nothing good coming out of Facebook or any for-profit public enterprise. F* Zuck, Musk & all billionaire scums.
I am sure this might have been mentioned by someone else but my concern - someone that is financially motivated and saavy could work on becoming one of the larger instances in hopes Meta will buy them out. Similar to a startup, make a good product (community) and hope to get bought out for big bucks.
This means we need to trust instance owners and they in turn, as they get larger, need to be over transparent of their motivations, goals, and actions
Quesion: I don't know if the tech limits this, but if an instance owner flips to the dark side- could past posts and content be opened up for Meta mandated data scraping? Or would any code change like that not be retroactive? Aka if we select an instance that turns bad could we be feeding the machine in the future without knowing it today?
There is no way to know if a Lemmy instance is running the official FOSS software or a modified closed source version. But to answer your question, anyone can scrape the public data even now. Your private data like DMs would need a backdoor or a zero day exploit to scrape.
Most of our posts are public already - that is part of how ActivityPub works. But internal data, any logs that might be kept, and a centralized repository of this data would be more accessible to Meta/FB if an instance were to be bought out.
However, this is true of essentially any entity capable of being bought, you can't really avoid it without going full p2p and even then...
Meta isn't going to "buy anyone out" if they're federated. They'll just turn your instance into a portal into threads for everyone using your instance, then force your users to join threads by killing the link. Meta bought insta and whatsapp because they were completely unfederated alternatives to facebook that were gaining traction that facebook could not kill.
Smothering your competitor is always preferable to buying them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE
There must never be a single dominant instance. If one instance becomes too large, they end up having too much influential power. And with all that power, big corporations or power tripping admins will use that power to coerce other instances to do certain things. "Don't want to follow our unilaterally-imposed rule? We're gonna cut off your entire instance and your users will lose access to our communities."
If Meta doesn't get defederated, they will become the dominant instance. They already have the most amount of users since I'm assuming you can use your Facebook/Instagram account, they'll have the most amount of user activity, and of course the most amount of power.
I’m still getting used to this platform, so this might be a stupid question. Are we able to see their content/can they see ours?
If we defederate, they can technically pull our content because it's public, but it's difficult, and their users won't be able to interact with it.
We would not be able to see theirs unless you manually went to their site.
Right now, they still haven't turned federation on, so we can't do that. If we do federate, we will be able to (easily) see and interact with their content, and they will be able to (easily) see and interact with our content. If we defederate, we can technically see each other's content by visiting their site (or them visiting ours), but we wouldn't be able to usefully interact with them and vice-versa without making an account on their site (or vice-versa) ^.^
Why wouldn't they be able to interact with it, at least within their own ecosystem? The way I understand, if I defederate with them on my instance they can still see my content but I can't see theirs. There's nothing stopping Metta from taking that public data anyways and allow only their users to interact with it in their own sealed space. With how many users they have, it's possible it wouldn't even be noticed by the average threads user
Well, theoretically we could do the same. Host shadow-Threads content. That's essentially what's going on with reddit repost-bots, after all. But if you look at those they usually have no comments and for Facebook in particular, I would argue that enabling their ability to spread their content to the Fediverse is dangerous even if we don't interact with it.
And the same is true for Threads - they could actually do that kind of re-posting, in theory, but then it's pretty much just them reposting a link to some post on the Fediverse with their own silo. We wouldn't see any of them at that point. I'm arguing for defederating on the basis that it protects us from Meta/Facebook, not on the basis that it would stop Threads users from seeing some parts of Fediverse content (essentially posted as links) ^.^.
But theyve got the numbers to support their own echo chambers. I'm not saying what meta is doing isn't a threat, but isn't it better to be in the same room as their users to have a conversation with them than have them exist in their own echo chamber thinking the fediverse is only what meta wants them to think it is?
I don't think the average threads user would even notice if it's a repost. They'd see the content, and have the interaction. From what I know, if I defederate with threads, a user subed to one of my communities would still have the meta server pull in content from mine. I'm fairly certain their engineers can make it look more organic and allow seamless interaction between the 30 million threads users.
It still seems to me because of this, we would be doing ourselves more harm by defederating. At least right now. Even in light of embrace, extend, extinguish.
In a room where Facebook/Meta controls the entire algorithm, who gets to see what, and any astroturfing efforts they make? And where the fraction of people who will ever see your post is so tiny as to be insignificant? No. Facebook have over a decade of brazen, malicious psychological manipulation experience - as well as lots of money - that they have used to attempt to agglomerate more and more control over the way people communicate and engage in horrific behaviour (like the stuff listed in my Original Post).
Trying to play the game on their field is a losing proposition in every case, when it's with a company that has much more than a decade of information warfare and manipulation capabilities and hundreds of times more users (plus probably 100s of thousands of times the financial resources). The Fediverse is far too small to compete with that at the moment.
If you really need to sell the idea of the Fediverse to Threads users, you can still make a Threads account, or spin up an instance for yourself to do that. Exposing the Fediverse as a whole to the metastatic organism known as Facebook/Meta is a losing proposition.
defed meta!
What's the point of joining the fediverse when other antisocial network are abundantly available? They are well marketed in front of the public. I see nothing good coming out of integrating fediverse when you know they don't really care about you.
Exactly, while mainstreaming the fediverse might bring initial attention to it, in the long run it will just destroy the values that the fediverse stands for. Especially when it's a predatorial company like Meta
All i have to say afterr reading that is: HOLLY SHIT!!! I didnt even know a fucking city tryed to go opensource, let alone Munich, and fucking MicrosoftOffice of all the fucking things prevented them from doing so. Fuck. We absofuckinglutely must keep motherfucking Meta as far fucking away from our comunities. The fucking problem is gonna be when those meta fuckers start fucking offering money to the admins, keeping a server is fucking expensive and they are gona have to get money from somewhere. Fuck, whe really need a solution for this otherwise we are fucked.
OP I completely agree with all of your points. ESPECIALLY (BIG BOLD LETTERS) we need to create better "front-ends" Anecdotally, I put a post a on mastodon that didn't get responses (the vibe there seems a bit different on this issue, because I usually do get responses) Since the reddit migration, I've gone into a homelab frenzy. I have reached out to others. I have been in awe at the developers who worked on the overloading of servers and the jump on the creation of third party apps. The pre-existing community that explained a complicated process to many people.
We saw how many uses came over from reddit and found it too complicated. We had those discussions too. How there were solutions like simplifying what the fediverse is, what instances are, etc. etc. This took time for people who already cared about what was happening on reddit_ which is a small minority of internet uses.
And that would have been okay, right? We had our space, we could have had time to build.
I have been going on about this issue ad nauseum with my partner. I have a computer science background and work in cyber tech so this came to me a bit faster, but still a learning curve. I showed her videos, articles, walked her through the apps. But this is someone who is a social media user.
I had a fever for a few days (very irritated as it disrupted my home lab fever, pardon that pun) when my partner is comes running in thrilled*___* that she gets to be involved with my project and finally understands it because she saw Threads and the word "fediverse"
This is someone who is yes intelligent, who lives with someone who is way more involved with this issue that the average internet "normie", and still, because of the front end UI, the simplification of it. The exact quote was "this is a space on the fediverse for me"
A lot of fighting happened, lol anyways if you have made it this far, especially to OP:
We need to organize. I do not think anything can get done with siloed passionate informed users like ourselves. How do we organize? This will take crowd funding. Resources. Project roadmaps. Mission statements. Unfortunately, some of the ick of how we work together in a corp to roll to market.
We need to move fast
We need things pretty
How do we get this done?
Communities without leadership, or pulverized leadership, suffer a lot when it comes to progress. When one person orders something and everyone works on it, things tend to happen quickly. When everyone can complain and question decisions, things slow down
I wish there was a silver bullet for this problem. The best my monkey brain can think of is electing people to take these decisions, which leads to politicking problems.
This is exactly what I want to see and what I've been fighting for recently. This is complicated and brand new to all of us but if people realize they're a part of something bigger than them. They would want to be part of that too!
That's not how this works. The overwhelming majority of Threads users just saw whatever thing FB put on the instagram accounts and clicked it. They have probably never heard of the fediverse and even if they like the idea they'll just go "oh, I'm already on it, no need to bother".
We can get exposure without letting a company specialised in manipulation and astroturfing straight through the door.
To be honest, federation is presently too complicated for a majority of users. Until that is solved, distributed social networks aren't going to really take off.
If you understand tech, you will get it. But lets face it, most people don't know wtf they are doing lol
This should be the Fediverse tagline
I think one of the ways we could combat as well as defederating them from instances is provide such a good user experience to consume content on the fediverse that threads - or whatever else - becomes just a shittier, ad-ridden version of what we use.
Look at Reddit for example, if they didn't have the power to remove our access to APIs, third party apps would still provide the best experience. Can any of the features Reddit provides that third party apps don't justify the number of ads thrown in your face? Nope.
Same here, if we focus on improving the experience of a Lemmy or kbin user and ignore whatever meta is doing, nothing is stopping us from becoming just the better way of consuming all fediverse content. Then if threads were to drop federation, we would still have the upper hand.
The only thing that might hurt us in the end is if we start giving in and host communities on their instance. But if we don't, and keep our ground, we can have the best of both worlds. See their content without their ads, and keep control of our own content, without their rules.
I certainly am not against improving the UI, but at the current scale of the Fediverse we don't have anywhere near the resources to compete directly with Facebook/Meta. It's too early. The primary defense must be defederating.
Making our UI advancements in a way that a corporation cannot - for instance, exploiting their need for advertising to make sure we have better experiences - is a good strategy in the long term. But it is a secondary strategy to immediate defederation ^.^, because Facebook is only at the start of the enshittification process for Threads and hence they won't be pumping it full of ads and their engineers can focus on having a "better" experience in the short term until they destroy us.
You can't have the best of both worlds, unfortunately. By exposing Fedi users to Meta/Facebook content, we expose ourselves to a company that has a long and continuing history of social manipulation and is able to pressure us to host communities on Threads - even if it's only done by sheer mass of users.
By letting them in, we've already almost lost. Whether by direct EEE, or by simple user agglomeration onto primarily-Threads communities, or by a deliberate campaign by Meta/Facebook, they will eventually try and gain direct control of the network.
My opinion is that the only useful response to an organisation that is openly known for direct deception and manipulation and attempting to assimilate existing networks (like e.g. what happened to Instagram and Whatsapp and XMPP, and probably others I'm not specifically aware of) is outright rejection.
Well said, I'm definitely going to switch to an instance that defederates meta if mine does not. I don't want us to get drowned in corporate nonsense. I am so happy to see Lemmy succeed and hope this wont affect us like it did XMPP
If the attention this post is getting isn't a strong indicator of what our communities want, and the direction that the fediverse and all instance admins should follow, then nothing will be.
Especially now, because of the extra obstacles of joinin the fediverse, users are on average more aware of the implications of such a thing. We should listen our people.
I'm really out of touch here. So, Meta is joining the fediverse?
Meta created Threads, a microblogging platform (basically a Twitter clone) that you use with your Instagram account. They've stated that in the future, Threads will be able to federate with other ActivityPub platforms.
Not if we work together and most of us defederate from them.
Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
My only think is it would be trivial for meta to do this with any other instance and not tell anyone it was theirs. There is nothing stopping meta from spinning up an instance and not claiming it as there while the rest of the fediverse continues to federate with them. Would still give them open access to everything and their instance wouldn't even need to be super populated to get most the information they could want.
This is a legit concern and a very good reason to not federate with Meta, but I never want to see the phrase "social graph slurping" again.
There were leaks of threads federating with mastodon
Stupid idea: Could a server like lemmy.world pretend to have a very popular post by faking interaction with it to get it to show up to everyone using threads? It seems like it would be doable to run a server that allows for vote and comment manipulation, allowing for anyone to get anything to show up on threads. This could be bad for meta, as any actual user posts would be overshadowed by fake posts/spam from federated instances. I have no idea about how lemmy works, but anyone could make a server that would be running modificated code, right?
Your intuition is correct. Someone could certainly modify their backend to create faulty data with the intention of sharing it across platforms. There's no real standard for preventing that right now as far as I know.
Coincidentally, I just read an article about the impact large players can have on a financial market when they create a new ETF. The article went into some detail about the various ways the market can be manipulated, and also the unintentional influences the mere presence of a new, huge, monolithic owner of a large share of a commodity can have. It's rarely a positive event for the smaller players.
There are similarities between financial markets and social media spaces, and social media should take heed from the lessons offered by the much older financial space. Unlike financial markets, the ActivityPub sphere has controls small players can exercise to counter movements like Threads. How effective they are remains to be seen, but I think you're absolutely right: the existing AP players would be better served by locking out Meta, than to allow the wolf into the playground.
I'm having trouble conceptualizing the attack strategies here. I also lack much understanding of what (exactly, precisely, at the technical level) federation is so I don't understand how defederation is a defense against those attacks.
Would someone help me break this down conceptually? Are there any analogies? Is this like closing the gate of a castle? Is it like quarantining infected people? Like blocking a phone number? Not loaning someone money?
Please don't just say "yes to all those analogies". I'm casting about for understanding here.
How can I better understand OP's argument here? (I have a background in tech and understand passwords, certificates, signatures, etc if that helps). Is email a federated thing? What's federation precisely?
Layman here, from what I gather it sounds like federation is like one of those cups connected by lines. Federation is the equivalent of having a line connected to the web of cups and strings. Then suddenly a big cup provider comes into the mix, which at first seems great since there are more people communicating through cups. However, due to their bigger resources they greatly outpace the rest of the web, offering fancier cups and stronger wire, resulting in people moving to their cups. Then one day they cut the connections to all other cups but theirs; while the original web is still intact, the remaining users are essentially cut off from most of the cups they were connected for.
By defederating instances are basically (but probably not as effectively as Meta would) cutting that string before they get the chance to infiltrate the web.
Idk though once again I know very little
For "knowing very little", you fucking nailed that analogy. That's exactly what Instagram is trying to pull here.
So the attack is to migrate people across that connection into their space, then sever the connection, resulting in a loss of people here.
That doesn't worry me too much. I personally am here because I've had bad experiences with being silenced in big centrally-controlled places. And for me, if the only people who remain here are the ones who really despise those big special cups, I'm fine with that because I like the idea of a community of other outcasts.
But thank you for explaining the specific danger: loss of content creators into the fancier places.
I'm still curious about how those strings are implemented at the information security level.
Someone has explained the basic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy below, but I also want to comment on my own "Embrace, Extend, Consume" idea, as well as the other issues that come with Facebook.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn't complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others. They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn't comply >.<
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn't necessarily destroy the communities but essentially borgifies them and renders people unable to leave.
The other component specific to facebook is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.).
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users, and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the strings (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of both.
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in specific, these are just illustrative:
@threads.<whatever their url>So it's like opening a wormhole to the borg homeworld. Not worth the effects of contact.
I think I miss something, the ActivityPub protocol is not owned or maintained by Mastodon devs. Isn't this just standard communication like an extension of HTTP? something like GraphQL (that created by Facebook itself). Quick google mentioned that ActivityPub is maintained by W3C.
So Meta can (and I think currently uses) ActivityPub, and all of your points already been possible without needing to federates with any other instances. For example, they already can say that ActivityPub doesn't work on some cases, and push W3C to do some changes on the standard
I'm imagining Zuckerbot finding your post and his eye screen going red and it has your name and photo with a big flashing red PRIMARY TARGET
AI Summary:
This text is talking about why it is important to stop being part of the Facebook/Threads/Meta social media platforms. It says that these companies have done bad things like help with genocides and manipulate people's opinions. They have also invaded people's privacy and tried to control the internet. The text says that we shouldn't believe anything these companies say because they are not trustworthy. It also says that by leaving these platforms, we are protecting ourselves and our network. It is like our immune system fighting against harmful things. The text suggests that we should focus on making our own social media platforms better instead of relying on these big companies.
Wasn't there a post showing how bad defederation is as a defence when other instances were doing so? Why don't we just have a bot that removes comments from META and messages the user, that in order to comment they must use another instance? This way we can use METAs own tactics against them. Drive users to our instances, regulate communities automatically and still increase overall content generated rather than styfile.
Defederation isn't a bad defence, though.
Chances are with that strategy, facebook will just block those sort of bot things once they realise it's happening and it will just look like people here aren't replying to the Threads user.
The only way to win is to not play their game ^.^
I would not sing up for Meta run instance, but it is because I don't really trust it will last. In a big corporate scheme of things, it is an experiment and can be killed anytime because it is really nobodys passion project to maintain. So I really doubt a Meta run instance will be better than a multitude of community run instances in the long run.
But yeah, I'd sway for defederate. Meta is a corporation and it's intentions are what they are. It's not "fair" but also its not like Meta is comparable to another community in the fediverse.
Cannot agree harder
^.^
fuck zuck, hoping kbin also defederates
I’m all for defederation. It might seem alright in the beginning but slowly the problems would arise to a point that being on Facebook’s Threads would be easier. At that point they won because the rest of Fediverse would be deserted and thus killed. Just remember what happened with XMPP and Google Talk. It’s so incredibly sad that the Internet feels like a battlefield again. We free users who would like to enjoy a nice service without any enshittification and without being commodified vs another faceless corporation that would like to make money out of us all.
Hold on, is Lemmy part of meta? Cause if it is I'm fuckin out of here as well. I do not support meta fb, or any other company like them.
No.
In layman's terms, Meta is using the technology Lemmy is based on. How they use it is the concern.
The hope is Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon are not ruined by Meta's ulterior motives.
If this is true most likely won't be long. Meta and Amazon are just cancers that spread once they have a fraction of a foot in.
@not_that_guy05 No. Lemmy is not owned by any corporation or any one person. All that federation or defederation means is whether an instance connects to another.
Oh ok. I really hope they don't allow it then. Meta is a cancer that grows once inside a body(platform).
One thing that people are not talking about is that it would be fairly trivial to create communities in the fediverse on open servers and then just sync a bunch of your corporate drivel from what ever company like meta into those communities. Its already happening. Reddit was the first one to do this. There are communities where every single link goes to Reddit here on Lemmy
But at least we could defederate those instances once we realize what they are doing, yes?
Its not as easy as that. If you have open signup on your instance you would have a hard time stopping a user signing up, creating a community, and then filling it with synced data from another location. There is no instance to defederate. They are in all open instances.
I see your point. But the owner of the server/instance can still kick the user and their community out right?
Simply the fact that they harbor known harassers like LibsOfTikTok would be enough to de-federate pretty much any other fediverse instance. Why would their moderation have a free pass just because they're big?
Not related to the topic, but if I can give one piece of feedback, it would be to stop using
^.^and>.<.And if I can give one piece of feedback for your reply, it would be to stop telling people how to behave. One of the things that really bothered me about Reddit was this expectation that everyone needs to write the exact same way. We can do without that here. It doesn't hurt anyone to use emoticons, emojis, and anything else that might make a post more fun, so what's the problem?
He is merely helping the guy be more readable and impactful. Especially since it wasn't a "fun" post. Posts educating people are in fact best served by removing the clutter. Chill.
Okay yeah that's fair actually.
Nope! :)
Thank you for this. While new to the fediverse, the activites of the large players ring true. I'll be watching.
They'll start setting standards, other instances will comply, and meta will control (or destroy) the fediverse.
Wait... FB/Meta is going to create instances? Somehow I missed this news and I'll be trying to look this up after by post.
Anyway, yes they should not be allowed. They have a vested interest to destroy the Fediverse. How would they do this? Well, Microsoft has pioneered this strategy known as Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish. It's much harder to apply these things to opensource, but we've all seen how much Microsoft has been Embracing Linux in the past 6-7 years.
I'll probably keep a presence on a non-threads-federated instance and one on a threads-federated instance, just to compare and to talk to grandma. I doubt I'll spend much time scrolling through whatever it is Instagram users write about but you never know.
I'd like to go against the grain and be against defederating. I have so many friends who couldnt give less of a fuck about this stuff and because I care I am forced to isolate myself from all their mainstream services. I would love for once to be able to see the same posts they see and share stuff with them and maybe show them that its not so bad over here.
What about when the communities get so intertwined, then Meta starts trying to impose their rules on those outside communities? If lemmy.world chooses to federate with Threads and they do the same, it's only a matter of time before their rules become our rules or lemmy.world gets the boot. If they don't adopt them, it's safe to assume the lemmy.world userbase would leave for Threads after having been a part of it for some time.
OP stated Meta/Threads users would still be able to see posts, but they wouldn't be able to interact. If M/T were an unbiased player, they could easily allow Lemmy users to interact on Threads with their Lemmy accounts (not giving any of your personal info over to Meta), but we all know that won't happen.
I can't see a positive reason to invite the weasel into the chicken coop
.... you can still spin up your own instance if you really want to expose yourself to facebook's social manipulation? Or you could make an account on there.
But you can also show people it's fine over here by posting links, talking about it, sharing lemmy memes, etc.
Letting them in on any large scale is a losing proposition, as explained in my Original Post ^.^
I think that this is the best take on this topic
That basically starts us playing the losing game of "more users at amy cost". We will not win and it is comically naive to think so.
Read my post.
Thanks so much for your article.
Can someone explain what it means to defederste from meta/threads? I didn't think those were federated so I'm a bit confused
"People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it."
Who gets to appoint the gatekeepers?
I actually support making it easier for people to join the Fediverse. For instance, by having each instance compile lists of other instances which self-determine the kinds of topics they want and pointing new users to instances that are less overloaded, and by making the signup process easier, and improving UI. Letting Facebook consume us and destroy us via EEE is not that.
The "gatekeepers" are the people willing to set up instances ^.^.
The gatekeepers are the instance mods/admins. The model is known to have problems....unfortunately, it's the best option we have IMO
we need to force defederation from thread's
I know tonfuck of reasons why we shouldn't have them here. Are there any advantages?