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Are we defederating from Threads?
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I'm new to federation as a concept, but isn't the only thing you accomplish from defederating Threads is that this community will miss the opportunity to grow its userbase? Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that anyone can be anywhere and access anything from anywhere else?
If so, the only people who come out behind are the people signing up on Threads specifically, who are granting every piece of personal data to Meta. But people signed up on other instances are protected.
As far as I understand, the existing fediverse is not at risk of anything, correct?
I guess people are worried about Meta pulling some moves out of Embrace, Expand, Extinguish playbook.
But isn't the core design of the fediverse resistant, if not immune, to those sorts of tactics? Should Threads be allowed in the federation, the only thing they can do is defederate, right? That means we may get used to the increased userbase and become disappointed when a large chunk of their traffic goes dark, but the remaining fediverse will have grown and benefited until then.
I think the idea is that Threads can pull in a bunch of users to the federated ecosystem using other instance's content, implement features exclusive to Threads to entice people to move from whatever instance they're on now to Threads, and then defederate Threads from everything else afterwards and remove ActivityPub compatibility to trap people on Threads and then enshittify the platform for more money.
But... if we defederate now, won't we just be trying to create a walled garden of a tiny userbase?
If the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. In the end, the non-corporate federation will grow immensely, I imagine. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
The problem is that corporations can scale their own propaganda campaigns way better than we can. It's best to cut the problem off at the source than it is to try and compete with them at their own game.
Hmm, perhaps. Although if we never federate in the first place, I guess we'll never know. It seems like if we tested the waters, what we could gain could far outweigh what we could lose, and we could always cut the line if we see it clearly isn't working out.
Counterpoint: For users with a Meta presence still*, what about using their existing centralized platforms to proselytize Fediverse alternatives instead?
We gain those who are interested - we avoid those who would prefer to play in Meta's garden. Seems ok to me. Edit: hell, my recollection is this was how a decent chunk of folks got to Facebook in the first place. I was a kid fucking around on Nexopia before that, then groups starting moving to Facebook.
*I do - I hate Meta, but the one use case I haven't been able to address are event listings on Facebook. All the other event calendars for local shows I've found lacking in one way or another - the really good ones back in the day got killed by Facebook.
It feels counter productive, but the reality is that the less huge corporations are involved in a federation, the safer it is.
The problem with federation with Meta is that it encourages Meta to develop and contribute to the infrastructure. Which sounds great, but the record is poor on that front.
Once a company with huge money starts working on your infrastructure, they're going to make changes, changes that maybe the community doesn't agree with, but since all the money is being funneled through one of two companies, they make the decision.
Then the company decides that they don't want to keep supporting something that doesn't make them any money. Since Meta would theoretically bring millions of users from their platforms, they could decide to suddenly cut out all non-Meta instances. Now we're the odd ones out, your friends are wondering why they can't reach you anymore, you're suddenly offline.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. It happened with XAMPP, it happened with Java, CSS, most browsers are Chrome based, 'exchange' email servers, etc.
The best thing to maintain software freedom is to never open the door to huge companies.
It is at risk. Meta/Facebook have done this before. They embrace, extend and then extinguish. Eventually they say the only way to be safe as to use their products, force people to switch over as all the content is generated on threads and there goes the fediverse. It's better to get ahead of them and just not allow them to link up. Facebook is a hostile actor in this space and needs to be treated as such.
I'm of a similar mind.
My time online is limited, and if Threads ends up having the most interesting stuff then that's where I'll spend my limited time. If I can follow users from Threads over at mstdn.ca then I would very likely stick with the Fediverse to get the best of both worlds. I'm mostly a content consumer so I go where the content is.
Also, I don't really think Threads and Lemmy are a good match, if Threads is more a Twitter substitute then I think Mastadon is a better match (and all micro-blog class Fediverse platforms). So I suspect not many people will use Lemmy to follow anyone/thing from Threads, defederating them won't have much practical effect.