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  • 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.

    • 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

      • I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.

        • But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so.

          Hmm, that sounds fairly applicable to the Paradox of Tolerance, where the we are beholden to be inclusive to an industry that has a repeated history of running afoul in society.

          The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
          https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

          • Well, Meta has a history of bad behavior in terms of how they treat users on their own systems, but no history at all for how they treat federated systems. You could even go the other way a bit and say that Meta has contributed meaningfully to the open source community with projects like React. (Obviously this is short on parallels as it doesn't involve their main income streams.)

            I would absolutely say that users should not join Threads directly. Meta is already hoovering everything they possibly can about their users. But the mechanism for that hoovering is the app, not the protocol. Any data they get about users that are not on Threads directly is data they were going to get anyway because that's the design of the protocol; anyone can get that data.

            It seems that members of a federated system can't decide how to treat an entity until that entity interacts with other members. You assess the nature of those interactions, and if they turn out to be bad, you defederate.

            What the Mastodon community is doing now looks a bit like "this person drives over the speed limit all the time, so they're obviously going to steal food if we let them volunteer at the homeless shelter!" But we have no evidence for such unwanted behavior whatsoever.

            edit: I saw on another thread that apparently Meta reached out to some Mastodon instances to try to get them to sign NDAs. If true, that's inexcusable and signals intent pretty clearly. Public protocols must be developed publicly.

          • Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.

            My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:

            1. Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
            2. Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

            I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.

            The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.

            • Honestly you sound really naive. You seem to be under this delusion that people who hold intolerant ideas are only doing so out of honest ignorance and they can simply be convinced otherwise. Have you ever interacted with an anti-vaxxer? A covid-denier? A religious fanatic? A slavery apologist? The world is absolutely filled to the brim with incredibly unreasonable people who will ignore all evidence for things that don't fit their world view. They aren't looking to be convinced otherwise.

              How do you plan on "respectfully asking" a homophobe to stop hating gay people, for instance? What if they just want to post about how much they wish gay people would die, what argument do you think would sway someone dedicated to their religion? Since its just speech and not action, they should be free to hate as much as they want according to you.

              Your whole point doesn't make any sense either, the idea that people would jump ship to make threads accounts if they were defederated is absurd. The fediverse is an incredibly niche corner of social media, the only reason you would specifically search out for communities here is if you were disatisfied with corporate social media (like threads) to begin with.

            • Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.

              Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper's quote in the wiki article above:

              ... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive ...

              Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

              I'll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation's historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it's future actions.

              I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

              • Twitter
              • Reddit
              • WeChat
              • TikTok
              • LinkedIn
              • YouTube
              • etc

              • … for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …

                If we can't convince people of our point of view, then that's our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we're saying "we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to". That doesn't seem appropriate.

                corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.

                If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it's hosted. If we don't do that, we're not really a fediverse.

                I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

                That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they'd all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become "too big". The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****

                • I don't agree that defederating with Meta is against the definition of Fediverse.

                  This is the header on fediverse.to:

                  The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics. Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.

                  Meta-owned instances go directly against every one of those points. For me, Fediverse should always be run by people not doing it for monetary gains. The main advantage of fediverse is not that you can and should connect with anyone, but that it's a community that is not ran for profit, and the servers are run for the people with good and self-less intentions, instead of users being heavily monetized and their behavior fed into algorithms to manipulate them even further with the content they are shown. And the federation is there mostly to alleviate a problem that usually happens in such comunities - people move on, servers die, admins can't run an instance any more. With fediverse, this is not that big of an issue, thanks to the way it's designed.

                  Allowing Meta, or any large company in that regard, in will destroy this idea of community run and privacy-centric social network for everyone, and only result in Meta profiting from it and the content the users create.

    • 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...

      • 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 we had to white board a decision matrix on Facebook federation, what would be the number of risk's and rewards for either approach? How would you weight or quantify them? Just trying to approach this from a little more of an analytical angle, given most of us are developers anyway.

        • I appreciate the push to be more analytical. I thought that I was being analytical, but this challenge to my thinking has made me realize that I've not been thorough.

          Edit: speaking of thorough, I missed including the founding principles of privacy-centric and ad-free. That would seem to disqualify Meta right out of the gate, just as most people seem to prefer.

          Ethically, it would seem that admins are limited by that, although I suppose technically, they should wait and see what an instance does before making the decision to defederate.

          Anyway, here's what I came up with should anyone decide to depart from the founding principles.

          What our root concerns? I could be wrong but I think they are advertising, accuracy, and civility. Some people are concerned about sheer volume of new entrants, but I don't know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to address that concern.

          Accuracy and civility are both moderation problems that the fediverse has to deal with whether Meta joins or not. Yes, there may be issues of scale and volume, but if the fediverse is to go mainstream, those problems need to be solved anyway.

          There are forms of advertising that I think we could all live with in moderate amounts, but surveillance ads and malware have pretty much destroyed any tolerance for ads.

          Okay, so how would ads get distributed in the fediverse?

          1. Any instance could push ads of any type, in any volume to anyone registered on that instance. Any instance could collect data from anyone registered on that instance for serving surveillance ads on that instance or for direct sale to data brokers.
          2. Any instance could push ads to anyone who subscribed to communities hosted on that instance, but would be severely limited in data collection without data sharing agreements between instances.
          3. Anyone accessing an instance via web page could be served ads, including surveillance ads, whether logged in or not.
          4. Anyone using a fediverse client could be served ads by that client, including surveillance ads.

          1 through 4 are all instance-specific and can be avoided by any user who wishes to. There will always be nooks and crannies inside the fediverse that are free of ads and surveillance. The very existence of the fediverse is evidence that there is a critical mass of people to keep those spaces alive.

          5, the client, has nothing to do with any instance or, in a sense, the fediverse. Clients can always do what a client wants. It's up to individuals to choose wisely.

          So what are the potential benefits? If Meta comes it at Meta scale, then anyone currently using both Meta properties and the fediverse might be able to keep the value of both while using only a single platform. If people using a Meta property follow Meta into the fediverse, that can increase the variety of communities and make very niche communities viable.

          My take is that the fediverse can cope with an entity like meta because nobody is forced to join their instance or interact with anything or anyone hosted on Meta.

          There are a couple of caveats:

          1. As previously noted, I don't know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to assess the risk of a very large influx of people over a very short period of time.
          2. If "embrace, extend, extinguish" is truly a concern, then I think being vigilant with respect to "extend" will prevent "extinguish."

        • Risks/rewards for whom?

          For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.

          But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. 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.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
          • Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
          • Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
          • Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user's post or a @meta.com 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.

          • I think that it mostly boils down to what most of the users see as the "Fediverse vision". For me, what's most important is that you have communities and users that are providing content to each other selflessly and with good intentions, instead of them being a product that is heavily monetized and manipulated through the content they are served. The Fediverse helps in this regard that it alleviates the problem with such communities - that they come and go, servers die or people hosting them move on. By being part of a fediverse, you distribute this between multiple such volunteers, so a server disappearing isn't that much of an issue.

            However, letting Meta in goes directly against this vision, and makes it even worse by letting Meta feed on and monetize content of every user on the platform. That goes directly against what I see as a main advantage of the Fediverse, and it will probably make me reconsider whether I want to participate. But that's only my, pretty selfish and gatekeepin opinion. But my dislike for corporations such as Meta is deep enough, that I simply don't want to have anything to do with them.

            But other users may have a different opinion, which I respect, and that's what this discussion is about. It's also possible that I may have misinterpreted what Fediverse was supposed to be about, and I was just projecting what I would like it to be. I guess that we will see how will the Meta situation eventually turn out. I guess that Fediverse will probably split into Metaverse with instances that did federate, and Fediverse that didn't. All that remains to be seen is how large will be the communities left on either side. (Now that I think about it, maybe I have it wrong, and you can for example defederate from Meta, but still be federated with i.e metalovers.lm that are federated with Meta? How does that even work, actually? Will we be able to interact with Meta users through that instance, but not with their posts, or never message them?)

      • I appreciate your reconsidering your position! Thanks for taking my argument in good faith hahaha. I was worried I’d get some hate for it.

        Cheers!

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