To the admins- will lemmy.world block Facebook's Threads or are you open to federating with them in the future?

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Many of us do not trust Facebook and anything it is associated with or swallows up.

EDIT:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/adam-mosseri-says-metas-threads-app-wont-have-activitypub-support-at-launch/

"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "

““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @mosseri@threads.net.””

“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.

“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”

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192 comments

I have done a little bit of reading but I'm still not sure what the issue is. Is it that Threads will take over and defacto become the entire Fediverse? Because I think that would happen whether or not Mastoson/Lemmy instances choose to defederate. Is privacy the concern, and if so, wouldn't it only affect people using Threads?
- FB has proven time and again that they don't care to moderate their spaces, and they increase engagement by presenting the most toxic and angering things to you. Community groups in particular are absolutely hideous on there, full of people angry at the (insert minority group) walking down the street. I don't want that in my life again, and I don't want it infecting lemmy. If I did want to engage with that type of content, I'd make an account on Threads.
  That said, I'm not out here making demands of our admin and moderators right now. They're busy just keeping this place running. The threads situation won't be going away tomorrow, so it can wait a hot minute.
- One concern would be:
  Say Lemmy/kbin grows organically to 1 million users.
  Threads federates, with 100 million users
  Do you want these users flooding Lemmy? I don't want to be biased at the theoretical type of user on Threads, though if the right wingers/trolls/extremists migrate to Threads because they think it's "more open" then that may be an issue. If it's full of soccer moms posting pictures of their kids, or karens complaining about everything, that may be an issue.
  Multiculturalism is great, I want to hear new ideas, though some areas are breeding grounds for lower-think, it seems. This probably sounds prejudiced or elitist.
  I want to talk to the vanguard people who take the risk and are openminded and come to lemmy, not necessarily the "lemmings" who join facebook because they love facebook and don't want to, or can't, delve deeper into why facebook is one of the worst forces in media at the moment.
  I am not prejudiced (I hope) against "regular people" and "soccer moms", though think that if 10 million soccer moms came here, the discussions may not be as... interesting, as they are.
  Also, I don't know what lemmy instances will think about downloading masses of data from threads.
  
  I think this will be pretty manageable by finding and using communities that are well-run and have explicit rules and standards of behavior that are enforced. If a community is explicitly meant for serious conversations about, I dunno, music theory, that is enforceable, and if Suburban Subaru Sarah actually wants to join in on that, all the better, but pics of her kid's soccer game will belong in a different space, just as much as pics of some nerd's Warcraft raid do too.
  
  Sure. However, you can't trust meta, so anything that is done I hope has several failbacks and get-out clauses.
  
  Ultimately, there is simply no mechanism for Meta to interfere with a community that it doesn't federate with. I can definitely see a bit of a split developing between Meta and non-Meta instances, but beyond that, there's really not much to worry about
  
  https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
  
  This is such a bad analysis of that situation. You are relying on it too much. I've pointed it out in other replies to your countless posting of this link with no context.
  
  I donate money to this platform because I want an open and free internet. I want that for anyone who wants to partake. I don’t want extremists, sure - but I think the “soccer moms” you are referring to are really just your average internet consumer. If we don’t agree on that, that’s fine - I’m happy to move to an instance that’s not as restrictive. I think that’s the beauty of the fediverse. I think it’s ironic when you talk about wanting open minded people to join the instance though lol.
  
  I have nothing against "soccer moms", I just don't want to see endless photos of their kids, which may be ironic since there's shitposting on all social networks. Perhaps we'd be able to ignore those communities, however it'll leak over to other communities.
  It seemed to be "fine" when "those" sorts of "regular folk" stuck to facebook for their fix of sharing their lives.
  Anyway, this aspect isn't the main point, I'd say - it's that one cannot trust facebook, and if they want to federate, it cannot be good for us.
  
  Personally I don't care about the soccer moms, my main concern is all the problems that come with being a mainstream social media platform. Threads threatens to overwhelm the content being generated with all those problems where your Lemmy feed is just going to represent Instagram etc again. Screw that.
  
  That's exactly what I'm talking about when using the generic "soccer moms" - mainstream twitter/facebook posts.
  I'm probably confusing myself as I have nothing against "normal people", and want them to discus sthings, and I'm sure there could be a lot of good discussions that could be had with "normal people", though being drowned by mainstream media posts is the main issue, as you say.
  
  And if that experience ends up being negative, instances can choose to defederate. Many admins just want to see if it will actually be a problem. If admins choose to solve a problem that doesn't exist yet, let them. But let's not protest instances and destroy communities over possibly nothing just because the admin is curious to see what happens.
  
  I think it would be easy enough to unsubscribe to the EndlessMoppets community and only subscribe to communities that curate Moppetless posts.
  As far as leaking over goes, I never had a problem with EndlessMoppets leaking into any of the subs I did subscribe to over on Reddit.
  And for what it’s worth Lemmy is not encrypted so it would be silly to think Meta isn’t already vacuuming up all this content already.
  
  https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- Because this is reminiscent of what happened with XMPP. In the old days you had many closed source protocols for instant messaging. Then XMPP came along and started gaining steam. At that point, major platforms started using it, with everything federated. Someone with Google could talk to someone on Facebook and with someone on myown.sillyserver.net. Everything was going great. But obviously the majority of people went with the easy option to go with Facebook or Google, meaning you still had a federated network on the paper, but with a few actors weighing way more than most.
  Obviously at that point, they slowly defederated, preventing their customers from talking to their contacts on other platforms. But most of their contacts where on the same platform, so the cost of migrating was higher. That's how the federation ended. XMPP still exists, and was actually used by WhatsApp in a non federated way, but it is the shell of itself with not a lot of people using it.
  A social network strength is in its number. Accepting Meta into Fediverse creates a very real risk that they will try an embrace and extinguish strategy and in the end you will have most people on Meta and just a niche of people on Lemmy/Mastodon, similar to how it was a few months ago.
  The goal of the fediverse is to find the proper balance between having multiple platforms big enough so that moderation and technical management can be done by knowledgeable people, but small enough that they cannot decide willy nilly to defederated. Having Meta in the fediverse would very probably break that balance.
  
  XMPP died because of competition. Everyone is forgetting everyone said Google was losing the chat wars with Apple and that's why Google repeatedly released new systems. Google left XMPP and that isn't why XMPP failed. It failed because virtually everyone had either an Apple account or Android account. So they all had a chat account already. They "destroyed" XMPP the same way Blackberry hurt XMPP at the time as well. XMPP would be just as relevant if Google never federated with it.
- It's a combination of EEE (Engage, Enhance, Extinguish) tactics, as well as toxicity overload. Meta are notorious for manipulating their viewers. Threads will rapidly devolve into rage bait, since this gives maximum engagement. They will use us to dilute the resultant toxicity. Once it's established, even de-federating might not be enough. It could generate a locust like influx of toxic new members. The federation doesn't have the community robustness to absorb that sort of hit right now.
- Read up on EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
  
  Will do - thank you
- I also don’t understand the issue. I’m against meta / twitter / reddit (hence my account here), but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users? I feel like if anything this is a great way to get more people comfortable with the concept of the fediverse and push them one step closer to breaking away from the traditional social media companies. So far all I’ve been able to see is “Meta bad, defederate”.
  
  I like your optimism, but Meta is a relentless cancer and FOSS is its enemy. It won’t sit idly by while ideas of ad-free alternatives grow in its users minds. Nothing good can come from Meta’s mingling with non-profit competition.
  The only silver lining is how incompetent these corporations have been lately. Fingers crossed, they’ll fuck up whatever nefarious shit they have planned, and the fediverse can carry on in some state when they try to pull the rug - at the very least for those who value its ideals over user count, but hopefully also still as a viable and active alternative.
  Here’s an accessible summary of a few historical examples of why people don’t want corporations adopting their open source platforms: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
  
  They will be hovering up your data and in a while they'll EEE this place to corporate death.
  
  They can already hoover up all your data. Fediverse data is by design very public.
  
  EEE isn't a verb. It's a type of attack. Without defining how they possibly could, it's mostly FUD. And they already can access your data regardless whether they are defederated from your instance or not. Defederation means you don't see them, not that they don't see you.
  
  "...but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users?"
  Because our feed will be full of the kind of stuff that people will be posting on Threads, complete with whatever boosting algorithm Meta chooses to use on there. That's not why I'm here. If I wanted a heavily tilted feed of whatever Meta thinks I should see, I'd be there.
  
  Algorithm wouldn't work well because the whole value to Meta is that it's curated per user. You can't do that here. It'd need to be one algorithm for the entire world. So it'll be very limited at most. Plus they'd have to break the spec to even cause it to happen. At most it'll be secondary affect in that Thread users upvote it. But even then, if it's a poor experience, then defederation would be imminent. I'm just against the whole idea of being upset it isn't happening before we have any remote idea of how it works out.
- For me it's mostly because massive corporations love to destroy any possible competition. It has happened repeatedly in history. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
  I came to lemmy because I hate all those guys and I don't want one coming in and destroying it. Meta has absolutely no incentive to help the fediverse. He is here for the free code, to fuck with Elon, and destroy some competition. That's it. Don't let him.
- https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- There are multiple concerns:
  The basic principals of Federation is "killed" as Threads will try and bait people on ONLY using their platform. For example that they wont even show any posts/comments from others but in reverse they spam other posts with their posts and comments.
  There will be a huge increase of users like multiple million users. With it that type of users who want to share literally every opinion. The karen, twitter "Free Speech" type. It will bring much hate to the fediverse.
  Personally the fediverses goal is to have smaller instances and not a big boy that wants everything.
  And they would try and monetize and advertise in the fediverse.

192 comments