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  • Yes, because we already know exactly how this is going to go. Their need to constantly make more and more money means that we know TODAY what is going to happen: EEE. We know this because of Fark, Digg, now Reddit, and to a lesser extent Slashdot and StackOverflow. The profiteers aren't interested in federating, or having well-run communities; they're interested in money and nothing else. We know for an absolute fact that Meta needs to make money and they're only interested in the Fediverse because they see money in it (quite simply: because if they didn't they wouldn't be).

    I completely get "we shouldn't strike pre-emptively" but if you wait until the third E it's too late. But we already know it's not pre-emptive because they've already enshittified their own communities. Ever tried scrolling through Arsebook recently without FBP and uBlock Origin? Article - article - ad. Article - article - ad. One item in fucking THREE is crap you're not interested in. That's what they want to force onto the Fediverse. We know it today. We have seen what they have done to their own stuff. So when they come sniffing round here we are completely justified in slamming the door in their face even if they promise to be nice this time, because we already know what they want.

    "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it," and you don't have to look far. The influx of people into the Fediverse is directly caused by the profit-motivated enshittification of Reddit. If we don't draw the line here then we have to retreat back from Lemmy and invent something else, which they will then want to enshittify.

  • “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

    Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy's recent popularity is that people are fed up with the "if something is free, you aren't the user, you are the product" situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).

    Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy - I'm surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the "chicken and egg" problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don't care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.

    I personally like this instance very much, and I've been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn't hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.

    EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse

  • I'm already a day late and I haven't actually read all the comments because they're surprisingly a lot here. But here is my two cents, hopefully I'm not just repeating someone else.

    Do you want the fediverse to be as big as possible? Or do you want it to grow in a steady manner in a healthy way with healthy discussion?

    Letting on the garbage that is popular social media giants like meta, will completely and utterly overwhelm this community. They have millions of users, we have thousands. Every single one of our posts will be drowned out by them. Say goodbye to high quality discourse, we will just become what Twitter and Facebook turned into, the same way that Reddit is going.

    I do not care if we have millions of users, our higher bar of Discovery and usability means that we get people who are self-motivated to learn, learn about technology, learn about our culture, learn about our rules.

    Would it be nice if it was easier to discover/join the fediverse? Sure. Would it be nice if we had millions of users? Sure. But I want to grow carefully and sustainably. I would rather have a small or medium-sized community with healthy discourse, than a worldwide gigantic social media community where conspiracy theories reign supreme, and the less techy people don't understand how threads are different from Lemmy, and are constantly cross posting and are confused about what they're looking at.

    I can block meta communities myself, but I can't block all the hordes of people that will jump on our threads. This is a scalability problem waiting to happen, this is a social discourse problem waiting to happen.

    Lastly the only reason that I could possibly imagine that Zuckerberg wants to federate is to keep the only viable alternative to monopolistic social media conglomerates in check. The more people that can talk to us through his platform, the less people will look into and join us. If they can assert their monopolistic practices on the fediverse, they could use the EEE model to make it irrelevant. He is trying to destroy the federated social networks before they are big enough to be a real threat.

  • So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta's Threads?

    That's what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta's folks and be in touch with Meta's community would end up creating accounts there. We'd be handing users to Meta by doing that.

    Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they'll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they're launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:

    1. We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
    2. We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.

    What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the "decentralize so that no one can gain too much power" model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

    If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the "fediverse" are people without resources, then what's even the point? Who wants an email service that can't send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?

    The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I'd prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.

    EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:

    We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

    Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

    • Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
    • Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
    • Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
    • Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
    • Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.

    That’s all well and good.

    But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

    • Well just look at what happened with XMPP and google: https://lemmy.world/comment/906346

      And even if we don't defederate, I doubt anyone in threads will notice us local instance users and contribute at all to our growth. There are 30 million+ of them backed by Instagram and like what, 10k of us? They just have too much weight to throw around.

      Hell I'm not even convinced reddit is going to die and Lemmy is going to continue to grow. Just look at their front page. Absolute nonsensical drivel still gets several thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments, while any Lemmy instance is lucky to get 100 upvotes and 10 comments on a popular post

    • This is an interesting take on the matter, and you do have pretty good points. For me personally, I don't think that bringing in the Meta crowd would bring us much value, as I've already stated in the other comment. I'm not interested in the style of content both Facebook and Instagram provides, and I don't really like the userbase - but that's also only my personal view, and it's not something that would warrant defederation.

      I'm worried that due to sheer amount of people they have, it would simply drown any content from other instances and would make it harder to find (and also really hard to moderate - Meta has significant resources to moderate that many millions of users, something smaller instances can never reach). Hot and Top would simply be filled by influencers, and it would take significant effort to just unsubscribe or block all of them (I'm actually not sure here how does the frontpage works, if you select all instances - is it like All on Reddit, or like frontpage with a set of default communities, but not everything shows there?), while also making it pretty hard to find smaller communities with different crowd - which is what I like on Lemmy as of the current state.

      As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

      I don't really agree with this. It's only my own take on things, but I don't believe in the slightest that Meta wants to contribute to the Fediverse or has any of it's interests in mind. Nothing good will come out of it, Meta will only exploit the Fediverse for free content they don't have to host or pay for to kickstart their own platform, and then slowly bring users over there with QoL they have resources to implement for their instance. I'm not worried that they will bring down the Fediverse - that's where the decentralization will work as it should since other instances can defederate as soon as a problem appears, and keep their content and their userbase. What I think is an issue is that unless we defederate soon enough, Meta will exploit Fediverse for their gain only, slowly make people used to the QoL they are providing and have resources for, and when it finally gets bad enough that instances decide to start defederating from them, it will be too late, and Fediverse will loose users and content creators, because they were used to and interacting with communities on Meta's instance - which were the best choice simply due to a high number of users coming from Meta's userbase. Which brings me to

      That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.

      This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation. As I've said in the previous paragraph - Meta's communities will be larger and have more content, and more people will leave once we defederate because they are used to those communities, including people that would not leave there now.

      And the last issue is the fact that it serves so much data about users and their interactions right into Meta's algorithms, without them having to make any effort for it. And I really don't like that, and it's the reason why I'm avoiding anything Meta even touches. But then again - that's my personal issue.

      To sum it up - some commenters said that it's a risk that we should try and take to see how it will go - I'd personally rather not risk it, and just keep Meta or any other multi-billion corporations out of this ecosystem. You can be sure that they don't have anyone's best interest in heart, and will only exploit it for monetary gain. And they have teams of experts in the field already working on strategies about how to exploit us as much as possible. I say don't give them a chance, this is something we cannot win and it will only make everything worse.

      • I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven't convinced me yet :)

        I'm in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit "the fediverse" for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.

        But... my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won't last very long at all. And, even if it does, it's not as valuable to me that way, so I'll be leaving. What's the value of a fediverse if it doesn't even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?

        This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.

        I honestly don't think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don't call it a "fediverse". It's just a forum. Would we say that it's fair for Google to say "From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don't agree with them"?

        EDIT 1: I haven't made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.

        EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.

    • Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

      I'd be interested to hear how Facebook would seek to alleviate those concern, regardless of weather such concerns are realisticly founded or not, as social networks inherently deal with humans and public opinions.

      • What kind of technical solution from Facebook do you think would best help appease concerned users in the Fediverse?
      • Could there be a technical solution to resolve the social dilemma of (real or appearance of) power imbalance between Facebook and the rest of the Fediverse?

      I'm trying to think of how Facebook could gracefully relinquish control over its platform while guaranteeing Facebook could not later subvert those concessions. Would that ever be in Facebook's best interests? I guess improved user trust and positive PR could help abate the calls for regulation and monopoly busting.

      There are skeptic rumours that Facebook is hoping to leverage the Fediverse as a relief valve for regulatory pressure due to EU's DMA:

      • Theory: the only reason Meta cares about the fediverse / ActivityPub is so that threads isn’t labeled a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act”
      • https://lemmy.world/post/1105955

    • You've officially changed my mind.

      Up until now, I've been harping on the concept of "controlling interest" in which a single entity is large enough to control the direction taken. But I hadn't considered that the new direction might be one that limits the potential for a negative result.

      Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it's a risk we have to take. If this federation experiment fails, then what is learned can be used in the next experiment.

      Now to track down and add a note to all those comments I made...

  • Absolutely, yes. It's hard for me to see federating with corporations such as Facebook Meta much differently than doing so with an instance run by spammers.

  • Yes, refuse to federate from the get-go. By the time the hostilities become open, it'll be far too late not only to attempt to repair any existing damage, but even to avoid further damage coming down the line like a juggernaut.

    Plenty of large corporations have shown time and again that SOP is to take over and kill any potential threats before they can develop. When a corporation finds another corporation using their resources for gain, even while still following terms and conditions, the lawyers come out and the fur flies. Why should we be pushovers just because we're not rich and don't have a legal fiction to hide behind?

    The Fediverse is a direct competitor to monolithic social networks. That's definitely how they see us, and it's how we should see them. I know that there's a "share and share alike" ethos behind all of this, and that blocking any entity arbitrarily feels wrong and unfair, but it really isn't. I also know that, assuming that things go well, one day there will be successful business ventures that evolve naturally from the Fediverse, and the community is going to have to decide how to respond to those situations in time. But right now we're a group of little pigs playing in a somewhat secure pen, and a huge, voracious wolf is asking us to open the gate so it can join in our game. By the time we realize that we haven't seen Jerry or Louise for a while, the wolf will have changed the lock on the gate and spread rumors about us to the other animals.

    If people still feel uncomfortable with refusing a large corporation "just because", then make a policy: "Due to the dangers inherent in unequal business relationships, it is our general policy to refuse federation with any entity with an average annual turnover in excess of US$200,000." You can always make exceptions, and even change the policy later, but it can ease your conscience that you aren't unfairly targeting one entity without justification; you're sticking to a sensible policy.

  • I don't know how I feel about defederating but I would like this instance to have a Terms of Use or Policy that prevents anyone who federates with us to use content on this instance for profit. Or something similar to spirit of Open Source licenses.

    The link to mastadon's blog you posted is very informative. I encourage everyone who peeks in this post to read it.

    I don't necessarily agree with Mastadon's official stance because say the largest Lemmy instance (Lemmy.world) was owned by Meta. Once enough users relied on content from Lemmy.world, Meta could then start charging other instances to federate with it if they want content. Which won't kill "the platform" but will make information inaccessible.

    Mastadon's stance :

    We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

    However I'm confused how Mastadon's official stance reflects their devs and admins because one of Mastodon admin, kev, from fosstodon.org, has been contacted to take part in an off-the-record meeting with Meta. He refused politely and, most importantly, published the email to be transparent with its users. Thanks kev!

    Mail from Meta to Kev, from fosstodon, and reply.

  • What kind of things do you think they would do in order to "extinguish" activitypub? Would they implement features that only exist on their platform as proprietary extras?

    • Well, I don't work for Threads or Meta, and I don't know anything about their short-term or long-term plans. But let's imagine a theoretical, commercially-operated social web service called "HeartStrings", which acts in bad faith:

      • HeartStrings uses their significant marketing ability and existing user base to become a dominant entity in the Fediverse. Simultaneously, they downplay or even hide the fact that a lot of their initial content comes from the Fediverse. This isn't difficult as their traditional target audience probably won't know about the Fediverse or even be able to understand the concepts behind it without significant explanation, which they are unlikely to pursue on their own.
      • HeartStrings implements extra services for their users which only work on HeartStrings (karma, useful built-in bots and moderation tools, regular prize giveaways, "preferential" positioning of posts from HeartStrings, their own spin on "hot" or other post sorting options)
      • They create local "backups" of posts from other instances (a.k.a. scraped content), "for the convenience of HeartStrings users" and, initially, also as "a service to the Fediverse."
      • Once they have sufficient users and content, they begin blocking posts both to and from certain other instances (probably not actually defederating, but handling everything silently, internally). When someone finally notices this systematic censorship, HeartStrings provides vague justifications involving "misinformation" and "illegal activities".
      • Because this creates minimal backlash from core HeartStrings users, the company works faster and faster toward their end goal of completely removing ActivityPub support while simultaneously implying that the Fediverse came to HeartStrings (rather than the other way around), was given a fair chance by HeartStrings, but turns out to be filled with terrorists, drug sellers, pedophiles, and other bad actors. With no central body to defend it effectively against such a well-financed aggressor, the Fediverse takes this virtually without responding.
      • Result: HeartStrings has sucked what free material and promotion it could from the Fediverse during its critical launch phase, then sabotaged the Fediverse, and finally kicked it to the curb.

      • This is a pretty good explaination and might be what meta tries to do. I agree that we shouldn't federate with them.

  • I'm skeptical of their intentions. If we do federate I think we should be ready to defederate if the need arises. I also think Lemmy servers should try to come together and agree what the "need to defederate" from them would look like so everyone can defederate together. It is likely some servers will defederate from the start and that's fine, I'm not totally convinced that's not the best course personally, my mind isn't fully made yet.

  • It's kinda easy to jump on the obvious "Yes, fuck facebook" bandwagon...

    But I'm curious on how they intent to implement this. How are the communities grouped? Would we have to federate with the entire Meta Instance?

    If Meta would have some "Programmers group" community that actually has high quality content and comments (And not default Facebook comment quality) with informed/informative members it could be interesting to federate with those...

    It seems a little early to completely reject the idea before knowing more about the implementation details.

    Also, it does seem like a great way to get a lot of expose. Lemmy is still pretty obscure. If meta connects with Lemmy, that's an influx of a potential 3.74 billion people... A bunch of those people might click through to smaller communities of their interests (like programming) and discover instances like that.

    • I've been following the Meta drama on Mastodon for a while now, and while I don't think Threads is designed exclusively for EEE - I can help but feel that may become the unintentional result.

      that's and influx of a potential 3.74 billion people

      ☝️ Because of that right there ☝️

      The moderation tools on Lemmy and Mastodon are getting better, but short of defederation - a nuclear option - I worry that the influx of people will bring along the worst of the internet. The trolls, the astroturfers, the literal state sponsored hacking groups/rage farmers.

      I don't think Meta is going to come to the Fediverse to take it over, I think it's coming to get a short term win by accessing the community of people who purposefully abandoned it years ago.

      I disabled my Facebook account over 10 years ago, but by federation with my Mastodon instance mean Meta can claim me as "a Threads connected user" ? Probably - it's technically true.

    • If meta connects with Lemmy, that’s an influx of a potential 3.74 billion people…

      That sounds like it could be really hard for us to moderate. All those users would be coming from the same domain(s), so we'd have fewer options to protect ourselves from brigading, bots, and bad actors. Our moderation tooling and FOSS infrastructure is still in it's infancy.

      I fear it would quickly grow into something "to big to failban", as too much of our community's users would inevitably be centralised on Facebook's instance. Our instance, and users not Facebook, could lose a lot of autonomy if they couldn't partake here without realisticly opening their floodgates to every actor behind Thread's domains.

      • That sounds like it could be really hard for us to moderate. All those users would be coming from the same domain(s)

        Yea, though I don't know about the implementation details, which is why I meantioned "It seems a little early to completely reject the idea before knowing more about the implementation details."

        I don't really know how facebook intends to implement this. If it's an "All or nothing" kind of situation, or if they're are going to separate the instances and groups a bit.

        I also don't know about the options for "federating" - if we could do something like a "readonly" mode for specific (facebook) instances. That way this instance would get exposure to facebook, and if people see that the community is interesting they could make an actual account or something.

        Of course there's no value if we just get a horde of 12 year old trolls and their grandmas as shitposting users

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