Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
From what I have read, I think it’s all of the above.
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a space is wanted free from corps, ads, data perversion
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people are fearful that 30 million people joining threads has automatically made it the largest instance. Once it integrates with ActivityPub and can federate, it will dominate the space and produce the majority of the content. People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content and content production with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
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many believe meta will not act in good faith and is doing this to appease European courts and laws
Because of all of this people likely believe keeping threads quarantined right off the bat is the best solution to mitigate the amount of damage they can do to what’s already been established.
Edit: I am adding to this post as I just stumbled across a post from the host of the lemm.ee instance (which I am a big fan of). He has also listed some great cons of Facebook stepping into the fediverse:
-there is nothing stopping facebook from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores which would ensure they end up on the front page of “all” for federated servers
-threads already has more users than all of Lemmy’s instances… therefore, they can completely control what the front page looks like by dictating what their users see and vote on
-moderation does not seem like a priority for threads which would increase workload for smaller instances
-REVENUE FOCUSEDI paraphrased a lot of this but as this is getting some traction I wanted to provide additional visibility to the cons of federating with the Facebook.
Pretty much this, and I’d like to emphasize the part where Threads userbase outnumber the Fediverse 30 to 1 after only one day.
Lemmy is evolving into a very nice place so far because of the type of users it’s attracted, and the fear is that the atmosphere would shift on a dime when the voices here get drowned out by hundreds of millions of commenters from Instagram and Facebook.
A few years ago, Reddit strategically banned two terrible subreddits during one of their shitstorms (the whole AMA firing scandal), just as Voat was getting popular. It turned from a decent community that was starting to grow and challenge Reddit’s presence, to a right-wing extremist cesspool overnight.
You also see this sort of thing happen to subreddits all the time. Some of them go from a good community, and either slowly or quickly, shifts into a much more terrible version of itself. Russian bots/ops have transformed subs to push their own agenda.
The community matters, and how that community evolves matters a great deal. Communities can live or die from massive migrations like this.
I started a community to track the H5N1 global outbreak but I do NOT want to moderate it long term; if it picks up, the anti-vax/Plandemic people are going to start showing up (they already do sometimes in the subreddit for it). I feel like opening the doors to Threads is going to hasten that.
In addition to what you said, I think additional aspects to consider are the open standards and protocols Facebook/Meta have already abandoned once it became convenient to do so:
- XMPP access for Messenger/Chat
- RSS feeds for any newsfeed source. They even continued to use the RSS badge (which is unofficial as far as I’m aware) for their follow icon even after they removed RSS feeds.
The bare minimum price of Meta’s integration into the Fediverse should be nothing less than the return of those standards, and honestly even that may not be enough.
Meta taking their ball and going home some time a ways down the road is much less an issue than them dominating content by being there in the first place. They will have their own moderation and content rules that will shape the content that flows out from them, which will shape each community that interacts with it. Considering the very mercenary approach they have to that, it means that content will be far more monetized and monetizable. Which means both sanitization and pandering, neither of which benefits freedom of thought and discussion.
Considering the huge influx of people coming to places like Lemmy or Kbin to escape that kind of situation (reddit), it may mean the death of the community that has grown so far, before Meta even considers leaving.
Very well said.
Just to play devil’s advocate:
There could be some downsides to defederating it too:-
threads could be a gateway to bring more people into the rest of the fediverse in a user friendly way.
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It might cause the rest of the fediverse outside of threads to be more fragmented if some defedarate it and some don’t.
Absolutely agree. The optimist in me wants to be excited for what this means and how this could impact the future of, well, the Internet.
But then I remember this is Meta we’re taking about. They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta. As someone who doesn’t use meta products, this brings concern.
This is such a blatantly obvious truth that I’m starting to suspect some users here are astroturfing, peddling this bullshit feigned naivety about the rampant unethical practices of FB/Meta. There’s enough history that we don’t need to question it or give Meta a chance.
I’ve been working on building the !vans@lemmy.world community, but I may look into moving it to another instance if lemmy.world doesn’t change their mind on federating with Threads.
Edit: I guess they’ve only stated their plan for Mastodon, which is wait and see.
Yeah, it feels like everyday there’s a new post asking “HEY GUYS SHOULDNT WE ACTUALLY FEDERATE WITH THREADS?”.
Agreed, feels like bots are here pushing for federation with Facebook.
They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta.
They definitely do things selfishly in a way that maximises benefits to meta and ignore any downsides to anyone else, but while thier impact is probably mostly negative, there’s some small positive aspects to some things they do, sometimes…
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People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
I don’t see how that could possibly happen. It’s not like they can buy the Fediverse. Seems to me far more likely that the Fediverse will be gain interest from people wishing to follow/interact with Meta users without being beholden to Meta and if/when Meta decouples from it again the Fediverse will be larger than before. Sure, some may come and go, but others will find interests outside of Meta.
Like everyone is pointing out, they already will be the largest instance. They are not going to gain that much by trying to trying to absorb the rest of people who are likely in the Fediverse from dissatisfaction with Big Tech and wanting to break free from their algorithms and restrictions.
- while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
- users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
- whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
- existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.
Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it’s own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.
Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it’s communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.
Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.
I do still think this is a good thing, but it’s a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren’t starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.
I am extremely skeptical of 2 and 3, because it means people who already decided to drop mainstream social media platforms will go back on their decision, and it suggests that people want instances to be more like Meta, rather than for it to function in a user driven way that provides things that Meta will never be willing to offer.
If people can be tempted off of the Fediverse so easily, the problem is not Meta. Keep in mind that right now people are already choosing not to engage with Facebook. I’m not naive to assume that they won’t have appeal and influence and dirty tricks. but seems to me like such a complete lack of faith in the Fediverse to assume that if Meta merely exists alongside the ecosystem, it’s inevitable that everyone will jump ship. That sounds like what they wanted was a Big Tech-driven platform all along.
I don’t think that’s right.
Comes to mind also that Mastodon has had many years of headstart. How much of a slow growth does it still need?
Luckily, we’ll find out not too long from now. Hope you’re right.
I think you’re underestimating evil.
Nah, I know they are evil, but I also know that there are things people want that they will never provide because they want full control and an advertiser friendly environment.
Like say, where would NSFW artists be more at ease? The Fediverse or an Instagram offshoot? Especially in the wake of Twitter falling apart.
Let’s also not overestimate the scheming of tech tycoons are either. I believe Meta is making a blunder and I don’t think we should stop them.
Considering pornographic content isn’t allowed on threads… not really much choice in that matter.
That’s my point though. There are things that will never find a home under Meta’s umbrella, so it cannot just take it all over.
. It’s not like they can buy the Fediverse.
They don’t need to. They only need to buy the admins. And we know that some admins have annouced they are for sale.
In the Fediverse it’s easier to escape that than it would in any other platform.
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Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use, and eventually removing support for the open standard entirely, forcing other users to enter their walled garden because that’s where all the people are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).
Large numbers of people are saying that Meta is doing this. And then people are quoting each other saying that, linking to the same article over and over, and whipping themselves up into a frenzy demanding that everyone defederate with anyone who’s not defederating with Meta (even though it’s not even possible to federate with Meta yet - Threads still hasn’t implemented ActivityPub).
It’s currently just a big moral panic and I’m awaiting some kind of actual evidence that there’s a real problem here.
I’m wondering what they could possibly even Extend in a way that the Fediverse can’t keep up? The most they can do is to gatekeep people who are only in their ecosystem, but… they already do that. Whoever is only on Facebook and Instagram is only on Facebook and Instagram, and it didn’t stop the Fediverse from existing.
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam.
Nope. It is because the admins of the instance have decided to do so. It might be for the reasons you list, for completely different reasons, or for no reason at all.
The mastodon instance I’m on decided to limit threads instead of banning it (decision made by voting). Threads posts will not show up in our timelines, but if we follow an account on threads we can still see them in home timeline. I think this took care of most of the stuff while still being flexible.
The biggest threat IMO is being exposed to Meta-curated content. They definitely use their algorithms to push narratives in their interest.
Being exposed to their users is being exposed to them by proxy.
Don’t you think we already deal with them a lot afk?
Anything that lands on Meta’s servers is open for Meta’s use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we’re anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that’s helping them.
If by algorithms you mean things like GPT, all data on the fediverse is effectively public and arguably even easier to be collected than the likes of reddit, and is almost definitely going to be used to train models whenever or not the fediverse federates with threads.
There’s still significance in defederating though, specially when it comes to preventing “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”Being publicly viewable doesn’t make it public domain. We each maintain our copyright. Our posts are our personal intellectual property.
We can’t stop them from using them, but that doesn’t make them theirs, and it doesn’t mean we should just hand them over freely.
If they’re going to use them, they can at least make the effort to take them.
2032: did you or a loved one use lemmy? If so you might be entitled to a settlement.
Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Defederating from Meta changes nothing in this regard.
They can take. That doesn’t mean we need be ok with giving. Just because they’re ok with theft IP doesn’t mean we need to be ok with them doing it.
What “IP theft”? By using a service built on ActivityPub you are inherently and deliberately broadcasting your posts to the public. Meta has just as much right to read those posts as I do.
I’d counterpoint by saying that Meta isn’t a person - up its not really a apples-to-apples comparison here. They’re trying to get in here to make money. Pure and simple. I’d wager we aren’t - we’re here hour community.
Our wants and needs are opposed, that’s why I’m not comfortable with letting them commercialise/monopolise whatever they want - especially somewhere that could offer us a more healthy online experience and upset their business model long term.
Isn’t it subject to the same GDPR rules that the whole of fediverse pretends they don’t exist? All it takes is asking facebook what they have on you and unlike some “depersonalized” identifier you can ask for your data based on the activitypub id. It’s actually much easier to go after a big corp with such a request as opposed to some random mastodon or lemmy instance.
meta abide privacy laws
you funny
I would suggest you to sent a GDPR request to facebook (if you’re in a position to be covered by GDPR and have a facebook account) and to your lemmy instance (being lemmy.world).
Facebook will have a bunch more data on you, undoubtedly, but it will take no time for them to process the request.
Lemmy? Good luck with that. First try finding their privacy page and see what data they actually collect on you. Whom they send it to process. Try reaching the admins maybe? Lemmy has no tooling whatsoever to help with that so they will have to get their hands dirty with postgresql, too.
I like fb no more than anyone in this thread but let’s be realistic. They do have a much better story of complying with GDPR specifically than anything in fediverse.
There’s a reason Meta can’t operate Threads in Europe. They don’t abide by the GDPR.
I’m pretty sure the parent company knows how to deal with GDPR between facebook, whatsapp, and instagram. Whatever issues they faced in EU (most probably the EU’s Digital Markets Act) isn’t directly related to GDPR, because if it was for GDPR compliance alone I guarantee they’d be in the appstore by this evening.
Pretty sure
The EDPB found that Meta IE’s [Ireland’s] infringement is very serious since it concerns transfers that are systematic, repetitive and continuous.
That’s a great example! I am actually aware of this case. Mind that the article quotes:
Meta’s sanction is for breaching conditions set out in the pan-EU regulation governing transfers of personal data to so-called third countries (in this case the US) without ensuring adequate protections for people’s information.
And we discuss the GDPR in the context of the data requests retrieval in here. So you’re absolutely correct in that they suck about following it to the letter, but I don’t think this particular one applies to this discussion.
Honestly, I feel like the bigger issue is the immense flood of content that’s going to pour out of Threads. I’m not sure if many of the self-hosted instances will be able to federate with it and continue to function.
This seems like a more viable argument than much of the EEE stuff, in regards to Threads v Mastodon.
But I simply don’t understand the ins-and-outs of how Threads stuff gets federated, and how much toll it would actually put on other servers.
The reality is that it probably won’t accomplish anything at all, particularly for lemmy users whose fediverse is structured considerably differently than mastodon.
You don’t tend to see people from that side of the fediverse over here.
Yep. On one hand, I’d be super-concerned if Reddit decided they were federating with Lemmy. Reddit would create /c’s on their instance for all of their /r’s and completely torpedo all of the existing Lemmy communities.
Mastodon is just users though. You don’t generally see users in your feed unless you actively follow them – or if you decide to drink from the firehose and go look at the All feed. And it’s not like Meta can “take over” Mastodon hashtags like Reddit could take over communities. Hashtags are server agnostic.
And unless you sign up on their server, I honestly don’t see how Meta can pilfer more data than they already can by just scraping public servers.
Just please don’t let Meta diddle the ActivityPub protocols. They need to adapt to the protocols. Nobody should be adapting the protocols to them.
It would still be nice to be able to use the All feed though, and not have it filled with giga-engagement posts from hundreds of millions of Threads users.
The all feed is already just porn every time I open mine (Lemmy.world) - I’ve already more or less written it off as a useless part of the site (through nobodies fault)
You can disable NSFW on your profile for now (although not perfect - it also removes non-porn NSFW).
You can manually block all porn communities that pop up on All, which although tedious will eventually work.
Hopefully better content tagging and filtering, along with the ability to block instances on a user level (such as lemmynsfw.com) will mitigate this in the future.
Still, just because something isn’t working well at this stage due to a lack of features (Lemmy is still at an early stage) doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Saying “fuck it, All doesn’t work well right now so let’s let Meta fill it” seems a bit rash.
I need NSFW enabled for a few communities that use it as spoiler tags unfortunately.
I just don’t see the point in an all feed. I’m perfectly good with using my local feed. That’s why I’m on Lemmy.world. I have little to no interest in most instances and just stick to the one I signed up on. As it is now, if threads federated I’d likely see no change. Id have to go specifically looking for that content.
Even now, All/Federated is just way too overwhelming to be of much use.
Depending on how big your instance is, Local is still viable. And Meta won’t change your Local feed at all.
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO’s actions. The last thing we’re interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
As far as privacy and tracking go, can you unpack that a little more? Isn’t everything you post on the fediverse totally public to begin with- isn’t even already likely that they have spun up servers to test ActivityPub integration with, that have already pulled your fediverse posts? This just seems like a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Yes, my posts can be scraped easily, but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation. All they can do is scrape me saying things like:
“Targeted or general advertising for any product indicates to me that the company paying for the ad makes a low quality product that is over priced to pay for spam marketing. I will always seek out the better priced or better quality alternatives that do not fund advertising like this. I have never click or followed direct marketed advertising, except when it interrupts me in an annoying way. Then I will duplicate the tab, click the ad, go the the landing page, let it load, click a link on the page, and let it sit in the background while I use the old tab to go about my day. I close their tab and automatically wipe all cookies at the end of every browsing session or after leaving the tab open for a few minutes to ensure it costs an order of magnitude more than the ad impression did. I will make sure I cost them a full ad click for pissing me off. I never use my browsing/social media devices to make purchases. They are not even on the same network and VPN.”
Data miners are more than welcome to scrape this post, and show it to all of their advertisers please.
what I voted for and how
I think you’re mistaken, as far as I understand, any server that federates with your home lemmy instance has access to what posts/comments you’ve up/downvoted: https://lemmy.world/comment/704895
This by itself makes it very easy for “malicious” server operators to profile users.
kbin makes it very clear through the
/votes/up/votes/downpages attached to each post/comment - lemmy doesn’t show this information in the UI, but you can get it easily by federating your own server with the instance of the user you want to profile.Agree with the rest.
I would add as most important: psychologically unhealthy behaviour their algorithms are promoting.
It starts normally, but algorithm is rewording unhealthy posts and soon whole network is full of it, it happens since they are just hunting “engagement”, click, time in the app and basically addiction.
The Algorithm only happens in their app, though. They aren’t forcing it on every Mastodon server, and definitely not on anything Lemmy.
And, yes, The Algorithm is truly awful.
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Facebook will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.
Defederation is one-way. An instance you defederated with still has access to your instances posts.
I think it might accomplish more to wait a few days or hours for them to do something that egregiously violates community standards, then defederate en masse—and use the defederation as an event to draw media attention to their practices.
It would be nice if there was some kind of open Internet code of conduct that could be pointed to as a reason for defederating, which journalists could reference in their coverage.
The code reads: moderate your own instance however you like.
You might wanna look at this post.
Yeah that’s a great post.
My response is a bit shorter.
Fuck Meta and the bits they rode in on. 😁
