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Threads and the Fediverse

Start by reading these two articles:

Ok, now that you've done that (hopefully in the order I posted them), I can begin.

I have always been a strong supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), so much so that all of my projects (yes all) are OSS and fully open for anyone to use. And with that, I knew that things could be used for good... and bad. I took that risk. But I also made sure to build stuff that wasn't, in itself, inherently bad. I didn't build anything unethical to my eyes (I understand the nuance here).

But I've seen what unethical devs can do.

Just take a look at those implementing the ModFascismBot for Reddit (that's not its name, but that's what it is). That is an incredibly unethical thing to build. Not because it's a private company controlling what they want their site to do, no, that's fine by me. Reddit can do whatever they want. But because it's an attempt to lie about reality, to force users to do something through manipulation not through honesty. Even subreddits that voted overwhelmingly to shut down still got messaged by the bot telling them that the users (that voted for it) didn't want it and they had to open back up or they would be removed from mod position. This is not ethical. This is not right. This is not what the internet is about.

Or the unethical devs at Twitter, who:

It's one thing for an organization to have political lean...that is just a part of life, and that will never end. It's another to actually sow disinformation in order to accomplish nefarious things to further your profits. It is what has caused massive addiction to tobacco, the continuation of climate change, death and disfiguration from forever chemicals, ovarian cancer and mesothelioma from undisclosed exposure to asbestos, or selling 'health products' that claim to cure everything under the sun, but can "interfere with clinical lab tests, such as those used to diagnose heart attacks".

Please do not confuse this for saying that companies shouldn't be able to sell things and make a profit. If you want to sell someone something that kills them if they misuse it and you market it as such, you go for it. That's literally how every product in the cleaning aisle of your grocery store works. That's how guns work, that's how fertilizers work, that's why we have labels. But manipulation for profit is unethical, and that's why companies hide it. It hurts their bottom line. They know that their products will not be used if they reveal the truth. Instead of doing something good for humanity, they choose the subterfuge. Profits over people. Profits over Earth honestly. Profits over continuing the human race. Absolutely nothing matters to companies like this. And unethical developers enable this.

Facebook (ok, fine, Meta, still going to refer to them as FB though) is trying to join the Fediverse. We as a community, but honestly each of you as individuals, have a decision to make. Do they stay or do they go? Let's put some information on the table.

Facebook...

  • lies about the amount of misinformation it removes ^1
  • increased censorship of 'anti-state' posts ^1 ^2 ^3
  • lied to Congress about social networks polarizing people, while FB's own researchers found that they do ^2
  • attempted to attract preteens to the platform (huh, wonder where all that "you must be 13" stuff went) ^4
  • rewards outrage and discord ^3

Facebook also...

  • Allows for checking on friends and family in disasters ^6
  • Created and maintained some of the most popular open source software on the planet (including the software that runs the interface you're looking at right now) [7][8]

From my perspective... There's not much good about FB. It has single handedly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people across the planet, if not hundreds of thousands. It continually makes people angrier and angrier. It's a launching pad for scammers, thieves, malevolent malefactors, manipulators, dictators, to push their conquests onto the world through manipulation, lies, tricks, and deceit. Its algorithms foster an echo chamber effect, exacerbating division and animosity, making civil discourse and mutual understanding all but impossible. Instead of being a platform for connection, it often serves as a catalyst for discord and misinformation. FB's propensity for prioritizing user engagement over factual accuracy has resulted in a global maelstrom of confusion and mistrust. Innocent minds are drawn into this vortex, manipulated by fear and falsehoods, consequently promoting harmful actions and beliefs. Despite its potential to be a tool for good, it is more frequently wielded as a weapon, sharpened by unscrupulous entities exploiting its vast reach and influence. The promise of a globally connected community seems to be overshadowed by its darker realities.

As a person, I believe that we need to choose things as a community. I do not believe in the 'BDFL'...the Benevolent Dictator For Life. Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, wrote an article just recently about how things would have been different if they had stayed BDFL of Rust. From my position the BDFLs we currently have on this planet really suck. Not just politically, but even in tech. I don't think that path is good for society. It might work in specific circumstances, but it usually fails, and when it does, people get hurt. Badly.

So, with that in mind, I've been working on a polling feature for Lemmy. I seriously doubt I'll be done with it soon, but hopefully FB takes a while longer to implement federation. I understand there's a desire for me, or the other admins to just make a decision, but I really don't like doing that. If it comes down to it, I will implement defederation to start with, but I will still be holding a vote as soon as I can get this damn feature done.

[^8]: the website actually uses Inferno, but from what I can tell it was forked directly from React, judging from the actually documentation and references in the repo.

48 comments

  • Great read and I love the angle you're taking, having the community vote for it is a great idea even if the answer is fairly predictable. Hope other instance admins follow suit.

    but hopefully FB takes a while longer to implement federation.

    I wouldn't worry too much about it. Companies are pretty slow to implement big changes, and when they do federate I doubt they'll initially federate with anything other than major mastodon instances and test the waters.

  • FWIW: I see no reason to federate with Threads/Meta/FB. We can always change our minds later.

    My hope will be that users of Threads will end up learning about federation/activity pub in general, then become curious about other instances. I’m the early nineties, many people thought AOL was the internet. It was the intro to the internet, for many, many people who moved on to finding all other kinds of wonderful stuff out there. No reason it couldn’t happen that way.

    • And I'm on the other side thinking I don't see any reason to defederate threads just because it is run by Meta. We always can change our minds later.

      I think we should see threads just as another instance of a new service. If we see that this instance is not playing well we defederate them. So same rules applied to all.

      There are still good people on Facebook/Instagram how just never heard about Lemmy, mastodon and the Fendiverse. And even if Threads or other meta platforms will implement activity pup but no real Fendiverse services will allow federation with them those people will still never get in touch with us because they never interact with us.

      Just knowing about activity pup exists will not change this. Most of those people don't have a tech background like we have and are therefore less interested in finding out what that stuff is. They will probably assume that this is some meta think to connect to other services of Meta.

      I say letting federation open so people can see and find stuff from the Fedivers in meta Services and give people so maybe even the possibility to move from threads to mastodon (or Lemmy although I think this is less comparable to any meta service) will put much more pressure on meta then it will put on us.

      If we defederate a few months after (because of any valid reason) this we'll be seen by much more people even on the meta side and the impact of this will be much greater. So meta will be willing to make fedivers happy (or at least less angry?). This gives the power back to us, the people. They will care about us because they are depending on us, at least to an extent. That's what the fedivers was created for I thought.

  • Normal people, and society in general, are often scary and reckless with their use of technology. Like, they expect it to single-handedly solve all problems, or they expect evil scientists to doom us all, or they take technologies which are in reality designed by highly intelligent and well-intentioned people to be part and parcel of a plot to turn us all into slaves or kill us all, or they fall for scammers using technobabble. Normal people mostly don't know about FOSS or have a firm grasp on the ethics or the practical consequences that computer technology has on society.

    Facebook, while it is a technology company and therefore it knows more about technology, is also a part of normal society, it has some of the scary recklessness of normal people with regards to technology, and it is likely to interact with very large numbers of non-technical people. That unpredictability does not seem to be favorable to a small platform like programming.dev - this site's probably pretty fragile to other people making rash decisions with technology. I don't know the details, but I imagine things are better, but maybe not better enough for other, larger Lemmy instances, due to limitations on developer time. If a small part of a big company decides to start making problems, they might be able to cause big problems.

    I don't see a way to dramatically tilt the odds of that unpredictability being a positive thing in favor of this site or FOSS as a whole by integrating with them - it doesn't seem to grant Lemmy instances any leverage over them. Their goodwill is of dubious value - they were already likely to try to roll over Lemmy if it ever seemed to them to be convenient for them, which it very easily could become, and giving instances the option of defederating doesn't seem like it should upset them too too much or give them a cover to do mean things to mess up the platform.

    So yes, I'm pro-defederation.

    I expect people will wonder where I'm coming from with this huge block of text, because I think people tend to assume that when people use a lot of words, they either know a lot, are an idiot, or are trying to trick them. I'd say that this is situation fits none of those three categories. I think a lot about stuff like computer ethics, so that's why I'm being so wordy about this - but I'm not speaking out of practical experience. My experience is talking with mostly non-technical family, reading the news, reading r/programming before the blackout and programming.dev now, trying to get into programming and mostly failing due to lack of mental energy, and thinking about technology a lot in my free time.

  • for my vote I'd say that defederating any non-FOSS instance, chat service, community is the way to go.

    To endorse or collaborate with any zero-sum systems seems like a terrible decision for fediverse projects/instances to take

  • My concern is rather from technical aspect. For example the admins of my home instance temporarily defederated lemmy.world in the past due to having way too high traffic overloading the lemmy.sdf.org servers. They quickly rushed to the servers to upgrade them, which fixed the issue. However threads is much much much larger than lemmy.world.

  • In reply to an offline discussion:

    I get Facebook is evil and all, but having trouble understanding why it shouldn't be federated. Is the fear that FB content will overwhelm the network/resources? All arguments I see are philosophical or emotional. Thinking users should be able to filter content they don't want and operators should behave more like a DNS service (routing). Thinking FB federation would only increase adoption

    Increase adoption? Probably, but taking a more pragmatic standpoint, setting aside Facebook's notorious history, I'd prefer a more cautious approach by first incentivizing organizations, institutions, and perhaps even individuals to join the FediVerse by not relying on a centralized instance.

    If users can spread out using other federated platforms, diversifying stakeholders in the network, then this could help establish some degree of protocol ossification for ActivityPup.

    In this regard, I shared similar concerns with reddit users who were at first asking app developers to trivialise user onboarding by defaulting everyone to lemmy.world . Given recent security incidents, I think this week has been a notable (if not a thankfully early and forgiving) reminder of the perils of putting all our eggs into one basket/instance. IMHO, sustaining perpetual diversity of our network is key for the Fediverse's survival, and perhaps for the Internet itself in general.

    Instead, we could prioritize federating with more independent stakeholders first, rather than with a single social media instance that is already larger (by several orders of magnitude) than the current Lemmy-verse, let alone the entire Fediverse.

    Platform Total Active
    Facebook Threads 100,000,000 ?
    Fediverse 10,048,569 1,941,542
    Lemmy 363,331 74,361

    Sources:

    There are defeatists that suggest if ActivityPup can not passively withstand such onslaughts, then it's domize is already assured. Yet I would argue that communities are not passive, and that maintaining a public garden takes proactive efforts and vigilance, lest it be lost and succumb to wild overgrowth or a monoculture of human induced invasive species. Thus we should strategically seek to federate with instances that have self invested communities focused on self preservation, rather than instances that only have fiduciary obligations in monetization.

    If I could stretch this agricultural medafor to its limits, then I'd say we do not yet have the moderation tooling or modern farming equipment to cultivate quality content on an industrial scale. Taking on to much land at once without enough self invested community members, where we'd have to pick up the slack as unpaid moderators (cough-Reddit), could lead to mismanagement of limited (and voluntary) resources. Given the historic issues of content moderation on Facebook's platform, and my impression that Facebook users in general are ambivalent to the self preservation of the company in comparison to its hosted content, I think it safe to say we'd have better success in learning to walk before attempting to run with global scale conglomerates.

    While some may feel this remains a philosophical argument, I'd argue it is more of a pragmatic one, given the current maturity of the Lemmy software, the scale of current stakeholders, and realistic resources at our current disposal, taking on Facebook's level of traffic would be biting off more than we could chew.

48 comments