1y ago

Question: Why are some instances defederating instances which don't sign the fedipact?

Something I don't understand currently about the whole Meta/Threads debacle is why I'm seeing talk about instances which choose to federate with Threads themselves being defederated. I have an account on mastodon.social, one of the instances which has not signed the fedipact, and I've had people from other instances warn me that their instances are going to defederate mastodon.social when Threads arrives.

I have no reason to doubt that, so, assuming that they are, why? I don't believe instances behave as any kind of relay system: anybody who wishes to defederate from Threads can do so and their instances will not pull in Threads content, even if they remain federated to another instance which does.

I'm unsure how boosts work in this scenario, perhaps those instances are concerned that they'll see Threads content when mastodon.social or other Threads-federated instances users boost it, or that their content will be boosted to Threads users? The two degrees of separation would presumably prevent that, so I can see that being a reason to double-defederate, assuming that is how boosts work (is it?).

Other than that, perhaps the goal is simply to split the fediverse into essentially two sides, the Threads side and the non-Threads side, in order to insulate the non-Threads side from any embrace, extend, extinguish behavior on Meta's part?

Ultimately, my long term goal is just to use kbin to interact with the blogging side of the fediverse, but there are obviously teething issues currently, like some Mastodon instances simply aren't compatible with kbin. I'm too lazy to move somewhere else only to move to kbin "again" after that, so in the short term I guess I'll just shrug in the general direction of Mastodon.

To be clear, I have a pretty solid understanding of why people want to defederate Threads (and I personally agree that it's a good idea), it's the double-defederation I'm not sure I follow. Is my understanding at all close? Are there other reasons? Thanks for any insight.

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Basically Meta will try to join the fediverse build up a bunch of users and get content. Once they become the biggest instance they will build up a wall to kick all the competition out. It is what google did to XMPP. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html By signing the anti fedi pact we are esentially preventing a corporation from taking over and ruining it for everyone else.
- This explains why it's a good idea to defederate from Meta/Threads, but why defederate from other non-signatory instances?
  
  It is like countries setting up an Embargo. If instances know they might get defederated by helping expand metas influence they will think twice.
  
  They or their users don't want their posts reaching Meta's servers. Any site federating with Meta has the ability to boost content from other sites they're federated with to all others they federate with. So, if Site A is federated with Meta, and Site B is federated with Site A but not with Meta, posts from Site B can still reach Meta via Site A.
  
  The solution to this is Authorized Fetch. It trades a little bit of efficiency (individual AP messages being re-shareable by intermediaries) for proper authorization (every server must fetch the messages directly from the source, with the correct authorization). Mastodon implements it behind an env variable, and implementations like GoToSocial force it. No idea how kbin or Lemmy work but they should look into it.
  
  because the non-signatory will participate in the spread of a new protocol for example.
- I think many people here are immensely overestimating the value of the Fediverse user base. The entire active Fediverse, let alone individual instances, is barely a rounding error for Meta.
  There is no if or when Threads become the biggest instance, Threads apparently got 10 million users in 7 hours. The whole of Mastodon has 9 million users in total. By now, Threads alone is likely bigger than the entire Fediverse combined, which mind you is something like 99% bots and inactive users.
  Even if every single instance defederates from Meta, their fork of ActivityPub would by far be the most significant one by not a small margin.
  
  Even if every single instance defederates from Meta, their fork of ActivityPub would by far be the most significant one by not a small margin.
  And? Any other big name will never agree to import the fediverse fork of Meta. The war is open, all of the big names know about the EEE trick and none of them will fall for it and embrace their fork.
- What also could happen is that a lot of Fediverse post could be collected, then used to build ad profiles. It's quite easy to deanonimize people, and even if the "same user handle" tactic fails, one can just use heavy monitoring to someone to say "X on A is Y on B". I got advertisement for Galaxy S23 Ultra cases just by talking about it.
  
  @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social this can happen today, everyone is scraping fediverse. But as others said we are not that many anyway. Threads got 10 million users in 7 hours
- Except Thread isn’t federating initially
  
  https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110548129223290575
  NDA being signed by some admins of the fediverse.
- I don't get the XMPP thing. XMPP was an obscure protocol mostly used in non-federated applications (several MMOs use XMPP for in-game chat for example, obviously not federated). When Google and Facebook adopted XMPP and federated, the user base exploded, sure. Then they defederated, and XMPP went straight back to where it was before. There was no EEE - it was EA: Embrace, Abandon. Google and Facebook didn't extend or extinguish anything. If anything, Slack and Discord killed XMPP, not Google.

53 comments