[Facebook federation megathread] Downvote this post if you want lemm.ee to federate with Threads. (Updated)

Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it's not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it's likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.

Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.
Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

By the way, we're not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
We don't really know what to defederate from - it's completely possible that "threads.net" will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.

Update:

By now, it's clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it's still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won't please everybody, but I really believe it's the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

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401 comments

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The thing about waiting to take action until they break the rules is that by then it's too late.
Google played nice with XMPP up until they established a dependence - then they went for the jugular. Do we have any reason to believe Meta will behave any differently?
When you identify cancer, you don't wait for it to Metastasize - you cut that bitch out as early as possible.
- AKA Embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy
  
  Can you tell me how did Google extend XMPP?
- I see this article posted over and over again, but it doesn't help when many of the posters themselves don't understand it (I don't mean it's your case specifically, of course, just generalizing)
  The article starts saying that Google won by EEE with a completely personal hypothesis that has absolutely no factual base (the protocol would be more used today if Google didn't use it, which is unprovable and overly optimistic)
  Then proceeds talking about the office suite describing it as a similar EEE case (which was not since it was MS own thing since the beginning) and by completely ignoring the most glaring and important fact that lead to the current results (which is it being the default suite on any pc)
  Then it finishes by saying that the fediverse shouldn't be popular and have many people, it should instead focus on the freedom of it (which can be agreeable)
  The real message of all that article is just that yeah, the average user likes to use whatever they find served to them directly (in Gmail, on their pc, on their phone) and doesn't care at all where it come from or how it works. Convenience beats privacy for most people, out of ignorance.
  There is absolutely no need for any EEE evil plan for someone who already controls the majority of users, that's just a shortcut to avoid developing something from scratch.
  There are real issues with federating threads (moderation, ads, their number controlling the All/Hot pages etc).
  It's not useful, in my opinion, to keep using EEE as a scarecrow without even understand that at the moment Meta has absolutely nothing to take advantage of since the number of people that use mastodon only without any meta product on their phone is so small to be nothing to them.
  What meta can gain from mastodon is that they don't have to start coding from scratch, saving time and money and coming out now at the perfect moment of Twitter collapse. And maybe a bit of a positive image because they "work on open source".
  That's the whole value they probably see on this atm, not way less than a million people that probably have other meta products on their phones anyway.
  I think we should focus on the real problems, this EEE thing is basically becoming propaganda at this point and makes almost no sense in our specific case (lemmy vs threads)
  I also agree with a defederating-first cautios approach, btw, for the reasons explained before. But we should talk, inform and discuss about the real problems
  
  In the Google example, they integrated with XMPP, weaponized compatibility to slow development of XMPP features, and then pulled the plug. Unsure how to really address your post without just pointing back to the article.
  Hostile takeover of a decentralized network is a pretty specific issue, so if you don't like the Google vs XMPP thing, then no worries, but where else can we pull insight on the matter of Meta vs the fediverse? Broaden the scope to megacorporation vs a small competitor and the megas consistently snuff out -any- competition before it has the chance to become -actual- competition. The fediverse is a mosquito next to Meta; that doesn't mean they won't swat.
  WhatsApp and Instagram weren't real threats to Meta; that didn't stop Meta from removing the competition from buying them out. In Zuck's own words: "it is better to buy than compete." ...well, you can't buy the fediverse, so that leaves them with tactics like EEE to avoid competing.
  Our options are to either trust Meta to play nice, or assume hostile intentions and take proactive measures. Zuck's own words weigh in there too: "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
  
  As I said, the article itself contains no proof that results would have been any different in the long term for XMPP. It's just a baseless theory. We can read it again and again but the results will always be the same, I'm not sure why you're pointing back to it when I analyzed every point it tries to make already.
  I am not saying EEE doesn't exist, I'm just saying that nothing in that article contributes to our discussion, and that the EEE scenario doesn't really even fit our situation.
  WhatsApp and Instagram were direct competitors to Facebook and Facebook messenger respectively. While not as big as Facebook, Instagram was pretty popular and WhatsApp was already a standard of communication in multiple countries (they payed 19 billions for it) So yeah, definitely they thought it was better to buy than compete. But are we really thinking the fediverse is even comparable to Instagram or WhatsApp? They wouldn't buy it even if they could, it's literally less than crumbles to them, both in value and user base.
  I love the fediverse and I'm excited about it but let's be serious, it's crazy to even think meta would see it as a competitor. Remember, 19 billions dollars. That's what meta thought it was better to pay to remove a competitor almost 10 years ago. Can you value the current fediverse even a 1% of that? Let's not kid ourselves, we're in no shape or form any kind of threat or competition to Meta.
  And, also, we're a different kind of service altogether. They would do something about reddit first if they were interested in this kind of service.
  What they care about is filling the Twitter void, and this was the quickest/cheapest/most convenient way to do it. It can cause problems for mastodon, probably for kbin, but lemmy's situation is different.
  As I said before, there are legitimate causes of worry (moderations, ads, sheer size of their user base, pushing agendas etc) Let's talk about those, which are important and can lead us to develop new ideas and ways to keep the fediverse healthy.
  This EEE scarecrow makes no sense in our situation. We're different services even if we can coincidentally communicate with to each other.
  Also people keep saying to defederate when there is nothing to deferate from at the moment, threads is not federating anything. We don't even know which domain we are supposed to defederate. Whats the point of talking technicalities without understanding them?
  The conversation about what to do in case that happens is useful and healthy, but the sheer amount of disinformation and misunderstanding about the concepts is frankly crazy.
  We don't want to become like meta platforms that are full of disinformation, but most people keep spreading disinformation and mindless slogans here too instead of talking about the real issues.
  That Zuck quote is the literal example of that. I have yet to see even one single person here saying that they trust Zuck. But people keep quoting it ad nauseam as if it has any meaning in our context. We are discussing about what are the risks and if they outweght the eventual benefits, nobody is saying that they trust the lizard.
  I prefer someone saying "fuck meta, i don't want any connection to them out of ethics" compared to the 200000th person posting the XMPP article as an out of context Bible.
  If you read all of my previous post, you know I'm pro defederation, there is no point in trying to convince me since we already agree.
  I'm just strongly against disinformation, fake issues and red herrings

401 comments