Fediverse @lemmy.world choroalp @programming.dev 2y ago

Why people keep defending Meta/Threads?

(Sorry for bad english not my first language)

I am pretty sure most of us can agree on how bad Meta is and for some reason people are defending Meta.

I think many people is not realising how Threads and Federation with Threads is going to harm the development of Fediverse.

I dont think many people realize how Threads itself is going to harm fediverse. After twitters well known series dumb moves, many people saw this as an opportunity for fediverse to rise. But with Threads, essentially a 1 to 1 copy of twitter, just going to scoop all of that twitter refugees. Not just that but Threads is using fediverse as ready to consume content farm and eventually cause some users to migrate out of fediverse to Threads because "Well i can stay in touch with near circle easly while still being in fediverse" and after getting enough profits they will defederate themselves because there is not enought to gain from at that point. They will suck the life juice out of Fediverse.

Also as you know threads is tightly integrated with Instagram which made many Instagram users dove head first into Threads and this caused Instagram and Threads culture to be identical. And i think you can guess how bad Instagram culture is. Threads is just a breeding ground companies and influencers with high levels of toxicity and homophobia almost instantly. And we dont want this culture to infintirate Fediverse (Right?) More on the culture. Many threads users are going to destroy the thing we have. Fediverse will never get popular as FAANG Platforms whatever we do. Why we are trying to bring Hateful, Censorship oriented Instagram culture to fediverse. Why?

Also no, Threads is not going to contribute to Fediverse in users because why would a user will leave meta's ecosystem and getting into this confusing things about fediverse while they can experience fediverse from Threads? Your average Threads user is not going to care about Fediverse.

We need to defederate from Threads to prevent them from profiting off fediverse. Defederating WILL DO SHIT unlike people says. This will make fediverse read-only to Threads which might emphasize some people to join fediverse to contrubite to it. Defederating essentially take the main point Meta wants with Fediverse. the engagement.

Edit 1: Sorry i was a bit aggresive in the post. Also i reinstalles threads to see how shittie this app is after a bit more maturizing and i already sae a couple scams

Edit 2: DELETED

Edit 3: Nope, Threads community does not fit overall fediverse community and i think we defederate.

130

130 comments

Threads does not need to steal people from the Fediverse. We are minuscule compared to Threads in just one day. Threads already has more content and engagement then us. They do not care about the Fediverse, they do not care about stealing people from the Fediverse. At most, the only reason they want to “support” it is because it makes them look good compared to the apocalyptic hellfire that is currently Twitter.

Good boy points are way more valuable to Meta than actual Fediverse users. They’re after Twitter users, not a small group of hardcore tech anarchists.
- Threads already has more content and engagement then us
  
  Do they really thought?, I'm not a Twitter/mastodon user, but I read from comments that all their content right now is cringe influencer and shilling stuff.
  
  Absolutely. The quality of discussion is not even remotely comparable. Threads is trash.
  
  Bad content is still content
- To be honest, the only reason they're doing this is because of EU regulations. Otherwise, we wouldn't even be be a thought to them.
  
  EU regulations, the FTC consent decrees, and don't forget the fact that decentralized web3 stuff was all the hot shit for a split second between NFTs and the metaverse, it may be as simple as the project manager chasing the hot new thing.
- Let's see who outlast who in this game.
  
  I'm on the Mastodon side of it all. More features, better content overall, nicer community and the app doesn't feel like it was made in a week.
Meta: We're launching it now with no ads or plans, then we'll figure out what to do once we hit a billion users

People: Ooh but Meta may not be all bad, let's just wait and see!

I mean, Meta is totally freely admitting they're just playing the good guy now and will hit hard once they gain monopoly and can do whatever the fuck they want. How much more clear does it have to get?
- Enshittification is fueled by normies NEVER LEARNING.
- grow grow grow
  
  ah shit servers cost money, well we will just spend more money
  
  ahh big time users but no revenue might actually not be the best idea
  
  ads
  
  still not profitable
  
  Reddit (nft, plus plan, ban third party apps, just keep the whales)
People defend it because they actually like the instagram culture and they don’t dislike the data collection. So they see our staunch opposition as a condemnation of the things they like and they get defensive. Some are bootlickers too, who just love defending corporate actions for some reason.
- Full disclosure, I've been labeled as an astroturfer because of my optimism for Threads federating. So, take that as you will.
  
  But I think that there's a lot more nuance to it than what you've said. I personally don't defend Threads, but I do defend Threads federating. I'm on Lemmy specifically because I don't want to be on Threads. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to connect with Threads content and users.
  
  Especially since a federated Mastodon server (since that's the clearer peer service) means you can actually decide which Threads users you see rather than Trusting the Algorithm^TM. That's a pretty strong pitch to get people to migrate once they're sick of their feed just being 85% brands and influencers paying for reach.
  
  I'm more concerned with the expected lack of Threads moderation making a lot of work for admins who need to continually ban individual Threads users with no hope of the originating instance policing itself.
- Instagram culture is probaly the one of the most toxic, brain rotting cultures i ever seen. Get that thing away from me
Oppress me harder, daddy!
Threads is going to break into our federation and then ruin any conversations and topics we can talk about with just sheer volume of users. Lemmy is nice because we don't have meta or reddits algorithms optimising for propaganda, censorship and outrage. Its nice to talk about corporate corruption or random things instead of pointless garbage that gets spammed on tv. I want organic content. Anything corporations touch turns to shit, this instance is dead unless it preemptively defederates.

https://lemmy.world/post/1179031
- THATS WHAT I AM SAYING
  
  Maybe I'm agreeing with you :P
The average person just doesn’t care. If the app works and they can see memes and connect with their friends they’re happy with it. They don’t care about data collection or the fediverse or any of that stuff. And I’m not saying this to imply that they’re stupid or anything like that. Just different priorities. All this stuff just literally doesn’t matter to them.
It's not that complicated.

Threads is another instance that brings people to the Fediverse, and people like the idea that they can stay on their instances while still interacting with the world at large. For many people, having everyone on the Fediverse is the goal, and in fact, is a long-term goal of most of the platforms - the "Fediverse" is not meant to be a sort of closed community only for marginalised people to get away from the corporate web, it's for everyone to use in whatever way they see fit.

There is literally nothing more to discuss if you're wondering why people "defend" Threads.
- I dont want a platform that owned by a Genocide helper corporation. Also threads will bring a moderation nightmare just like @WolfhoundRO@lemmy.world said. they explained it well
  
  And that's fine, the Fediverse gives you tools to not have to deal with that through silencing or defederation.
  
  But for many people on the Fediverse, they're here specifically for other things, and being able to interact with the corporate social web from outside of it is ideal for them.
  
  Note that I'm not arguing for or against here, it's just very easy to see why many aren't interested in defederating.
- Part of federation is the ability to choose whom you interact with. Email is federated and everyone accepts that you can block certain bad faith actors. The notion that federation implies that everyone can use it in whatever way they see fit doesn't mean that everyone needs to interact with each other. Facebook is a bad faith actor, and it can go play by itself.
  
  Let's consider your email example -- I don't like a lot of stuff Google has done. By your proposed rules, should, say, ProtonMail block all emails from Gmail to prove a point?
  
  Your comment doesn't really contradict anything I said, and I agree with you.
  
  I don't subscribe to the idea that the Fediverse means everyone should have to interact with everyone, to be clear, but people absolutely have the choice to federate with those we may consider bad actors, and then we can respond in kind.
  
  I am all for defederation of bad actors, I'm mostly just explaining why others are not against the defederation of Threads.
I don't think people are defending it, they just think it's not that big a deal, it really is tho.
- I think long term its a "big deal", but in the shorter term, the amount of panic among people who are actively switching to another instance because the instance they are on has not blocked threads yet is kinda ridiculous.
  
  I am not leaving lemmy.world for another instance because they have not instantly blocked threads (who don't even have connection set up to the fediverse in a way that lemmy can share content)
  
  So in the short term (like today, this week, this month) it is not a big deal.
  
  In the longer term it is a big deal and worthy of discussion.
  
  But, because someone says "I am demanding lemmy.world unfederate from meta in the next 24 hours or I leave" does not mean they support Meta on the fediverse :D
- Ok, then let them EEE the fefidiverse.
  
  We shouldnt let them touch Fediverse.
Defederating won't do jack shit to meta, they can still view your content and view data to their hearts content

All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads

The two things Meta likely cares about is content and data, both of which they can still get
- It's a lot more legally dubious for them if you defederate. If your instance willingly connects and shares data out of their own volition, it's like that instance giving permission. If an instance blocks communication via the ActivityPub protocol outright, what are the legal grounds for Meta/Facebook to be able to freely access that information? Even if it's posted publicly to view.
  
  As an example. I can have my own website and post some info there, write articles, have contact information. People can view it. Companies can index this information and make it available to search. But I'm guessing it's not legal (or at least less so) to be collecting that information to process and sell. Companies can do that so easily because you agree to it in their terms of service.
  
  (But hey, IANAL.)
  
  In all honesty I don't really believe that Meta will take data from other servers for advertising since that seems to sit in a very grey area legally (might honestly be straight up illegal in some countries)
  
  I guess my point is more about OP wanting to Defederate to stop Meta profiting (which I don't think it really would)
  
  At least under the gdpr in europe it should be a privacy violation as you need to have the consent of the user to process it's data. So they would have to go to every single one in a comment and ask for permission if they want to use it for recommendations algos or check out if contents fits advertisement.
- All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads
  
  It also prevents interactions between Threads users and communities hosted on your instance. This extends to users from federated instances.
  
  Threaddies can interact with their local copy of a community. No one else can see their comments and posts. Lemmings can interact with the federated version of that community, seeing each other.
- It makes Threads less attractive for people using it because they „can follow people from Mastodon too“. So maybe through that a few people will decide to register in the Fediverse on any other platform rather than using Threads for it. If we only get a few people with that I’m fine with it tbh.
- Couldn't meta theoretically scoop up all their user data including contacts and then actually link that to other users?
  
  I'm not talking simple fediverse data- I'm talking all interaction elsewhere on the phone and other platforms then associate that to fediverse data too.
  
  I'm not too sure what you mean, for their own users yeah they can use whatever their users agree to. Phone numbers, IP address, name, email, device, whatever they like really. They can then easily have that all linked up with their relevant Instagram and Facebook profiles for advertisers. Adversisers then kind of build up profiles about users across different services which is why often if for example you look up cats on one app you might see a cat food advertisement in another
  
  Target for example is great at building profiles up (automatically) of their shoppers, a while back there was a huge story about them predicting a pregnancy Forbes Article
  
  Other users not on Meta I'd say no, this sounds like it would be illegal honestly at least in some countries though I don't know enough about privacy law to say
  
  That said, instance owners could definitely sell off your data to advertisers if they wanted to and it was in the TOS of that instance
- All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads
  
  Maybe I've misunderstood this, or maybe you're thinking of this only in terms of Lemmy, but my understanding is that since Threads is a Twitter-like, it's more likely to try to federate with Mastodon/Calckey/Misskey/Pleroma instances, and at least in the case of Mastodon, defederation is a more firm separation than on Lemmy. If a Mastodon instance defederates from Threads, it's not just that the folks there will stop seeing posts from Threads, but that folks on Threads will stop seeing their posts as well.
  
  ~~I may be wrong, but that's been my understanding at least, hence why a number of Mastodon instances have agreed to defederate from Threads.~~ This is wrong, I had misunderstood the process (thinking of it in terms of mutual defederation, which isn't always the case!). See Ward2k's post elaborating below.
  
  Edit:
  I was wrong, so today I learned how defederation works when it's not mutual! Thanks Ward2k!
  
  Nope not at all, this is where the misconception is.
  
  Defederating works kind of like a one way block, you stop your instance (Server A) from being able to see content from the other (Server B)
  
  Server A can no longer see any content from B
  
  B can still all the content from A, however users of B can no longer comment, upvote, downvote etc the only thing they can do is read the content of A
  
  This is the same for Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon
  
  Defederating is for when you don't want your users to see harmful content (bots, extreme ideologies, problematic posts etc), if you just don't want to see the posts then fair enough that's the way to do it
  
  If you care about the privacy aspect of Meta seeing your comments/posts or about not wanting Meta users to see your content then no, defederating won't achieve anything
  
  Edit: I don't like Meta, my point is that lots of users are calling for defederating without actually understanding anything about how it works
- We need a more effective solution i agree
  
  I don't think we do, at the end of the day this is kind of the point of being a decentralised service. You pick a server you like and one that defederates the way you want.
  
  If you try to do it like a two way block situation you could very easily end up with larger servers deciding to just Defederate smaller ones to completey kill them off since the majority of content would be hosted on larger servers
  
  If your issue is with the privacy aspect or Meta taking your content potentially to be used with advertisers then unfortunately this is going to happen regardless, any publicly viewable content you have to expect is going to live on the internet in some form forever and will be used by advertiser's to the best of their ability
  
  The solution is to join an instance that has defederated Threads (if you don't want to see content from them) and be cautious about the information you post. This isn't exclusive to the Fediverse either, any public forum your comments and posts should try to keep you as anonymous as possible (if privacy is your concern)
Remember half the population voted for Trump. Half the people out there are dumbasses that are not informed about something before they ~~think~~ speak
- No, a third voted for Trump. Another third sat at home and didn't express their one voice to make a change at all.
- Lol true
- half the population voted for Trump
  
  As a Brit, I can honestly say that neither I, nor anybody I know, voted for Trump. I'm pretty sure vast swathes of Germany, France, India, Senegal, did not vote for him either.
  
  Russia.. maybe..
  
  Brexit intensifies
Because some of them don't see the danger of Threads. And I'm not only talking about the EEE tactic: I'm also talking about the festering sludge that will grow on Threads and that you have also seen. For the Fediverse, it will be a moderation nightmare. And be sure that Zucc won't even moderate his platform; he doesn't want to and, as far as he's concerned, it's even out of his range.

Think about it this way: if a user starts spewing death threats within the Threads platform, he MAY get sanctioned. Not banned, "sanctioned". But if he does that to the Fediverse and especially on servers with already overwhelmed moderators, do you think that there would be consequences coming from Zucc for doing this kind of stuff outside the official Threads servers? No, nothing! Our moderators would surely ban him if they would find out about this in time, but imagine thousands of these kinds of accounts invading from Threads doing this constantly. This is not just Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but it gets to Embrace, Raid, Harass, Extinguish
I don't think people are intentionally defending Meta/Threads, so much as saying, "This is where my friends & communities are, so this is what I'm using." They may not like Meta/Threads or the like, if they even give them much thought, but they like their friends/communities/content that are on their platforms more than they dislike the platform owners/operators.

They're not really normies or stupid or whatever negative category you may want to put them in, they're just everyday folks for whom their social platforms are low priority in terms of consideration/reflection. Is what they want there? Yes. Does it work reliably? Yes. If it ticks those boxes that's all that probably concerns them.

Should they give it further consideration? Most of us here would probably argue yes, but we're not about to change their minds by pestering them about it or insulting them for their decisions.
- i really don't love the name-calling.
  
  three fingers pointing back and all that.
- I think i was a bit aggresive there
  
  Eh, my response was less to you specifically and more to some of the other comments & the attitudes I've seen of others concerning this subject. I think your post was honestly one of the less aggressive ones I've seen lately, so apologies on my part for not being clearer on who I was addressing.
My only use for Twitter was the mainstream stuff like service updates, official announcements, and sports reporting. Mastadon is never going to be mainstream. Mastadon will always have instances without meta for the whatever the fuck else you'd use it for now.

You can make the most user friendly website ever but nobody is going to use it if it doesn't have the content they like, and "All the same content with no ads and an app with more privacy" is a pretty easy sell.
I think more than anything, this has shown the insecurity of ActivityPub for me. The whole point of federation is to get everyone on a decentralized platform that is aimed at 'copying' data. But there's no reason that data needs to be unencrypted in plaintext. We should theoretically be very open to wanting to federate with a large new community, but the issue lies with ActivityPub. Because we can't trust ActivityPub, we can't trust Meta. So are we implying that we imperially trust the services we currently use? I think this should be opening a conversation about ActivityPub security, not 'how quickly can we defederate from Meta to avoid the security issues', we should be looking at options for resolving those security issues. End to end encryption is in absolute must. We should want to add and federate more users into the ecosystem without fear of where they're data is coming from and where our is going to. So I'm not 'for' federation of Threads, I'm against defederation for 'security purposes' when everything is already so insecure. Fix the root problem, not these work around solutions.
- Thats insteresting
Please read Eugen Rotchko's thoughts and approach to threads.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Does threads even plan to federate at all? I haven't looked that deeply into it. They may have just used AP because its open source so it was easy to spin up a twitter clone. I could very well be wrong about that.

The arguments about "hanging out with my friends" is valid, but also consider all the other organizations that probably will never consider using something like Mastodon. Will the bands I like, restaraunts in my area, politicians, etc join Mastodon? Maybe, but not all of them. Federation would allow me to follow my favorite bar and see what shows they have this week without me having to use threads myself.

When it comes to the damage Threads could do to the fediverse, I think thay has way more to do with how the fediverse reacts to changes that Threads may implement on their own. Considering the discussion all over fedi about Threads and whether or not to defederate, why the hell would the Activity Pub devs cater to potential breakages that Threads introduces? If Threads breaks compatibility with the Fediverse, then they will have effectively defederated themselves.

Ultimately it comes down to content. Threads may want to take our content and throw ads next to it, and that's fine if they chose to do that. Some of us may want content that originates on Threads while using a foss client.

If we chose to completely defederate from Threads, I think that will ultimately push users from the fediverse to meta. I hate facebook, but that's where my family is. I can't even convince my wife to ditch reddit for lemmy. They will scrape our data whether or not we like it, and whether or not we defederate. I honestly just don't see the point. As long as we don't allow meta to have too much say in how Activity Pub is developed, I don't really see the harm.
I have set up a Mastodon account and love the concept but feel like its mostly anonymous twitter. Reddit and Lemmy do a much better job of providing a platform for mostly anonymous interaction than twitter, which has always been successful for its ability to allow regular people to follow/interact with more public people, which Mastodon is mostly lacking. If those more public people move to threads and if the activitypub integration works well, I would be able to use Mastodon to follow the people I follow on Twitter and get rid of twitter while using a privacy honoring instance and that would make the use case for Mastodon much stronger. I understand the concerns with EEE and don't intend to set up a threads account, but it seems like if Mastodon is going to get extinguished by Meta defederating is not really going to impact it much... They can still extend the capability to pull people away.
It should be the users choice to block Threads, not the federation. What does Meta loose in getting defederated, they're already able to scrape like everyone else, you're just going to inconvenience users wanting an alternative. Some people want to see thread posts while also avoiding the data hell Meta is. Mastodon is a great way to do that and because of this will gain tons of users. Defederating will only gain meta more users since it took away the alternative option. Not everyone cares about the ecosystem like Facebook and Instagram but love twitter and need that addiction fix. The very small amount of users on mastodon will not make a dent in the profits of Meta at all.
- Exactly this, the only real reason that Meta would care about the rest of the Fediverse is free extra content for their users and extra data to exploit
  
  Defederating doesn't stop either one of these things, content is still viewable (defederating only stops other users on other instances being able to comment, vote etc) and the data is still their for the taking
  
  It feels like half the posts/comments at the moment don't understand the way that defederating works
- It should be the users choice to block Threads, not the federation.
  
  Yes, but that's not implemented yet: Allow a user to block an instance #2397
  
  The next best workaround for a user is to block all communities from that instance. And possibly all indivdual users. Including new ones, when they appear.
  
  It can safe a lot of work and hassle to defederate as an instance, if the population wants that. There are also aspects of defederation which cannot be changed on a user level (such as vote federation).
- I agree
- For me I personally decided to block it because I made a poll and most of my users decided to block it. Also, after 24 hours we can see that moderation is not that good which is why I’d defederate from it as from any other instance that doesn’t match with the rules of my own server at all. But that is really the good thing about the Fediverse. Being that flexible.
  
  Wait, you already have defederated you instance from threads?
  
  As best I can tell threads does not yet support activitypub and cannot be federated to a lemmy/mastodon/etc server.
  
  Is there really anything to do at this point or is it more of a pledge to so in the future?
- Good idea
I talked to this one pro-Meta federation person yesterday who was really hung up on the fact that they'd be able to hang out with their Meta friends on a more privacy aware fediverse app. I tried to explain how EEE would work in the context of lemmy, and how their privacy dream is all a moot point because Meta will inevitably kill the fediverse and force them to Threads in the end, but the other person just kept going "yeah yeah, I get that... but if we federate, then I'll be able to hang out with my Meta friends."

I don't know, they just had tunnel vision about being able to hang out with their friends, or were in the denial stage of grief about EEE or something.
- tunnel vision about being able to hang out with friends
  
  This mentality is why mastodon is where it is and threads has 8 trillion users already.
- i had this same conversation here yesterday.
  
  person in question "has no interest in a Meta account". oh boo-hoo!
- That person just wants to lick the bottom of meta's boot but also wants to be different somehow
- Test
I think federating isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the worst case Meta will remove ActivityPub from Threads in the future. Threads federating is an opportunity for regular people to see and understand the Fediverse, and we get to see the more mainstream influencers. If it turns out Threads has malicious intent, defederate and hopefully the backlash will get thread users to migrate to another federated instance.
- The worst case is threads taking the activitypub wheel and making it exactly what they want it to be and letting the rest of us that were here first suck it. There is a 0% chance that meta federating with the rest of us turns out positively for anyone other than meta
  
  They could take control of ActivityPub, but we can always create a fork of it if it does get to that point. We can manage without Meta anyway. And suppose Meta controls ActivityPub, it's still better than the current system where content is locked in a single platform and controlled by solely 1 company.
  
  Although fostering an open social network is not the intent of Meta, Threads indirectly benefits the concept of federation as a whole by contributing content and making it "mainstream".
- It won't. They have 30mil people on the app already. That's light-years more then the entire fediverse. The hope is, for meta, is to peal off fediverse users and then close the door behind them leaving the ActivityPub network a ghost town.
  
  Threads is going to peel off users whether or not it federates with us. At least federating means that Threads users can easily switch to a more private Meta-less platform and still access content on Threads.
Because people can have differing opinions from you?

130 comments