1年前

Yet Another Post About Threads/Defederating and 'wait and see'

Sorry. I know it's getting a bit annoying with all these posts obsessing over this subject but still..

Just to make my position absolutely clear from the start of this - I think the entire fediverse should defed from anything under any form of commercial control, which clearly includes Threads (when/if it enables ActivityPub).

I see a lot of instance admins are adopting a 'wait and see' approach to defederating from Threads. With respect, I'd like to ask them - what are you waiting to see? Evidence that Meta is an immoral organisation? Surely you can't be that naive?

Or is it evidence that Threads will attempt dodgy things with the ActivityPub codebase? That they will attempt Embrace-Extend-Extinguish? If that's so, I again ask you with respect, surely you can't be that naive? When Meta start introducing little, disarmingly helpful, tweaks to ActivityPub, will your 'wait and see' stance continue? And when Meta role out their own version of the protocol, urging Mastodon, Lemmy etc to adopt it - its free! Its better! - will you still continue to 'wait and see'?

The privacy thing I don't feel is (currently) much of an issue. Meta could easily scrape all our data tomorrow if they felt like it. What I fear is privacy after they've introduced all their 'improvements' to ActivityPub and released their own version. Maybe we'll end up with a two-state fediverse where one state is happy to federate with Meta and the other is not.

The fediverse was built on the principles of open standards and open source, by people, not commercial orgs. It is slow growing, slow to react and in some areas slow to change. These are, in my opinion, amongst its greatest strengths. There is no endless money pot provided by investors, admins are volunteers running instances on VPS's, software creators are people doing it as a hobby. This is people power, not money power. There's no profit motive. The second such a massive profit driven org gets a foothold - and is allowed to - that changes. It's simply inevitable.

Is the fediverse perfect? Of course not. But I believe the problems it faces can be overcome with patience and persistent forward thinking.

Then there is the fact that some instances (and hopefully increasingly more) are seen as safe areas for gay people, trans people, non-white people, women. Opening the door to Meta means opening the door to a whole shit storm of awful people whom we currently don't have the tools to protect communities from. Is 'wait and see' really a good idea given the fact this almost certainly will happen? I mean 'wait and see' what exactly? And yes, I know we have our home-grown awful people here and guess what? We struggle to contain them already! Threads got more signups in the first 12 hours of its existence than the entire current population of the whole fediverse. You want to 'wait and see' how many of those people are cunts? Because the answer is 'a lot'.

The fact is - the fediverse doesn't need Threads, or any corporate involvement. Yes, its already smaller than Threads, it's smaller than Twitter, it's smaller than Reddit. But, at the risk of leaving myself open to obvious jokes, why does size matter? There's already, in my opinion, enough people throughout the fediverse, esp on Mastodon and Lemmy, to have created places where their is good, lively, vibrant discourse. I'd much rather have quality over quantity. There's nothing actually wrong with slower, more manageable growth. We've all got sucked into believing the bigger something is the better it must be and that unchecked growth is healthy. If we're growing uh, 'house plants' then that might be the case, but we're not. Because the fediverse is not (currently) motivated by profit, we don't need unchecked growth. I've seen so many reddit refugees recently talking about how much better the 'feel' is on Lemmy, how much less pressure and angst and nastiness there is. I can't think of a single scenario in which instantly adding double the amount of people, some of whom are pretty terrible, without decent tools to manage them, all operating under the control of a company known to embrace/extend/extinguish and who's sole motivation is profit at all costs can be beneficial to the fediverse.

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Imagine how few people would be using email if all the regional ISP’s decided that they were going to preventatively block their users from being able to send / receive email from larger providers like Yahoo or Gmail.
- Imagine starting a new communication service that would replace email and not preemptively blocking known bad actors like email companies that hosted scams. How many people are going to want to use that?
  
  But imagine if 95% of everyone you know used the evil crappy corporate email, and not the super-utiopian one.
  Because both are "free", the reality is that almost everyone will use the email that actually lets them email other people.
  
  On lemmy, I'm not here for everyone I know. If I wanted to be in touch with them I'd probably still have a Facebook account.
  
  On Lemmy, individual people don't really matter that much. You're following topics & communities.
  You can technically do the same on Mastodon, but the weird stigma people just can't shake against #hashtags hinders it somewhat. Like it or not, Mastodon/Twitter/Threads-type content -- much like email -- is very person-focused.
- You're right, we'd certainly have a lot less spam to deal with.
  
  Spam largely does not originate from these email providers, instead the open nature of email allows for spammers to easily spin up their own SMPT servers and go wild. Have you used email before?
  
  Sure, I get that. I was thinking of the largely corporate spam that do use large providers protocols to send their email.
  It's SMTP by the way, not SMPT.
  
  I can block (unsubscribe) from corporate spam, just like I can block certain communities. But I don’t want to completely remove myself from ever receiving another email from a gmail/yahoo account all together.
  
  If they respect your unsubscribe request, for sure.
  The fact is though, you could block all emails originating from, say, GMail. You could even pre-emptively do it. Those kind of tools don't really exist across the entirety of the Fediverse on a per-user basis - yet.
  But what's the best way to prevent corporate spam? Don't use their services. Don't allow them to access your details.
  
  I also want to defed from Threads, but I appreciate the mature and non-knee jerk reaction of these instance owners to stand by the “innocent until proven guilty” stance within the fediverse. I’m sure the leashes will be very short and defed will occur at the first sight of EEE. I think it’s appropriate to watch and listen before making decisions.
  I’m choosing to remain optimistic that they will recognize it and shut it down immediately. Even tho I too despise corporations and wish them nothing but failure. I avoid Facebook and instagram like the plague because it just breeds negativity and hatred. I don’t think for even a moment that Meta is trying to turn a leaf.
  
  I see it more as a balance of probabilities thing. Given Meta do EEE things, given they openly want all your private data, given the social media they've created so far is considered harmful to lots of people and given all they really want is to turn a profit, are they more likely to try and EEE ActivityPub or leave it alone and co-exist peacefully?
  Maybe the correct stance is for instance admins to turn the wait and see approach on its head. Given the above, defederate now then wait and see if Threads behaves itself. If it does, then federate.
  
  The balance of probabilities certainly makes sense and applies here. I don’t expect threads to last long.
  I see both sides to it. I agree a biohazard spill should be contained immediately instead of letting it spread. On the other hand, we don’t want to come off as immediately hostile and want to have solid reasons for why we do what we do.
  I’m enjoying the healthy conversation around it. I do have a hard time supporting the “wait and see” side and most things OP said are valid. Since threads isn’t immediately federating, we have some time before we start to see what the impact will be or if instance admins will change their minds.
  
  I'm glad you think most things OP said are valid, as that's me ;)
  It is important to have healthy conversation about it - I don't think there's any reason to assume instance admins are acting in bad faith, even if I do think a wait and see approach is wrong and I certainly don't think they should be being called out by name (or instance name) or harassed in any way - they're providing a free of charge service after all. I donate to the person who admins the instance I'm on and I'd urge everyone to do the same.
  But to extend your biohazard analogy - rather than containing a spill, wouldn't it be better to prevent the spill from being able to happen in the first place?
  
  Hahahah phew!! I use Memmy and I can reply from my inbox and it didn’t have the OP badge shown there.
  Agreed that no hostility should be shown to admins who run and operate their instances without expectations of payment. Harassment in general is completely unproductive in any scenario. I just graduated professional school and am awaiting state licensing before I can work (hopefully the next couple weeks), after which I will gladly donate!
  The biohazard in my mind was threads and it’s already been spilled. Instances defederating sooner rather than later us the containment. So destroy meta and we’ve destroyed the biohazard, hooray!
- If we could, in retrospective do that, maybe we wouldn't be in a state where if you want to send an email and be sure it gets delivered, you need to use one of 2/3 providers or a mail delivery service. The email example is perfect to show how big companies did kill the openness of the protocol, without any need to make it closed.
- Email is about a single source propogating information to many, which is analogous to Twitter/Mastodon/Threads
  Lemmy is not like email. It is about communities of shared interests. The relationship is many to many
  If I created a many to many community based platform, I would not measure success by how many speakers on another type of platform were able to interoperate
- Emails are not the same as a social platform.
  One is sending letters to each other, the other is opening up a discussion to the user base.
  
  Man it’s been ages since I heard the Eternal September argument. History truly is circular.

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