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[Discussion] What is our stance on federation with Threads?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Personally, I'm still somewhat on the fence, but leaning towards "do nothing".
Pro-defederation: Threads users will greatly reduce the quality of discussion (weak argument imho) and Meta's overall goal is likely an attempted takeover of the fediverse (more compelling).
Anti-defederation: Meta can't take over anything without user support, which means there's not really much reason to freak out. Any data they could get by being federated they could get anyway, so no issues there. If they do start actively damaging the fediverse, we can still defederate later. Finally, users being exposed to instances that don't run on Zuck's narcissism and greed might convince some people to jump ship.
Overall, I currently don't see a pathway to damage from Meta's participation in the fediverse, and I don't think we should be too hasty on this.
I agree with Barbarian's take. Zuck can start an instance and scrape everything on the Fediverse right now. Sure, we could watch for and block any instance coming from Meta. Then Zuck could pay a third party to do it for him.
It's the old adage, what you post on the internet stays on the internet.
So really, that shouldn't be a reason to defederate, since it won't solve the issue of Zuck getting his grubby mitts on our posts and comments.
And besides, he still has the problem of linking that info to a real person.
How does Meta do a "takeover of the fediverse"? The whole design of the fediverse prevents it from being controlled by any single entity.
People are mainly concerned about 'Embrace Extend Extinguish' which is a method large companies have used to disrupt open source communities in the past. Here's the wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
You can see microsoft was big on using it to try to sabotage browser competition and later chat app competition. These days google is accused of doing the same browser competition sabotage.
So for social media this might look like: adding features to posts that only work on Threads, or possibly wrapping fediverse content in their ads / own comment section, and supressing the fediverse comment section / original creators.
I don't know that this will happen and if it does it will take awhile - the initial 'embrace' step is meant to be non-threatening for the communities being absorbed.
Interesting article. I understand the concept there, but I still don't see how defederation solves anything.
Threads is free to develop proprietary features in their app, whether they participate in the fediverse or not.
Defederation just prevents the two platforms from communicating. In my view, this hurts Lemmy's growth far more than it could ever hurt a massive app like Threads. They are way too big to notice or care.