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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you'll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.
Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.
Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.
The idea is that at first threads.net will seem "normal", like all the other fediverses
Then they start adding features that either break against other servers, or straight up aren't supported, making threads.net seem more enticing just because all the neat features aren't on the other sites.
Think how Internet Explorer killed Netscape with all the Page Load errors caused by ActiveX, yet everyone wanted ActiveX sites.
Once they've walked through the path of least resistance and grabbed the bulk of the traffic, they just defederate from everyone.
Yep - best option is to defederate them well before they gain traction & start creating problem by not contributing back to the protocol in a way that benefits everyone.
I think after the community got burned by Microsoft & then google we’re finally learning.
Couldn’t any instance or app do this already? Like #peertube does videos in a way that isn’t necessarily fully federated with #mastodon. We get partial functionality everywhere and some places will have some extra things. If it is popular enough, then add it to the standard and let everyone who wants it add the functionality.
People are concerned about Facebook/Meta trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ActivityPub - if I've understood correctly.
You're acting like there's only two situations: The entire Fediverse defederates with them, or the entire Fediverse federates with them. That's not the case.
I, personally, do not want to interact with anyone using Threads, because Meta has a proven history of poor moderation and of manipulating the narrative for political gain on Facebook and I see no reason to think they won't do the same here. I am not the only one who holds this opinion. Those of us who feel this way can use instances that defederate with them, and have our way.
If you want to interact with them, you can maintain an account on an instance that does federate with them. You do not need to have a Threads account, nor does anyone else.
meta is not here to promote open networks. They will do more harm than good. If you want to learn more about how google achieved it with the XMPP you can read the story here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html written by one of the core developers.
This is an interesting article, but I don't think it's fair to blame Google for the death of XMPP. Google were the largest consumers of XMPP at one point, sure, but Google was in no way (and never has been) the market leader in communications applications. Google talk came and went, Hangouts came and went and so on. The argument of "When google pulled the plug, XMPP users had to use something else to keep in touch with friends" is equally true of Google messenger users as well. I don't know anyone that ever exclusively used a Google messenger app, now or then.
Google isn't entirely innocent here, they definitely didn't treat the protocol with the respect it deserved, but the development of XMPP was/is fraught with its own problems. I remember setting up an XMPP network for use in a small office as an internal chat tool, it was a nightmare of an experience. Different XMPP Clients had different levels of compatibility with different XMPP servers, many of the clients were just poor overall and the user-experience left a lot to be desired. All we wanted was a simple instant messenger for work, in the days before Slack and Teams. We ended up using OpenFire because it was developed in tandem with Spark, it was basic but worked well for our needs but any time I tried to adopt a different messenger, half the features didn't work.
I don't want to interact with anyone on Threads. It is new and it is Facebook.
Was about to say just that. I'll love to reject people that only follows big corpos.
It isn't the people. It's just if I already decided not to use Facebook or twitter. Why would I get back into bed with the devil on an experimental product?
Meta joining the fediverse is like Raytheon joining anti-war protests. They are not there for sincere participation.
No worries once threads becomes big enough they will defederate from fediverse /s That sure will be hostile to fediverse users.
I doubt they will defederate from the rest of the fediverse. If they reach a dominant position in the fediverse, they can hide behind the fediverse being open to competition to avoid anti trust actions
When Thread finally enable federation, just unleash the Lemmy meme community there. We'll see how fast they roll back the federation feature on their own after their feeds are getting flooded with beans.
THIS IS THE WAY...
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
I think that's essentially true for any instance, though. You don't federate with instances you don't want to.
Strongly disagree here, better to cast them down now while the chance is there. No mercy or quarter provided to Meta considering their track record.
If anyone is foolish enough to go there, let them, but do not drag us towards them.
Some instances will federate and some will block them. It doesn't have to be all one or the other.
Lots of naivety here. Big corps only act in their own interest. They view the world in terms of opportunities and threats. Eating Twitter's lunch is an opportunity. The Fediverse is too small to be worth much today, but someday it might grow up and challenge the status quo. That makes it a threat.
Threads is new - unless you meet someone who for some reason only has a threads account, just talk to them elsewhere.
Otherwise, why is it the Fediverse user who has to get the threads account? Tell your people to make an account elsewhere. If you are conscientiously avoiding threads, you're probably the only one in the relationship with a principle boundary to cross in this situation.
I'm all for federating with them. But give the user the ability to defederate their posts/comments based off their settings. I would rather my information not be supplied to any company owned by Facebook, that's just me.
The information they could get is already public. That’s how Activity Pub works.
that's exactly what I was thinking
While I think I agree we shouldn 't just defederate them. This is for a user to block them. And if you tell users how they can block them, it will maybe take a bit of pressure away from admins to do it.
During the first wave of Twitter refugees , there was a lot of explaining about ignoring and blocking users. Which can never hurt IMHO. Certainly because it can decrease the load on the volunteers that run an instance
I agree with you.
Instances can defederate from meta at any point they choose, should it become necessary in the future. Until then, it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the "normies" are, as well as giving more visibility to non-meta instances and giving said normies a road to the less data-hungry parts of the network.
Reading material: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
honestly, i think only half-accepting them would be beneficial. it gives meta users a taste of the fediverse but locks them out of a whole bunch of cool stuff that they could have, if they just make an account on one of the instances that they already know because it's in the half that does federate. we just need to ensure we never repeat xmpp's mistake: meta users should never be a majority.
i'll have to discuss this with our admin team, but my initial plan is to defederate meta if usage by them hits 25%. if a critical mass of the fediverse does that, in the worst case we'll split off from them before taking damage, and in the best case we'll actively siphon away their user base. (and if any other tech giant enters the fray, we'll just have to include them in the 25% quota as well.)
update: we discussed the topic and went for an immediate defederation
This is something I can't understand. There's obviously no profit motive to push fediverse to everyone, and most content is dogshit.
Can you explain why you find either to be preferable?
Plus, the more entwined threads is with the rest of the fediverse, the harder it'll be for them to break off. Users will be following Mastodon accounts and posting in Lemmy communities and if Meta does something to break that, they're the ones that'll get the backlash, not the fediverse. We'll just continue along as normal.
Yes exactly