Second largest Lemmy instance preemptively un-friends Facebook

lemmy.ml Lemmy.ml has now blocked threads.net / Meta - Lemmy

It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users will not be allowed to proceed. We strongly encourage other instance...

Lemmy.ml has now blocked Threads.net

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852 comments

It's not about Zuckerberg, it's about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it's impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it's only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn't inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
- If I wanted to see facebook shit I would use facebook, I stopped using whatsapp when it was bought by facebook, I don't want to see their content overwhelming the fediverse, that's why I'm here instead of there.
  
  I don't agree with this notion of "facebook content" vs "fediverse" content or anything like that. Content is just content, it's links, it's media, whatever. It's not "facebook shit" any more than reddit shit or lemmy shit. Content is a by-product of the users, so who/what the userbase is is extremely important - and that is why how it is marketed, who it appeals to and so forth, and the relative scale. thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform, and so forth, is the real issue.
  You acknowledge that you have moved on from platforms when facebook/meta have got involved, and you're welcome to take your decisions on this, but it runs into problems in a federated environment where the goal is to increase interoperability by default.
  Don't get me wrong, I think our goals are the same, to have an environment where people can talk and share links that is relatively exclusive / for like-minded people. I just don't think the angle of facebook/not facebook is the right one (tbh I would go further - I would not integrate, but not because of the provenance/company, but because of the users' expectations coming over from Threads)
  
  Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever
  Content is not all the same, there's quality content and there's shitposting.
  "facebook content" is mostly - to me - shitposting, astroturfing, botting, propaganda, etc. as reddit has become lately, while lemmy content is mostly quality discussions.
  I don't want shitposting burying quality content here, that's what will happen if we don't do anything about it.
  Not to mention corporate control, look what happened to reddit, and look at how many scandals there are about faceboook (now meta) as a company, why do you think they want to join the fediverse, they don't give a crap about quality, their only interest is in monetizing stuff, embrace - extend - extinguish, I don't want ANY of that happening to lemmy.
  
  I agree with all of this.
  
  Let's see if you feel that way when your feed is filled with hate and ads.
  
  I think you didn't understand my comment. " thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform" specifically.
- Fun thoughts and all but that isn't the reason why they're blocking it. It's because Facebook is bad. Corporation, big, embrace, expand, extinguish, evil. Plenty of explanations around about why these blocks happened. However you're also right. If it were very small like a 15k people instance and it didn't carry corporations inside maybe they'd consider not blocking.
  
  same coin, different side.
- I don't think threads actually has 30 million users. They have some paid shills, probably a lot of their own bots, some people who legit joined to see what it was about, and a bunch of Instagram users who had accounts created automatically. I'm not positive about the last point but if you can't delete threads without deleting Instagram then I'm sure they're going to leverage their Instagram userbase as much as possible here.
  
  Up to 70 million as of a day ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/meta-s-threads-has-70-million-signups-surprising-zuckerberg
  I'm not concerned how many of these are real users - all the shills, the bots, are even worse than real users as they will just be spewing their propaganda around as much as possible.
  Adding ONE million users overnight to the fediverse would be disruptive enough, 10x the biggest day from the influx from reddit. We're looking at orders of magnitude more than that.
  
  I didn't even know I was one of those 30 million users until you and others mentioned that people with Instagram accounts automatically have one.
- Or make an account on an instance which chooses to federate with threads 😂

852 comments