I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy:
I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts:
I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
We have to have to remember microblogging is not the only thing that exists in the fediverse. Having access to threads from lemmy will pretty much have no impact.
Other instances would just de-federate in that case. I don’t think this is that much of an issue really because threads would just end up being its own ecosystem with no other instances willing to federate with it.
Can someone with a better understanding of how Federation works confirm or explain why this is wrong? I only learned about this stuff like 4 days ago after leaving Reddit.
I rly don‘t see it that way. The main reason they went for ActivityPub was to fuck Twitter. They just want to bind users long term to Threads and the combination WordPress, thumbler and meta is a very strong argument. I don‘t think they care so much about the data of the small userbase. The care about potential ways to monetise NSFW content without alarming the advertisers.
And they care about AP because that can make them even bigger then they are now.
I don’t have data, but I think going with ActivityPub also helps Meta to hurt BlueSky and their AtProto. By adopting ActivityPub, Meta is making it a Market Standard. Their userbase is huge, and other apps will need to use it to integrate with them. Why would someone adopt AtProto?
If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won’t see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don’t matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it’s like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.
I don’t see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn’t stay on shit they control.
And if you’re worried about their app collecting data: then don’t fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else’s phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.
It’s a Free, Open-Source instant messaging app, the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp, which offers encrypted messaging and most functionality that WhatsApp also offers. It failed to take off as well as we’d hoped since most people resort to iMessage or WhatsApp instead, both owned and controlled by Apple and Zuck respectively.
I’m totally willing to discuss my thoughts since it seems I’m in the minority on this threads mania-
Once Threads launches it’ll obviously have a lot more users than the whole fediverse combined, maybe even 90% of all users. Now let’s say some instances with barely 1-2% users and small content feed defederate from it. Do people think a new user who does not care about things like open source or privacy will join the niche instance? No, people will go where the content is. Big social media giants will jump on fediverse bandwagon and instances who dont fetch their data will become extremely niche communtites (some might like that but it’s not good for overall fediverse health).
Instead let’s say we keep federated with threads, and make posts like how YSK: other instances don’t track your data, other instances are free from corpo greed, other instances are run by normal people etc etc and make users aware and let them naturally migrate. Ideally, meta will bring the eyeballs which we can help to make fediverse as a whole grow.
imo it’s naive to think that us 100k users defederating will put even a dent on threads. Insta tik-tok people will join the new trendy social media and generate content. The only solution is to make people constantly aware that better alternatives to view the same content exist.
The potential problem is not us making a dent on Threads, I couldn’t care less if people want to use it. The potential problem is that they do the EEE (link1, link2) on the Fediverse. It’s not us trying to steal users from them, or preventing people from joining them, it’s about preventing them from becoming the standard way for people to access the Fediverse, thus giving them control over the protocol’s direction and giving them the possibility to, once they are the de facto standard, defederate and kill the rest of small communities.
That, and personally, I wouldn’t like Meta meddling with the protocol, simply because there is no beneficial outcome for them other than gaining control of it, which would be horrible.
Let’s say all of mastodon instances not federating Threads. What stopping Meta to do EEE on ActivityPub? That protocol is not owned by mastodon creator or other devs. It’s handled by W3C afaik
users won’t want to use an instance that can’t view content from threads (since that where’s most content would be), but they’ll be much more open to joining an open source instance that federated and views stuff from there as well.
I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they’ve done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they’re trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it’s how capitalism works.
If I wanted to see content from my racist Trumper uncle, I would just create a Facebook account. Keep Threads far away from the rest of the Fediverse. We don’t need to compete with them. Who cares if they’re way bigger with way more content if 99% of that content is garbage?
Serious note: I think the point of decentralized networks like this is that each instance will have to choose to federate with Threads or any other future corporate social media. If that sounds dangerous, welcome to the freedom of choice baybee! It sucks that the truth is that as long as we want this to be a free space where people can choose what and where they see content, that means some will choose to work with the big-easy-techgiant rather than take a harder approach because 99% of people aren’t that invested.
I really don’t understand this logic…
There is literally absolute no advantage by not federating with Meta.
Why would users prefer the free Fediverse MORE if it’s not federated with the “big and good” Metaverse?
If anything it just drives them away into Metas arms, because the non-Meta instances are small and all the stuff is on Meta anyway.
Defederating is just the worst case result, but instantly from the beginning… How does that do any good???
Most people in this thread have a vastly overestimated opinion of how large the fediverse is, how relevant it is to social media overall, and how much any other social media company actually cares about what’s going on here. If every server defederates from Meta, Meta will just shrug and go on with its day, and continue siphoning users off anyway. Probably even faster than before, because there will be no way for fediverse users to see the Threads stuff they want to see. They’ll have to explicitly re-home over there. And what are the chances they’ll stick around on the fediverse after that?
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
Maybe they want to use Activity Pub so that they can influence further development of it. I don’t know procedure how w3c is makeing decisions and updates to it, but I doubt someone that is not using it can have influence.
They are selling personalized domains, on ActivityPub every domain looks like a different instance. I don’t know that we have the ability to block every single one of the vanity domains they will probably sell for less than a twitter checkmark.
I think this is a good use case for creating white lists for federation as opposed to black listing the blocked ones and I figured one day it might come to that. We’ll have to put together some registry where new strains nstancea can sign up to be included. I know that sounds antithetical to federation, but there are solutions to the problems threads is creating.
I don’t think this will matter at all. The first instance that brands itself as “we only federate with instances that exclude all relationships with Meta,” is the instance I will be in and all the people who I want to hang around will be there also. Federating with Meta will be like holding a flashing neon sign that says “stay away from me.”
I don’t want anything to do with Reddit anymore and I haven’t had anything to do with Twitter or Facebook for more than 10 years - and all for similar reasons. Huge groups of people brought together by money are fucking poison.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
But… what kind of Camel milk do you like?
I think meta will dominate the space that federates with it. Hopefully none of my instances will do that… And I will be unaffected.
We have to have to remember microblogging is not the only thing that exists in the fediverse. Having access to threads from lemmy will pretty much have no impact.
Could Threads essentially cause a kinda DDOS attack onto other instances or bloating other instances with data?
They could, but why would they need to? They are so much bigger they work will be done for them without having to do anything
Other instances would just de-federate in that case. I don’t think this is that much of an issue really because threads would just end up being its own ecosystem with no other instances willing to federate with it.
Can someone with a better understanding of how Federation works confirm or explain why this is wrong? I only learned about this stuff like 4 days ago after leaving Reddit.
I rly don‘t see it that way. The main reason they went for ActivityPub was to fuck Twitter. They just want to bind users long term to Threads and the combination WordPress, thumbler and meta is a very strong argument. I don‘t think they care so much about the data of the small userbase. The care about potential ways to monetise NSFW content without alarming the advertisers. And they care about AP because that can make them even bigger then they are now.
The thing about having advertiser friendly nsfw content is actually really insightful
I don’t have data, but I think going with ActivityPub also helps Meta to hurt BlueSky and their AtProto. By adopting ActivityPub, Meta is making it a Market Standard. Their userbase is huge, and other apps will need to use it to integrate with them. Why would someone adopt AtProto?
I also think they don’t care about us, I doubt they even know we exist.
That doesn’t change that they would destroy us unintentionally. Like Vogons.
If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won’t see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don’t matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it’s like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.
I don’t see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn’t stay on shit they control.
And if you’re worried about their app collecting data: then don’t fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else’s phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.
What is Signal?
It’s a Free, Open-Source instant messaging app, the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp, which offers encrypted messaging and most functionality that WhatsApp also offers. It failed to take off as well as we’d hoped since most people resort to iMessage or WhatsApp instead, both owned and controlled by Apple and Zuck respectively.
Can I still use Signal?
Oh yeah it’s still available and usable. I use it to communicate with my immediate family, it’s a well-built app.
I’m totally willing to discuss my thoughts since it seems I’m in the minority on this threads mania-
Once Threads launches it’ll obviously have a lot more users than the whole fediverse combined, maybe even 90% of all users. Now let’s say some instances with barely 1-2% users and small content feed defederate from it. Do people think a new user who does not care about things like open source or privacy will join the niche instance? No, people will go where the content is. Big social media giants will jump on fediverse bandwagon and instances who dont fetch their data will become extremely niche communtites (some might like that but it’s not good for overall fediverse health).
Instead let’s say we keep federated with threads, and make posts like how YSK: other instances don’t track your data, other instances are free from corpo greed, other instances are run by normal people etc etc and make users aware and let them naturally migrate. Ideally, meta will bring the eyeballs which we can help to make fediverse as a whole grow.
imo it’s naive to think that us 100k users defederating will put even a dent on threads. Insta tik-tok people will join the new trendy social media and generate content. The only solution is to make people constantly aware that better alternatives to view the same content exist.
The potential problem is not us making a dent on Threads, I couldn’t care less if people want to use it. The potential problem is that they do the EEE (link1, link2) on the Fediverse. It’s not us trying to steal users from them, or preventing people from joining them, it’s about preventing them from becoming the standard way for people to access the Fediverse, thus giving them control over the protocol’s direction and giving them the possibility to, once they are the de facto standard, defederate and kill the rest of small communities.
That, and personally, I wouldn’t like Meta meddling with the protocol, simply because there is no beneficial outcome for them other than gaining control of it, which would be horrible.
Let’s say all of mastodon instances not federating Threads. What stopping Meta to do EEE on ActivityPub? That protocol is not owned by mastodon creator or other devs. It’s handled by W3C afaik
Nothing is, other than the users themselves by not federating with them.
users won’t want to use an instance that can’t view content from threads (since that where’s most content would be), but they’ll be much more open to joining an open source instance that federated and views stuff from there as well.
I wouldn’t want to use an instance that shows me Meta content, even if that’s where the majority of content is, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
I am here because I value quality over quantity.
I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they’ve done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they’re trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it’s how capitalism works.
Spot on. Anyone cooperating with them is a fool.
Well on the bright side, at least the fediverse is seen as a genuine threat to current social media. Hopefully it will stay that way.
If I wanted to see content from my racist Trumper uncle, I would just create a Facebook account. Keep Threads far away from the rest of the Fediverse. We don’t need to compete with them. Who cares if they’re way bigger with way more content if 99% of that content is garbage?
Counterpoint: beans.
Serious note: I think the point of decentralized networks like this is that each instance will have to choose to federate with Threads or any other future corporate social media. If that sounds dangerous, welcome to the freedom of choice baybee! It sucks that the truth is that as long as we want this to be a free space where people can choose what and where they see content, that means some will choose to work with the big-easy-techgiant rather than take a harder approach because 99% of people aren’t that invested.
I really don’t understand this logic… There is literally absolute no advantage by not federating with Meta.
Why would users prefer the free Fediverse MORE if it’s not federated with the “big and good” Metaverse? If anything it just drives them away into Metas arms, because the non-Meta instances are small and all the stuff is on Meta anyway.
Defederating is just the worst case result, but instantly from the beginning… How does that do any good???
https://lemmy.world/comment/891372
Both those things literally happen with 100% certainty and instantly when you defederate…
Meta is not going to go away or fail somehow just because everyone defederates from them!
Most people in this thread have a vastly overestimated opinion of how large the fediverse is, how relevant it is to social media overall, and how much any other social media company actually cares about what’s going on here. If every server defederates from Meta, Meta will just shrug and go on with its day, and continue siphoning users off anyway. Probably even faster than before, because there will be no way for fediverse users to see the Threads stuff they want to see. They’ll have to explicitly re-home over there. And what are the chances they’ll stick around on the fediverse after that?
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
Maybe they want to use Activity Pub so that they can influence further development of it. I don’t know procedure how w3c is makeing decisions and updates to it, but I doubt someone that is not using it can have influence.
It could easily be forked if they start fucking around, but that is a real danger.
They are selling personalized domains, on ActivityPub every domain looks like a different instance. I don’t know that we have the ability to block every single one of the vanity domains they will probably sell for less than a twitter checkmark.
I think this is a good use case for creating white lists for federation as opposed to black listing the blocked ones and I figured one day it might come to that. We’ll have to put together some registry where new strains nstancea can sign up to be included. I know that sounds antithetical to federation, but there are solutions to the problems threads is creating.
tbh, as a small instance, i might be defederating meta. im not a fan of the person that has everything through theft and scam.
I don’t think this will matter at all. The first instance that brands itself as “we only federate with instances that exclude all relationships with Meta,” is the instance I will be in and all the people who I want to hang around will be there also. Federating with Meta will be like holding a flashing neon sign that says “stay away from me.”
I don’t want anything to do with Reddit anymore and I haven’t had anything to do with Twitter or Facebook for more than 10 years - and all for similar reasons. Huge groups of people brought together by money are fucking poison.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
Where’s that Fediverse’s anti-Meta treaty again? Should update em clauses by now.