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[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.

458 comments
  • Hell no. I came to Lemmy to get AWAY from the corporate overlords.

  • 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 removed out as early as possible.

      • 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."

  • I changed my instance yesterday to a Meta defederated one. An absolute no brainer. And people who think, that you shouldn't defederate from Meta, can just install and use Threads along with all other Meta crap. Meta will never change. Lemmy is a fresh breath of air, the idea behind is great. Don't burn it.

  • If I see my family members‘ racist shit in the Fediverse, I return to Reddit.

    So will everyone else. Federating with Meta is a one way ticket to kill any potential the Fediverse could have.

  • I don't believe that federating with Threads will be completely apocalyptic, and I actually believe that the commercialization of the Fediverse is the way it will take over the internet. You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all. The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else, meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.

    That being said, I believe that for technical reasons, as well as the fact that it'd be very easy for Meta to strangle their competition in the cradle if we (Referring to the Fediverse as a whole, as this isn't even my instance) cooperated with them, nobody should federate with Threads until the Fediverse is large, resilient, and technologically matured enough to survive a hostile takeover attempt by a corporation like Meta. Basically, defederate from them for now, and reconsider at a later date when the Fediverse has had time to establish itself. I think in the future, the Fediverse will be able to easily deal with Threads being popular and enshittifying itself, but I simply don't think we're there yet.

    • You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all.

      Actually..

      Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn't exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.

      Most content on the internet is produced for free by users. Websites like Reddit can't exist without the free work of their moderators.

      So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That's cheap compared to the other costs..

      The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else,

      Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can't just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side. That's how they got us. The main selling point of Thread today: "come, many people you know are already there!"

      meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.

      They wouldn't get into it without a plan to monetize it, that's the type of things they're known for..

      Overall, I think people over-estimate the cost of running things on the internet. We already "paying" most of it just by producing meaningful content. We don't need tech companies to take their share in the process, we only need time and brain work to make the Fediverse easier to use so that our friends on the other side decide to join us here.

      • Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn't exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.

        Doesn't disprove my point at all. You can say that some innovation and upkeep is done by volunteers, but paid labor does way more innovation and way more upkeep on the Internet. For example, the day-to-day maintenance of things like Youtube, a cornerstone of many people's lives, is done for profit by paid workers.

        So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That's cheap compared to the other costs..

        Well, the thing is, some hosting fees are higher than others, and people do not like paying for things. This is why YouTube has had to get so predatory with its advertising, if they switched to relying on donations to cover the astronomical upkeep costs of being the go-to video hosting service, they'd go under within a week. Websites like Wikipedia, which mostly hosts letters and images, are way more affordable, and the limited number of people who donate are enough to keep it up.

        Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can't just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side.

        I thought the entire point of the Fediverse was that you can interact with people from different instances as long as those two instances are federated with eachother. Using another instance allows you to keep interacting with the original instance's userbase while avoiding most of the ads or poor moderation that comes with it.

        They wouldn't get into it without a plan to monetize it, that's the type of things they're known for..

        I wasn't referring to nor do I care about monetization, I'm mostly referring to enshittification and monopolization.

  • Yo I didn't come here to get down with Facebook ya know what I'm saying?

  • By virtue of how the fediverse works: if I, or they, want to be on Threads, then I, or they, can go make an account there & leave lemmy out of it entirely.

    Anyone saying it would be nice to interact with Facebook can just go make a Threads account. Anything else is just endangering the rest of the community for their convenience.

    • Hell, the design goal for stage 3 of my app is multi-account, multi-server feeds. After that I'm looking at integrating other services...

      I can't think of anything less tempting than the endless unsatisfying feed patented by Facebook, but I can stitch it in with your fediverse feed seamlessly. I can release builds for every platform

      I can't unstitch it. No one can. If we let them in, they'll wash away what this place is in hours... There's no unringing that bell

      It's real, real easy to add them in, in many places and in many ways, and if we take some time we can wait until we have tools to fine-tune federation

    • I don't understand why you're bringing in how the fediverse works, because one of the ways that the Fediverse works is by allowing users to choose a place to call home and where they create their account but still access all the different social posts from everywhere on the Fediverse. By virtue of how the fediverse works I don't need to have an account on their website to view their content. Or at least I shouldn't have to. If they support Fediverse, I should be able to access all of that anywhere on the Fediverse I want.

      The whole point is that I don't want an account on a meta platform, I don't want to volunteer that much data to them. I want to be on the Fediverse and still be able to interact with my normie friends and family who aren't ever going to be willing to get on this platform for nerds that the fediverse is going to continue to be until we are willing to play nice with others.

  • I'm in Lemmy.world but would like to chime in with my two cents too if you all don't mind. Just as one would approach a venomous creature—observing from a distance and acting accordingly after gathering enough data—it might be wise for instances to consider defederating from Threads right from the beginning, until further observations are made.

    Regardless of how well they try to present it, we should remember that big corporations not only fail to act in our best interests but also view us as the product. Contrary to the spirit of federation, monopoly will always be their ultimate goal.

  • I feel strongly against corporate involvement with the Fediverse so I'm going to have a pronounced reaction to it.

    Hell no to federating with Threads. Yeah they're a different platform and they have not joined the Fediverse yet, but they're using ActivityPub and they could do all kinds of nasty things with it (as evil profit mongering corporations always do).

    For future reference, say no to any kind of corporate influence.

  • As someone who deleted Facebook in 2012 and has zero intention of going back to any of Meta’s products… I don’t see a need to defederate and would prefer not to.

    Hear me out… maybe i just am still figuring this whole fediverse thing out but I don’t see how it can be bad.

    1. If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts. Like I still have trouble finding/following content across federated instances, basically going there, getting the name of a community, coming back here, and plugging it in.
    2. Any data they could mine about me they could get anyway since it’s either publicly available or not. They could just stave the fediverse under some other domain/IP that doesn’t even need to federate.
    3. In the event they try to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, they would just change the activity pub protocol in some way, at which point we would have two competing standards. Open source ActivityPub, as used by Mastadon, Lemmy, and the like… and Meta’s ActivityPub… if we don’t use theirs their extended (bad) version of the protocol, they essentially fork and we don’t get to see their content. So we’re just going to defederate now so they don’t have that carrot to dangle over us? Why not just know if they starts fundamentally changing the protocol we just let them break themselves back off from us? We don’t lose anything we aren’t giving up already by defederating.

    The ONLY thing that fundamentally changes for me is I don’t get to follow any Threads accounts from the relative safety of the fediverse. At which point I probably have to bite the bullet and spin up my own dedicated instance so I can chose to not defederate. All that said I’m more concerned about this on the Mastadon side of things, as like you said it probably wouldn’t even integrate well with the Reddit style fediverse.

    • You're simplifying things.
      You can't disregard privacy discussions as "they know everything anyway". There is a vast difference between what they know when you install Instagram/Threads and use it everyday and when you use nothing relevant to Meta. At the same time, I'm not sure how federating means your privacy is threatened either. (Let me know if I'm wrong here)
      "We could just fork away" is also a wrong idea. Everyone on tech groups are crying about Manifest v3, why are they not just forking Chromium? Think of RSS. Open source coders can never compete with a billionaire dollar company with a massive user base. It's pretty easy for Meta to dominate the platform.
      I'm not completely against federating with Meta, think there could also benefits to this, but it's also a pretty risky for the future of fediverse in my opinion

      • 100% agree that by using treads directly/installing their app, they get way more data. I would actively discourage people from using it. But all the normmies that are on Facebook Instagram anyway are gonna continue t do what they do. What I’m tryin to say here is that they get the same info on me as a Lemmy/Mastadon user by scraping the public lemm.ee site as they could by federating with us. I’m not giving up any privacy by being on a federated instance. But perhaps I’m wrong here if anyone has a technical explanation.

        I also agree with what your saying about manifest v3, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Let’s say 10 years from now Threads and the Open Source Fediverse (plus let Google and the other tech giants get their platforms all up in the mix) are all happily working together. Then Meta Google etc collaborate to change ActivityPub the way Google is changing Manifest v3. The Open Source fediverse continues on without implementing the new bad “features.” We become incompatible with them. We’re back to where we are now. We’re back in a small corner of the internet that doesn’t work with the broader corporate sponsored internet. The potential downside I see here would be if by letting Meta and the like play in our swimming pool, normmies have less incentive to move over to a Mastadon or Lemmy instance and we end up with a smaller pool when everything is said and done.

      • I think the biggest point and the reason why I think he's right about the privacy issue is that when I have an account somewhere on the Fediverse, Meta is going to be able to access that data that is publicly available from my account. That data is out there and available and that's just how the Fediverse works. The activity pub protocol is going to publish all of that activity.

        The difference being that if it's defederated from, then I have to have an account on their platform, and then they get access to way more of my data. Defederating as far as I can tell is a lose lose situation. Because no matter what meta is completely capable of scraping data off of the Fediverse. There is absolutely nothing that can stop them. Even if they are defederated from they will still be able to access all that data. Because the date is either public or private. If it's private then only the instance that I am hosted on has any access to it, if it's public then every instance (whether it's defederated or not) can access it.

        The only thing that defederating realistically accomplishes is preventing users of this instance from interacting with users of that instance. At least as far as my education can tell.

        It feels like there's a lot of very valid reasons for people to hate and distrust meta and there's a knee jerk instinctual reaction to defederate and I understand why but at the end of the day the admins need to be weighing the actual pros and cons.

    • Thanks for the response! I want to point out one thing:

      If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts.

      Unfortunately, this isn't true (as of Lemmy version 0.18.1). With their massive user base, Threads could easily ensure that all content by their users will always have huge amounts of upvotes. This would mean that any post or comment made by a Threads user would always be at the top of "Hot" or "Active". This also goes for any synthetic content (ads in the form of posts/comments).

      Consider also that Facebook has full control over what their users see (through their algorithm) - effectively this means that they will be able to control what the top voted posts and comments are on all instances that federate with them.

  • If we downvote, then what's the point of migrating here from Reddit? Facebook and other mainstream social medias can pour funds to create their own “universe.”

  • noooo....this is my happy place...thats a hard pass on anything meta

458 comments