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.
Please follow lemmy.ml and stand up to the big guys and defederate in whatever form it comes. This is a chance to finally stand alone from the Mega corps and have some peace and quiet.
Peace and quiet is so rare in social media these days, that is so not obvious that we somehow have it here
Looks like I chose poorly with mastodon.social. I really don’t want to have to switch instances at this point.
Yes, it was definitely a poor choice. Eugen, the owner of the instance was even involved in NDA talks with meta.
What does N/A signify? And does allow mean they are federating?
More like they haven’t publicly announced anything yet.
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N/A != NDA
So they actually meant Not Applicable? My bad, I thought they misspelled it.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m looking for a new masto server.
I’m really surprised by how many
allows I’m seeing
Exactly we’re here and doing all this work on our own dime so we can have a social media site that won’t turn out like every corporate social media site ever. It’s already working the way we want it to without any help from Facebook, so logically giving them a seat at the table can only not help.
Preach! There’s a good opportunity here to keep this space free from the greedy hands of a bunch of rich assholes. People are so eager for there to be a ‘new twitter’ but haven’t even raised one question about whether threads has fundamentally addressed the problem that has lead to the downfall of twitter and Reddit. Meet your new boss, same as the old boss. Why the hell should we keep just hoping that some billionaire ceo will do what’s right. Even if that ceo does the right thing, they will eventually be replaced.
There can be a place on the internet free from capitalist exploitation for profit. Communities can exist solely for the sake of the community. Not every goddamn thing needs to be monetized. Send a clear message that past tactics will not fly here.
Amen
Agreed. I want this place to remain completely free from corporate fuckery.
“Peace and quiet” is very well put.
I’m not a lemm.ee user, but I support defederation should Meta decide to permit access to Lemmy instances. We’re here to escape Silicon Valley, not look for opportunities to invite them to dinner.
Lemm.ee is a great instance if you ever want to ride shotgun on the long road trip of the fediverse but what I love the most about this experience is exactly this…create your own server, instances, communities. We are getting an early chance to build and customize our own user experience here. The idea of keeping out what we are fighting against makes sense to me and wouldn’t it be cool if @sunaurus did it early in the game like the 2nd largest instance did and beat .world to it? (if they follow suit, which I can’t predict)
First of all did you make your own instance for your profile?
Second of all and more importantly I think you’re right. Even if you aren’t part of a server and they decide to federate it indirectly screws us over in the short term and we get probably get totally messed up in the long term
Some said it’s the Star Trek borg and I’m not a fan but it’s a great parallel
Yes, I spun up my own instance. Partly for fun, but also to have control over my own federation should conflict affect an instance someone else operates.
That’s nice. I would do it myself but thinking my 3 brain cells sad lol and compared to some people I’m not very tech savvy
What are the benefits of spinning up an instance yourself? And what are you hosting it on?
I host it on a very small VPS. A huge benefit is c/all never contains communities I have no interest in. Therefore, communities I subscribe to are “favorites”. c/all is a superset of my favorites plus communities I check less frequently.
I’m here to escape Sillicon Valley, not to cut off contact with anyone who’s chosen not to.
Hell no. I came to Lemmy to get AWAY from the corporate overlords.
Fuck Zuck and fuck Meta
fuckfuck
Always remember.
“I don’t know why. They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg
Considering Meta mines as much data from as many people as possible just to advertise to them and also they can’t even launch Threads in the EU right now because of how aggressively it tracks literally everything about their users and Threads’ only purpose is to gather more data to sell to more people, I think that alone is worth not letting them play.
It won’t matter to you if you’re using ActivityPub, because they can’t mine any of your data that isn’t publically available through scraping anyway.
Staying as far away from Meta has been my goal since leaving Facebook 8 years ago. I really like this instance, it meets all of my needs for my Reddit replacement.
I don’t see a reason to federate with a corporation unless they were able to deliver something I’m not currently getting and their corporate support would greatly improve performance/sustainability for this instance. But based on previous experience, a company entering a space usually makes it worse.
I wish I didn’t love my quest 2 so much.
Sad thing is I don’t even have time to play it.
The thing with VR is that non-bigcorp alternatives cost a fortune, as Meta takes the loss on the hardware. Standalone VR is also impossible without bigcorp interference (as of now!)
I still have an Instagram account, when a company gets so big they get hard to avoid. But Instagram, for the time being, has a lot of content I can’t find elsewhere.
But I feel like this vote is an easy nay.
I’m missing something.
What vote?
From the OP’s post:
I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.
How is this related to the previous comment?
Dude mentioned staying away from meta…
Who makes the quest 2?
“There are two types of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.”
Dude mentioned staying away from meta…
Who makes the quest 2?
“ There are two types of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.”
I think like a lot of people the reason I’m putting up with the growing pains of a decentralized network, the fragmentation of communities that come with it, and sync issues across instances is because we want to try something that isn’t run by corporations that views users as something to sell off to the highest bidder. If I wanted to deal with a centralized large user base why wouldn’t I just skip this whole fediverse thing and go straight to Meta or reddit or Twitter or tiktok that is way more user friendly? I’m not here because I want another reddit clone that ends up being run or is influenced by another billionaire asshole down the line.
Strongly in favour of defederating. Firstly because I don’t want advertising or big businesses taking over feeds, but the point you made about moderation is critical. The sheer amount of content that instance admins will have to deal with will be unmanageable.
On a side note the whole fediverse desperately needs solid moderation tools to handle it’s growth.
No Federation with Corporations.
We should make a “No Federation With Corporation” sticker
I’d buy a patch, it would go well with
.
Now now now friend it sounds to me like you haven’t had your brain washing! Don’t you know Meta has our best interest when it comes to delivering high quality ads. They even collect all your data and manipulate what you see because they care so much that you’re seeing ads that might interest you in an extremely invasive way
Ok in all seriousness we cannot associate with meta becuase I’m sure they’ll make a ton of big communities and non meta users will join because of the sheer size and then close it off and go “if you want your community you gotta get the meta app” the whole embrace extend exterminate thing
Right, or they’ll set their own technical standards… so lemmy.world can’t interact with threads unless they start doing data mining that threads can scrape. This is almost certainly their conscious and explicit plan.
Sounds like a good recipe for failure. Let’s block all instance we don’t like for whatever reason. Let’s fragment the fediverae till nobody uses it because it’s a mess of instances that don’t talk to each other for a slew of reason.
Oh stop being hyperbolic. That’s not what I said at all. Big companies like Meta will ruin this place given half the chance. They don’t want a Fediverse, they want access to the users here so that they might one day absorb them. Federation with corporations will ruin the Fediverse, it’s that simple.
Go make a threads account if you want to look at ads so badly.
Already made an account to see that it was all about. So how big is too big? Who do we block after meta?
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Fuck facebook and fuck everything that has to do with it! Defederate!
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You know, we’ve already got an app to go to deal with Zucks’ social media hole. It would be nice to have a space that wasn’t connected to it. Then we all get the best of both worlds.
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 bitch 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.”
As I said, the article itself contains no proof that results would have been any different in the long term for XMPP. It’s just a baseless theory. We can read it again and again but the results will always be the same, I’m not sure why you’re pointing back to it when I analyzed every point it tries to make already.
I am not saying EEE doesn’t exist, I’m just saying that nothing in that article contributes to our discussion, and that the EEE scenario doesn’t really even fit our situation.
WhatsApp and Instagram were direct competitors to Facebook and Facebook messenger respectively. While not as big as Facebook, Instagram was pretty popular and WhatsApp was already a standard of communication in multiple countries (they payed 19 billions for it) So yeah, definitely they thought it was better to buy than compete. But are we really thinking the fediverse is even comparable to Instagram or WhatsApp? They wouldn’t buy it even if they could, it’s literally less than crumbles to them, both in value and user base.
I love the fediverse and I’m excited about it but let’s be serious, it’s crazy to even think meta would see it as a competitor. Remember, 19 billions dollars. That’s what meta thought it was better to pay to remove a competitor almost 10 years ago. Can you value the current fediverse even a 1% of that? Let’s not kid ourselves, we’re in no shape or form any kind of threat or competition to Meta.
And, also, we’re a different kind of service altogether. They would do something about reddit first if they were interested in this kind of service.
What they care about is filling the Twitter void, and this was the quickest/cheapest/most convenient way to do it. It can cause problems for mastodon, probably for kbin, but lemmy’s situation is different.
As I said before, there are legitimate causes of worry (moderations, ads, sheer size of their user base, pushing agendas etc) Let’s talk about those, which are important and can lead us to develop new ideas and ways to keep the fediverse healthy.
This EEE scarecrow makes no sense in our situation. We’re different services even if we can coincidentally communicate with to each other.
Also people keep saying to defederate when there is nothing to deferate from at the moment, threads is not federating anything. We don’t even know which domain we are supposed to defederate. Whats the point of talking technicalities without understanding them?
The conversation about what to do in case that happens is useful and healthy, but the sheer amount of disinformation and misunderstanding about the concepts is frankly crazy.
We don’t want to become like meta platforms that are full of disinformation, but most people keep spreading disinformation and mindless slogans here too instead of talking about the real issues.
That Zuck quote is the literal example of that. I have yet to see even one single person here saying that they trust Zuck. But people keep quoting it ad nauseam as if it has any meaning in our context. We are discussing about what are the risks and if they outweght the eventual benefits, nobody is saying that they trust the lizard.
I prefer someone saying “fuck meta, i don’t want any connection to them out of ethics” compared to the 200000th person posting the XMPP article as an out of context Bible.
If you read all of my previous post, you know I’m pro defederation, there is no point in trying to convince me since we already agree.
I’m just strongly against disinformation, fake issues and red herrings
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.
