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  • I'm all for defederating corporations.

    The fediverse is already a reaction which is intentionally anti-corporate. Most of us are here because we don't want another Twitter or Reddit or Instagram or Facebook or whatever.

    Considering how Google killed XMPP, by the time the harm was done, it was too late to exclude them.

    The fediverse is not for corporates. Keep them out.

    • While I understand that sentiment, I don't think we should be thinking of this from the standpoint of accepting or rejecting corporations, but rather from the standpoint of accepting or rejecting the people using the platform in question. Yeah, Meta sucks, but in defederating preemptively, we would basically be denying people from the Fediverse just because of which platform they choose to use, which I think goes against it's open nature.

      As for the bit about Embrace Extend Extinguish, I believe the Fediverse is too strong for that to work. Worst case, Threads becomes the de-facto, and we're just back to where we are now with Threads taking the place of Twitter, and the Fediverse being the option for those looking for something better. Except I think people would actually be more willing to jump to the Fediverse since they would have more exposure to it through Threads.

      • The reason the fediverse is strong is because of lessons learnt from 10+ years of EEE and enshittification by corporate interests.

      • The people using Instagram/Facebook aren't people who are looking for a platform to browse the Fediverse, at least not the majority. The majority of users there are people who don't even know the Fediverse exists.

        Meta isn't looking to join the Fediverse or provide some kind of service to their users, they are looking for business opportunities. They are looking for money, advertising space, free content. Videos and memes were stolen from outside sources into Facebook for years and they still haven't addressed it - there isn't even an option to link to the source outside of copying the link directly into the post.

        Meta has no goodwill whatsoever. The ONLY things they are looking for are business opportunities. More people to milk for money, and more ways to do it. They are not a new player in the internet scene, they have always been against social interest from the very first changes they made to Facebook, and they are still that same company under the same leadership.

        Not defederating from Threads is choosing to water down the content in the instance's "all" section, in order to have an instance with literally 100x the size of the entire Fediverse, which can at best produce memes and at worst stand against the entire reason anyone even made an instance in the first place.

        TL;DR I support defederating from Threads. And I write all of this while considering your post to be good - your opinion makes sense to me, I just don't agree with you. And I don't agree with you because I watched FB and Reddit turn to shit simply because they had too few people in power. Lemmy can survive this problem because there are just too many people in power to abuse this system in the same way.

  • I think it's a bad idea to federate with Threads. If I understand correctly, we'd be mirroring Threads content and Zux' userbase in large. This would put undue stress on SDF equipment and degrade the user experience. Further, there is a lot of 'junk' on Meta's platform which we won't have a problem with if we don't engage with it.

  • I'm new here, and I dont have a very developed opinion about this, but my gut says that Meta is going to try to absorb (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse.

    I've seen a lot of good reasons to do that, but I think that it might just be to get at the software. It seems silly that they would do that given that it's free, but also they would be destroying a competitor at the same time, and really I've been working long enough that it wouldn't surprise me.

    Anyway, i think that maybe democracy would be a great way to decide a question like this, and it would also be interesting to figure out how to set that up in a way that the people asking the question can know whether someone is trying to cheat.

  • Meta is going to do Meta things whether we make it difficult for them or not. "Preemptively" saying no one who dares use a Meta tool is welcome in the "Fediverse" is guilt until proven innocence and collective punishment

    I find it very hypocritical to say, in one breath, "we need open standards and federated sites so that no one party can be a gatekeeper" and in the next "no, Meta, we as gatekeepers have decided we don't like you and you're not welcome here."

    If you block all of Meta just because they're Meta, not only do you punish countless potential valued contributors who have done no wrong, you also embolden Meta to engage with the Fediverse in less legitimate, more underhanded ways. Which they will do, as I said, no matter what blocks are put in their way.

    Let's focus on building affirmatively and consciously the community we want instead of walking around with chips on our shoulders. If bad actors appear, they can be dealt with individually without banning large parts of the rest of the world.

    • This feels a little bit like a "corporations are people" spin, intended or not. But I don't think that's benefited society all that much, in past.

      • I did not say Meta, a corporation, is people. I am saying the people who will use this tool, including people we all know, are people and don't deserve to be presumed guilty of Crimes Against The Fediverse for exploring it with any particular tool.

    • If you block all of Meta just because they’re Meta, not only do you punish countless potential valued contributors who have done no wrong,

      Bullshit. There's no "punishment" whatsoever. Those users are free to open accounts on fediverse servers at any time.

      you also embolden Meta to engage with the Fediverse in less legitimate, more underhanded ways.

      You mean like anointing a few heads of big instances as representatives of fedi and trying to get them to sign NDAs? Shit like that?

      Let’s focus on building affirmatively and consciously the community we want

      This is literally the point of pre-emptive blocking. Meta is an existential threat to the quality of this place, period point blank.

      People, individual people, built Fedi out of nothing. It's our party, we quite like it, and we can pre-disinvite entities with an enormous track record of shitty behavior whenever we want.

      If you want to interact with such entities and the typical user that comes with, by all means, find servers that federate. It will drive a netsplit, and that sucks, but it's also working as intended.

      I just hope SDF is on the right side of the split. Fuck Facebook and every single thing they stand for.

    • I would counter that Meta has used their “tool” to in essence to support a genocide and that makes them untrustworthy.

      As for having open standards with no gatekeepers… that point is a false equivalency. We have open standard like encryption, but that doesn’t mean one should go post their private ssh keys online. There are bad actors in this world and Meta Inc is one of them.

      • Do you believe people who use Meta tools are complicit in crimes against humanity? If so, I've got some bad news about the Internet.

        Give people a chance. Who knows; maybe some of them will drop the Meta tool and pick up the one you prefer.

  • My opinion on this is to preemptively defederate as Meta has proven itself time and again to be a bad actor; they have proven willing manipulate their feeds and algorithms to induce rage based engagement and even though they wouldn’t be in control of the fediverse, they will still at the very least try to heavily influence it. If the fediverse wasn’t a possible threat to them, they wouldn’t have created an app for it and made current fediverse operators sign NDAs. Additionally, if we are complacent, they could start creating Lemmy style fediverse communities to gain control of that aspect of the fediverse as well.

  • I searched this discussion for /mail/ and was surprised to see not one hit.

    Defederating from Threads is analogous to refusing to accept mail from or deliver mail to Gmail, is it not?

    As long as there's no concern with Threads knocking SDF over due to outsized mass, I think it's a bad move.

    • This analogy keeps being made but I am not convinced it is correct.

      Any participant in a dynamic network can choose with whom to have relationships. That's the point of a firewall or cloudflare or a million other security efforts.... to prevent interactions which due to malice or accident would cause some harm to come to the local system. There is no obligation to participate and in fact with the fediverse it is specifically designed with defederation in mind.

      The comparison has been made to email explaining the fediverse concept to new users. Most people know about email. But Usenet is much more apt, if you are familiar with that. Usenet had (has) similar concepts such as the way servers share, mirror and distribute content from others servers. There is a burden imposed on any given server according to the others it has communication with. If you never had the pleasure of being on Usenet, it was basically like email discussion lists where the inbox was public. But you still needed to have access to a server to read and post. Messages were sent in similar way to email but every server would retain a copy of messages prior to forwarding them on to a list of other servers. They would in this was percolate through the network. Every server had its own version of the history of usenet according to the choices of the admins and there was not central authority or main copy.

      Usenet server admins exercised broad discretion deciding who they would have a relationship with and what they would accept. Nobody was every perfectly connected to everybody else for various reasons including: legality, morals, politics, technical, geography, taste and happenstance. Individual people, hosts that allowed too many bad users, problem communities, filetypes, topics of conversation.... all kinds of things were blocked by admins. Some news servers were permissive and some were restrictive. Servers that were excessively permissive became hubs of spam, and thereby risked losing their relationships with other servers because other admins got too annoyed having to deal with it. And servers that were excessively restrictive had a hard time keeping users because you couldn't really participate properly if unable to see a lot of groups and not seeing a lot of the traffic, plus your messages would not propagate for others to see. So it was a balancing act.

      For the most part this is an analogy that isn't helpful for a lot of people.. But maybe on SDF there are some who can recall those days. I do not think the concept of blocking servers breaks the concept of the fediverse at all.

      (I am still undecided on my opinion on the question but I think it is a legitimate possibility.)

    • As I said in the other thread: Would you want to federate with Reddit?

      Google hasn’t actively tried to shutdown its competing email providers… Meta has (tried to purchase or shut down its competitors on multiple occasions). Why do you think they aren’t trying to do that this time?

  • I didn't join the Fediverse to have Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or any other corporate surveillance outfit follow me here and mine data my data from here. I too hope SDF will block Threads.

  • I agree with these other two posters. Why not wait and see what Threads even ends up doing before they're potentially defederated? Obviously, Meta wants to find some way to make money from the Fediverse, but will it actually affect users who aren't registered on their servers? Let's see.

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