((I’m not an expert, I’ve been reading up on things as much as I can. If there’s an error, I’ll happily correct it!))
TLDR:
- Nearly all of us distrust Meta and have the same broader goals
- We need to pick the best move to go against powerful companies like Meta
- Defederation may not be the right move, and it might even help Meta move forward (and more easily perform EEE)
- There are other options that we can spend our energy on
- It doesn’t matter for Lemmy (yet), this is more a conversation for Mastodon, Firefish and Kbin
We’ve been getting a LOT of posts on this, but the misconceptions make it harder for us to decide what to do. If we’re going to try and protect the Fediverse against large, well funded companies like Meta, figuring out the right action is important. We need to actually look at the options, consider the realistic outcomes, and plan around that.
I’m willing to bet around 95% of users on Lemmy and Mastodon CHOSE to be here because we understand the threat Meta/Facebook poses, and we want to do something about it. That’s not in question here.
So in that sense, please be kind to the other user you are replying to. The vast majority of us share the same goal here. When we disagree, we disagree on the best path forward and not the goal. Wanting to stay federated DOES NOT mean the user wants to help Meta or thinks that Meta is here for our benefit.
Misconception: Defederation will hinder Meta’s EEE
It might, but not necessarily, and it might even help the EEE. Here’s a link to some history of EEE, what it means, and some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish. I’d recommend at least skimming it because it’s interesting (and because this isn’t the only fight)
Assuming Meta is doing an EEE move, they’re in the embrace stage. That’s not about us embracing them, it’s about them embracing the protocol, which they can do whether we stay federated or not.
Defederation can tell newcomers that the defederated instance is an island, and they’re better off joining the place where they can talk to their friends and see the content they want. We saw this early during the Reddit exodus with Beehaw, where many users hopped instances away from Beehaw.
Meta can more easily embrace if more people actively use their platform. They can more easily extend if we’re not around to explain why extending is a poisonous action. Being federated can allow us to encourage users to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one (ex. Mastodon, Firefish, etc.)
Misconception: Defederation is the only move
Defederation is the first option that comes to mind. It sounds simple, it is loud and newsworthy, and it can be done with the click of a mouse. But if it is a bad action, then what are the good actions?
- Don’t let them have a monopoly over the use of ActivityPub. Grow the other platforms: The extend stage only works when the platform gets a near monopoly over use of the standard. That brings up the first action. If there are enough users, services and resources on things like Mastodon/Lemmy, then Meta (or any other company) can’t just extend the spec without causing their users to ditch Threads to stay connected to the content they want to see.
- Reach out to organizations in your area or line of work. Help them join Mastodon or other relevant Fediverse platforms. I’m sure the for-profit companies put money into this process, so brainstorm and reach out
- Add your Fediverse accounts to the bio of your other accounts, and share posts from the Fediverse elsewhere
As long as there is a healthy community away from Meta (ex. what we have right now), then they can’t extend & extinguish.
- Protect the Standards and share why it is important
- Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy (interoperability requirements etc.), and educate other users about the risks.
(I didn’t want to say more here because I’m not an expert, I’m happy to edit more points in)
Misconception: We should still defederate because of Privacy Risks
Not necessarily (and likely not at all?)
Meta is notorious for gathering data and then abusing that data, so this is an issue to consider. However, the way that activitypub works, the outgoing data is publicly available. Defederating with Meta doesn’t prevent that, and federating doesn’t give them any more data than they could get otherwise.
Misconception: Lemmy instances need to decide
This is a big point: It doesn’t really matter for Lemmy right now, one way or another.
It’s more of an issue when data starts coming IN to Lemmy from Mastodon and Meta’s Threads (or out from Lemmy to Threads). See below
Edit to add: For now it might even be good to defederate from Lemmy as a symbolic gesture. My instance is defederated, and I don’t plan on trying to change that. Ultimately it doesn’t change much
Legitimate risks from Federation with Meta, and more effective ways to counter them
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Algorithmic Amplification: Meta’s history of using algorithms that prioritize engagement can amplify harmful or divisive content. These algorithms are not public like it is with Mastodon and other FOSS platforms.
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Misinformation and Content Moderation: All Fediverse platforms will have to work on content moderation and misinformation. Platforms like Meta, focussed on profit and advertising, will likely moderate in a way that protects their income. Those moderation decisions will be federated around.
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Commercialization and User Exploitation: Meta’s for-profit nature means it’s incentivized to maximize user engagement, at the expense of our well-being.
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Additional Data on how the free fediverse interacts with their platform (this one is harder to make a counter for)
Counters:
- Promote user control over their feeds, and develop USEFUL but safe and open algorithms for the feeds
- Flag content and users from risky platforms, with a little warning icon and explanation (ex. ‘Content is from a for-profit platform, and it may ___’)
- Implement features so that users can opt in or opt out from seeing content from risky platforms. In particular on explore/discover/public feeds, so it doesn’t affect content the user is following.
- Develop strict community guidelines that can get Meta (and other companies) sent into the ‘blocked by default’ bins mentioned above. (edit: There’s a good point here that if Meta’a Threads is full of hatred or poor moderation, then blocking them is the right move)
Final point: Evaluate things critically. Don’t even just take my word for it. I doubt Meta or other groups care enough about Lemmy yet to spread disinformation here, and every post I’ve seen promoting defederation feels like a good faith attempt for something they believe in. But it’s still worth thinking about what we’re supporting.
Sometimes what feels like a good move might not help, and could even make things worse.
I think we should encourage politicians, governments and public figures to either self host or use non-threads instances. That way, Threads cannot easily shut off AP support or screw around too badly or their own content will decline.
Right now, social.bbc is a thing. Hopefully when threads launches activitypub, they’d notice that having a presence on both threads and their own instance is pointless, and prefer their own instance
This entire argument is bullshit. Meta needs to be an island from our perspective. Let them do their thing over there, we’ll do our thing over here. Their goal is to lure (probably former reddit or twitter) users to Threads and then cut off the greater Fediverse as a whole once their user base is established and much larger than ours. And they want to use our numbers to boost their for profit platform to make it appear more successful.
Separation from these kinds of corporate entities is exactly what the Fediverse is about. We can talk about “open” all we like but there is already a short list of bad actors we don’t allow here: Nazis and fascists, pedos and kiddie diddlers, etc. We can add Meta to that list as well.
We don’t want them interacting with us at all. Get out the hammer and ban them. Entirely.
I’ll add an edit to say this: I say that defederation is not extreme enough. They need to be blocked. Instances need to implement ToS and licensing that prohibits them from hoovering up and regurgitating our content. We need to start outright blocking Meta at the network level. Whatever the hell it takes. Line in the sand. No means no.
No Meta. Ever.
Think of this: In the past, we have never had any choice other than to roll over and accept whatever bullshit the major social media companies push on us. If you want to communicate, if you want to use any platform, if you want to be in, you had to deal with them and their system. Because they were big and you were little, and what are you going to do about it? You have no choice but to roll over.
Well, we don’t have to roll over anymore. We have this one – and believe me, only this one – opportunity to unequivocally tell them NO. We are not your product. You have no value to us. You aren’t a monopoly anymore. We do not need your corporate influence, we do not need your corporate bullshit. We are free of you, and we don’t need you.
Another edit: Oh, look. What do I find right at the top of my feed first thing this morning? Why, it’s yet another example of Meta being evil. And you still want them to have influence in the Fediverse?
The ToS part sounds good, and I was looking into something like that a while back.
As for the rest, could you share which parts of the argument is unfounded, or why it’s “entirely BS”?
Not to be hostile, but this is the kind of comment I’m talking about above.
- I absolutely despise Meta too, I’m trying to figure out the best way to limit their effects on the Fediverse and keep growing the good thing we have. As much as I want to do the big symbolic action, it feels performative and ineffective at best.
- It’s not really former Reddit users they’re after but rather Twitter. Lemmy is still separated and it doesn’t matter for us either way (for now)
The notion that anyone should interact with Meta at all is enough. You lost me right after that part. Anything after that is just meaningless apologetic noise for the sake of appearing nuanced. That’s the bullshit.
No means no. Never means never. No Meta. The extremism, the “big symbolic action,” it’s all warranted. Block them. Block them forever.
P.s. You’re allowed to use cuss words on the internet. Tell your friends!
The notion that anyone should interact with Meta at all is enough. You lost me right after that part.
Maybe keep reading the rest because there IS nuance to this. I hate Facebook and think that sticking our heads in the sand will help them win. If those other platforms that died to EEE just blocked and ignored the incoming threat, they’d have died even faster.
P.s. You’re allowed to use cuss words on the internet. Tell your friends!
I didn’t write out ‘bullshit’ because I’m on mobile now and it was a fewer letters
No, there isn’t. This is the clearest case of black vs. white you’re going to experience all week. Blocking Meta is not “sticking our heads in the sand.” There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms. But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. So answer me this, what do we actually stand to gain?
Bots? Misinformation? Having our content redisplayed on Threads for profit? Ads? Corporate accounts spamming us incessantly? Corporate moderators, corporate instances, corporate communities where all the messaging is controlled? Having our content used to train AI’s? This is all the crap we escaped when moving here, rather than using the existing social media network products. What, is Mark Zuckerberg going to cut instance operators a check to help with their overhead expenses for all the content he’ll steal? Don’t make me laugh. You can see posts that were made on Threads? If anyone actually wanted that, they’d just use Threads to begin with.
The argument is that Meta integration will allow the Fediverse to become “mainstream.” Well, Lemmy and Mastadon are already doing just fine without Meta. They will continue to do just as fine without them in the future, barring any catastrophic reddit style administrative fuckups on any major instance(s). Meanwhile, there is enormous risk in allowing Meta to have their way with us, our platform, and our content. None of the other hot air matters one bit no matter how it’s phrased. It will be much healthier as a whole for Fediverse platforms to grow organically without corporate (and frankly, evil) influence. And if that means they remain smaller communities now or even forever that’s okay.
The openness of the “open web” stops precisely before bad actors are allowed to co-opt it for evil purposes. Companies like Meta always have as their end goal a closed walled garden for their users remain trapped in to have profit extracted from them. Well, let them have it – on their own, without us. We need to set the precedent that those of us who give enough of a shit to use Fediverse platforms in the first place cannot be bought or sold. They’ll talk about “openness” now but I guarantee you the design is for that to be a one way street.
No means no.
Never means never.
No Meta means no Meta.
Nothing else needs to be said on the subject.
There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms
Source?
But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them.
Again, source? "If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. " is a bit weird, when the reason is so painfully obvious and relates to EU regulation and wanting to pre-empt any issues by showing interoperability and an open protocol. If you know of profit-based use cases beyond that, do share the sources please.
What are the benefits?
Of providing sources? Generally that whatever argument you’re making cannot be trivially discarded because it is based on unproven assumptions and hypothesis. That doesn’t mean the argument is making a wrong point, rather that the argument is invalid as an argument.
That is to say, defederation might be the right conclusion, but as OP hints at, not for the reasons commonly stated around Lemmy or Mastodon because those make assumptions about what Meta is doing, why they are doing it, and more importantly, how being defederated affects them.
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A small note: in 0.19 Lemmy has introduced the ability to defederate from instances on per-user base.
Now, when lemmy.world updates, you’ll be able to block Threads from your Settings.
Many instances already updated.
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I think a lot of your post is spot on but one thing I do disagree with you on:
Meta doesn’t do anything “for fun” it does everything for profit. If their exec board thought that promoting well-being and good mental health was more profitable, meta would do that instead of the other shit you talk about. A minor nitpick of your post but I think it’s always worth bearing in mind that companies like meta are singularly motivated by greed.
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just want to clarify something:
However, the way that activitypub works, the outgoing data is publicly available. Defederating with Meta doesn’t prevent that,
there is a technical solution to this in the form of authorized fetch: https://hub.sunny.garden/2023/06/28/what-does-authorized_fetch-actually-do/
mastodon implements it, pleroma/akkoma probably implements it, pixelfed implements it, firefish and iceshrimp implement it (sharkey has a PR implementing it opened just today), gotosocial not only implements it but enforces it, with no ability to turn it off
notably, none of the threadiverse software implement it, and no software other than the aforementioned gotosocial enable it by default.
Yeah but the point was probably more that the data is intentionally public. It shouldn’t matter whether Meta gets it through federation or opening the web page and reading it. It’s public information, just publicized automatically.
you can disable the webpage and unauthorized API if you so choose. mastodon and pleroma/akkoma provide these settings. gotosocial hides all posts with an unlisted visibility from public pages.
authorized fetch only provides protection for activitypub, it’s just a single component of a layered stack of protection you can enable depending on your exact threat model.
the privacy threat model of Lemmy is significantly different from a microblog, which is the current target of threads.
(also have none of you heard of consent?)
cc @FaceDeer@kbin.social this reply also applies to your reply
I want to throw this into the mix, but something that kept getting ignored early on during the reddit departure was the implications of defederation on how that effects networked systems.
It’s part of the math of social graphs, but bad faith instances and teolling, severely impacted Lemmy’s initial ability to catch on. By defederaring you massively reduced the total size of the network interactions that take place ( even if it’s very important to do so ).
This has the potential to allow meta controlled instances to rapidly out populate non meta controlled instances. From there it’s only a matter of time before they end up with a seat on the activity hub team. Then we’re back where we started.
Won’t the amount of users using meta effectively be a ddos attack on the smaller instances though?
Also, why is meta freaking out so hard about instances defederating if it isn’t an issue for them? I haven’t seen this much gaslighting since 2015 & 2019 days.
Won’t the amount of users using meta effectively be a ddos attack on the smaller instances though?
I hadn’t really considered that. My primary concern was more around ‘outvoicing’ the non-threads based instances.
Basically, even a tiny fraction of their users being engaged would almost instantaneously be an extinction level event for what would become the “old” fediverse. De-federation early with problematic instances pretty much killed the growth the lemmy could have seen, even though I do agree it was important and necessary. Right now if I go to Top of 1 Hour on Lemmy.world, I only need to go 3-4 pages deep to have seen all the posts from all the federated instances that have been submitted in the past hour. Maybe 100-300 tops. Within that, the total number of comments in this corner of the fediverse is equally low, and I think we’re likely in some of the most active regions of the fediverse (although we’re kind-of flying blind).
If we assume even 1/10th or 1/100th the rate of engagement comparing a current lemmy user (which I think is not very charitable) to a future threads user, and if we assume we currently have around 70,000 active users (which again, not very charitable), they’ll only need 700,000 - 7,000,000 subscriptions to become “most” of the content on the fediverse. This is where the network interactions aspects becomes critical, because they instantly become superconnectedness in graph theory explains much of the emergent phenomena we see around things like post popularity and virality.
Basically, Meta can come in and swamp us with content through pure numbers, and if federated, there is nothing we can do to stop them. Likewise, if not federated, we’re relegated to a backwater position in the fediverse; it will become almost impossible for any non-threads based content to find its way to the top. This is fundamental to the math behind how these kinds of networks function. There is nothing you can do to stop it.
I’m not trying to be a pessimist. Like you I’m trying to be a realist about the implications of federating with meta and the considerations and consequences that come along with it. I’m more concerned around the implications when I look at it through a theoretical lens.
I don’t know what the answer is, but de-federation seems preferable to extinction.
