How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:
Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
Federation will attract more users:
Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
We just need to create “better” front ends:
This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.
Thanks to Google and Facebook it was more widely used. When they stopped their involvement, XMPP went back to its previous state.
The Fediverse is already popular. If Meta embrace it before leaving it, it will come back to its present state, like XMPP. But unlike XMPP, the previous state is a good one. Thus it’s not something I fear.
I do tend to think that we should defederate, but the XMPP example seems irrelevant to me. It’s more like an email situation. That’s something I fear.
I’ll probably keep a presence on a non-threads-federated instance and one on a threads-federated instance, just to compare and to talk to grandma. I doubt I’ll spend much time scrolling through whatever it is Instagram users write about but you never know.
Is Threads going to have communities like Lemmy? If not, this seems like much more of an issue for Mastodon, not as much for the “Threadiverse” part of the Fediverse.
I only joined Lemmy because of its open source, non-manipulative, not-for-profit nature. If Meta joins it will be a good reason for me to quit. Hell, even Reddit would be better than a Fediverse with Meta IMO.
Hopefully .world decides to defederate Threads and Meta, but if they refuse you can migrate to another instance that does defederate them. The solution here should be to refuse Meta, not give up on Lemmy and the Fediverse.
They won’t be able to bribe every instance without making it known to the world but another mass migration even if within the same federation would discourage a lot of new users from joining/staying though.
This makes me so fucking angry that these fuckers wouldn’t even let us have a small corner of the internet to ourselves.
Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.
People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.
Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP “take a stand” against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.
ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.
We can see the end state of email from when they let big corps take over - its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam.
We have an opportunity to prevent that before it happens here, too. ^.}^
ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.
ISPs and Instances both offer you access to a wider network. That one exists on a network level is another matter. If there were a multitude of ISPs, like there was in the dialup era, would you have wanted them to decide what domains resolve?
its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam
That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.
What email is really suffering from is a failure of the network to combat abuse. That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.
That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.
They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.
Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.
That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.
This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools ^.^
They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.
It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse. That is true with or without trouble from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. If you wrote a machine learning algorithm to find spam, your ML would come to the same conclusion. There’s no obvious solution to that.
Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.
Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.
This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools .
Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.
Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.
They will do it to us, not just Threads users.
Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.
Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.
Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea ^.^
It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse
Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users ^.^
Do, what, specifically? How will they affect that your instance shows you?
Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea .
Should a listserv block people who are subscribed to another listserv then?
Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users .
An email is a message from a user at a domain. A fediverse post is a message from a user at a domain.
Content is public, but to a big email provider, it’s not much more data. Gmail filters based on identical-looking messages from an “unestablished” domain. If you came up with a way to filter spam on the fediverse, it would likely look very similar.
If Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever picks up critical mass, I can guarantee you there will be a shit ton of spam, misinformation, disinformation, and scammy nonesense coming from a long tail of instances. Much of the garbage will, thanks to large language models, look pretty human, too. The only real roadblock to it will be defederation from “unestablished” instances and even that will be unreliable at best.
There really isn’t a good solution to it, at least one that isn’t invasive in ways we won’t like.
Don’t even know why and how there are arguments in favor of Meta. They’re bad, everyone knows it. People still use them because they’re basically forced to keep up with acquaintances and family.
Well, I mean, in the United States our culture is built around “business good; much innovation” and anything to stymie corporate efforts is met with groans of “you’ll understand why it must be this way when you’re older.” It’s almost reflex for some to be apologists for corporations.
Heck, I even read some takes around that damned submarine being along the lines of “we shouldn’t regulate the sub industry – that CEO was just trying to innovate!”
Well, it’s a goodish sentiment. Where I live the tendency is to be pretty much against all kind of companies and the results show. Country’s economy is a disaster (Portugal). You shouldn’t become all against companies but you shouldn’t be blindly for all companies either. There’s a balance for everything in life and people should learn more about balances.
Heck, I even read some takes around that damned submarine being along the lines of “we shouldn’t regulate the sub industry – that CEO was just trying to innovate!”
Afaik you can’t even regulate it since it’s international waters and the submersible was technically “cargo”
EDIT: TLDR you should have some common sense regarding companies.
I think I fall on the side of preemptive defederation, not just because of data harvesting etc but also because the incoming communities will be huge and dwarf anything already here - look at what has happened here already as communities try to merge and establish. Everything dominant will become meta along with whatever mods and rules etc they already have in place. Scary.
Wouldn’t creating a walled off garden ourselves bolster these corporations? There will just be more users on threads than anything else and people are already moving to threads anyways because that’s where “all the people are” especially people who have a major following and want to interact with where a majority of their followers are. This would just create more harm to artists/influencers on the mastodon platform than it will help and just make Meta even more powerful than they already are. This will just take us back to where we were, a bunch of people separated by social media servers rather than unified. I don’t want to have to make 3 different social media accounts just to talk to people that I’ve known for years. All you’re relying on is assumptions on what the future will be like without actually seeing it first hand. We need to be reasonable and we need to see for ourselves how this will all go before we defederate from millions of people. Sure, Instance admins need to be cautious but the people shouldn’t be separated just because of fear. You’re extinguishing a service already by doing this.
At the end of the day, I will respect whatever the instance admins on the various mastodon servers decide (especially smaller instances with minority groups that do want a safe space) because I believe Open Source is the freedom to choose. I just simply think it’s too cautious and the people of those major services like Threads are not willing to go use a service like Mastodon. It’s too new and they’ll never understand until we slowly but carefully mass educate them on what even is going on here and what even is a fediverse? We need to get people to see that mastodon is the safe space they need to be because there are people there who want specific things that threads already fails to provide (due to strict ruling and such). We need to be available for them just as mastodon is available to us.
Allowing Threads will increase its power. Not even the totality of Mastodon instances can fight zuckerbot’s size and money. Long term, they want to destroy the competition and be the -only- option.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to Facebook/Meta is a mistake. They’ve been caught lying to investors, the Metaverse failed harder than the Sega 32x, they aren’t growing in any of their owned platforms (Face, Insta, Whatsapp) because, for all intents and purposes, there’s nowhere for them to grow. Twitter’s slow implosion is opening space for competition, which is what Threads wants to dethrone
The practicality and ease of use of Threads will naturally bring the majority of people there. Allowing them to federate means that people will prefer it over any Mastodon instance. Given time, Meta WILL apply changes to their ActivityPub protocol in a way to make the Mastodon users’ experience worse, annoying them and possibly cutting off the whole fediverse, forcing anyone whose interactions were mostly with Threads users to migrate there.
Their Activitypub protocol? We’re all using the same protocol unless you’re implying they’re making their own which isn’t the case since they’re using the activity pub protocol that we’re all using. The most they can do however to make the Mastodon user base much worse is if they bar off features like DMs or something to their own app otherwise. If they’re slowing down overall service in general then absolutely defederate especially if they’re not contributing themselves.
ActivityPub is open source. They can use it “as is”, like all mastodon instances currently do, or add their own custom stuff to the json object. There’s nothing stopping them from changing how Threads interacts with the protocol, and we won’t have access to those changes’ source.
It lists things such as “id”, “context”, “content” etc. What’s stopping anyone from adding a brand new object to that json list, like “replicate_to_instances”? Or appending a spammy message at the end of any message sent to any instance that isn’t “threads.com”?
The above could theoretically happen to any given instance. It’s possible because that’s how it’s supposed to work. Hell, Akkoma has some stuff that Mastodon lacks, mainly discord-esque reactions to posts (toots), but the two are still compatible.
Now, suppose that Akkoma added a bunch of closed source things, and they kept working on top of that, adding more and more stuff, until only the barest of ActivityPub remained compatible with the rest of Mastodon, while only people running Akkoma could get “the full experience”. That’s what everyone is expecting to happen from Threads.
Defederating won’t do any harm to artists, everyone here will remain here, threads will just be a replacement for twitter and nothing will change.
Creating a “walled off garden” as you say is actually a protection. We’re excluding the well known threat that is the Zuck. But we’re not excluding any users, anyone can join lemmy/mastodon… Would you partner up with a country run by nazis, even though the people in the country are the first victims ? No because you know their goals are not compatible with yours (I hope), and you know it will only benefit the nazi leaders and not the people anyway.
If we just wait and see, it will probably be to late to act, big corporations are the best at fooling people (otherwise they couldn’t have become so powerful)
Did you read my post? Meta/FB is a well known threat. We already know they are continuously engaging in information warfare towards their own ends and federating with threads just saps our momentum and redirects it towards them >.<
Defederating doesn’t stop people who want “exposure” from creating an account on Threads or even starting a masto instance. I highly doubt FB will make it obvious to Threads users that Mastodon even exists, which you would know if you read my comments on how their app acts as a silo.
Its right front and center. It won’t impact the user until they see mastodon accounts start appearing and hell it might appear again in an update just to tell them that it’s happening.
Also i know this might be off topic and or meaningless to you but this is a quote from Adam Mosseri who heads the project:
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
Up to you to decide what they mean by this and how you want to treat it. For now my own personal theory as to why they’re doing this is because of pressure from the EU’s Digital Market/Services Act and it’s one protocol for all policy they’ve been promising it seems.
“You may one day end up leaving threads” … Do you really expect meta to be ok with that ? It would go against their plan of world domination. Their whole business works by getting people addicted and unable to leave. They use all kinds of manipulation, even at the detriment of the quality of their services. You can’t trust whatever they say, it’s just corpo bullshit as always. Whatever they do, the question is never “what’s in it for users”, but “what’s in it for meta” and “what will it cost to not only users, but anyone that might be impacted”. Any big corpo want only their own good, at the detriment of any other, they never do anything for anyone unless it eventually benefits them more, bonus points if it harms the other, because they want to crush any competition. And meta doesn’t care about its users, depending on how you chose to view it, they are either just consumers being preyed upon, or actually the products, whose personal data is sold for a profit.
Yeah i know. Thats why i clarified with the additional theory that the only reason they’re doing this is because of regulations or what not and piggy backing off of us similar to redhat in a way but much bigger. That’s why I’m really weirded by that quote too. Its way out of character for Meta to do this and they might have a completely different exterior motive we have no clue about.
The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:
Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups
I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume
The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.
They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.
Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.
Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation
One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @[email protected]) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.
We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):
Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
Meta’s algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-“paid”/“verified” Threads users.
It’s already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.
Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta
Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.
I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.
Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.
I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).
Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!
Note on This Post
I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p
I don’t understand what’s the big deal. If they join fediverse - cool, more content for us. If they decide to quit, how is it different from a regular instance defederating? Why people think that users would abandon fediverse just to follow them? I’m still new here but I’d say that if some community vanishes, I just search for another ones that are available here or just stay with those I already have.
Maybe I just can’t see something but I left reddit because it decided to restrict its users, I thought the fediverse wouldn’t do the same.
Nice write up. But: what’s the gain for meta? Embrace, extend, extinguish is what you do to competition. Don’t forget meta is a Corp. Corps do things for money. All I see in your example is a cash drain. Corps don’t do cash drains. By joining the fediverse they get all that sweet content… For free. No hosting. No administration, just… Content. That’s the best deal ever for any data firm.
I do see plusses for meta so my take is: embrace? Yes. Extend? Yes. Extinguish? No visible upside, just downsides. So no.
This is no Microsoft in the 90s. Meta’s product is data. Not office suites or an OS. Why pay for data when the fediverse provides you that for free?
The purpose of the extinguish phase is simple; control
All future content is under Zuck moderation policy
Can change the narrative of the content as per the advertisers whim
Authoritarian governments make nice customers when they want the content to be nudged a certain direction
Why federate when you can easily scrape the data from the smaller instances? It’s free anyway
He will defederate only when he deems the data from the rest of the fediverse to be insignificant and the public reaction is small enough to control.
I don’t see that happening in the near future at least.
I will agree that this is a cash-drain. I don’t know whether his investors will agree with this long-term play (he already burned his metaverse) but I think it’s possible. We should keep our guard up.
I truly don’t scrapped data is as useful as people think.
Facebook wants to utilized the connected nature of the fediberse for its trove of data. They will have access to the entire fediverae if we don’t defederate from them.
If someone wants to join facebook, just go to that webpage, and if you want lemmy, then come here. I don’t get why we have to have a centralized social media platform for all the internet…
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
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Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Tl;dr - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is how google killed XMPP
XMPP is still alive, and is just what it was before Google used it. I don’t understand this argument.
Is it popular ? No Because it started to be popular back then.
Thanks to Google and Facebook it was more widely used. When they stopped their involvement, XMPP went back to its previous state.
The Fediverse is already popular. If Meta embrace it before leaving it, it will come back to its present state, like XMPP. But unlike XMPP, the previous state is a good one. Thus it’s not something I fear.
I do tend to think that we should defederate, but the XMPP example seems irrelevant to me. It’s more like an email situation. That’s something I fear.
Probably go read the article that was linked.
I did, thank you. And Ploum doesn’t describe the state of XMPP before Google Talk. I think this information change all the conclusions.
Thanks!
I’ll probably keep a presence on a non-threads-federated instance and one on a threads-federated instance, just to compare and to talk to grandma. I doubt I’ll spend much time scrolling through whatever it is Instagram users write about but you never know.
Is Threads going to have communities like Lemmy? If not, this seems like much more of an issue for Mastodon, not as much for the “Threadiverse” part of the Fediverse.
I only joined Lemmy because of its open source, non-manipulative, not-for-profit nature. If Meta joins it will be a good reason for me to quit. Hell, even Reddit would be better than a Fediverse with Meta IMO.
Hopefully .world decides to defederate Threads and Meta, but if they refuse you can migrate to another instance that does defederate them. The solution here should be to refuse Meta, not give up on Lemmy and the Fediverse.
They won’t be able to bribe every instance without making it known to the world but another mass migration even if within the same federation would discourage a lot of new users from joining/staying though.
This makes me so fucking angry that these fuckers wouldn’t even let us have a small corner of the internet to ourselves.
Thanks so much for your article.
Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.
People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.
Hey what’s a good response to “can’t we just ‘silence’ threads.net instead”?
@sapient_cogbag I hope my instance admins will take a look at this great article.
Have a nice weekend everyone @abel @wazaby
I disagree.
Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP “take a stand” against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.
ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.
We can see the end state of email from when they let big corps take over - its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam.
We have an opportunity to prevent that before it happens here, too. ^.}^
ISPs and Instances both offer you access to a wider network. That one exists on a network level is another matter. If there were a multitude of ISPs, like there was in the dialup era, would you have wanted them to decide what domains resolve?
That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.
What email is really suffering from is a failure of the network to combat abuse. That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.
They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.
Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.
This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools ^.^
It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse. That is true with or without trouble from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. If you wrote a machine learning algorithm to find spam, your ML would come to the same conclusion. There’s no obvious solution to that.
Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.
Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.
They will do it to us, not just Threads users.
Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea ^.^
Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users ^.^
Do, what, specifically? How will they affect that your instance shows you?
Should a listserv block people who are subscribed to another listserv then?
An email is a message from a user at a domain. A fediverse post is a message from a user at a domain.
Content is public, but to a big email provider, it’s not much more data. Gmail filters based on identical-looking messages from an “unestablished” domain. If you came up with a way to filter spam on the fediverse, it would likely look very similar.
If Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever picks up critical mass, I can guarantee you there will be a shit ton of spam, misinformation, disinformation, and scammy nonesense coming from a long tail of instances. Much of the garbage will, thanks to large language models, look pretty human, too. The only real roadblock to it will be defederation from “unestablished” instances and even that will be unreliable at best.
There really isn’t a good solution to it, at least one that isn’t invasive in ways we won’t like.
Yes they should and I would not mind
Yeah, does anyone even block gmail for example?
Don’t even know why and how there are arguments in favor of Meta. They’re bad, everyone knows it. People still use them because they’re basically forced to keep up with acquaintances and family.
Well, I mean, in the United States our culture is built around “business good; much innovation” and anything to stymie corporate efforts is met with groans of “you’ll understand why it must be this way when you’re older.” It’s almost reflex for some to be apologists for corporations.
Heck, I even read some takes around that damned submarine being along the lines of “we shouldn’t regulate the sub industry – that CEO was just trying to innovate!”
Well, it’s a goodish sentiment. Where I live the tendency is to be pretty much against all kind of companies and the results show. Country’s economy is a disaster (Portugal). You shouldn’t become all against companies but you shouldn’t be blindly for all companies either. There’s a balance for everything in life and people should learn more about balances.
Afaik you can’t even regulate it since it’s international waters and the submersible was technically “cargo”
EDIT: TLDR you should have some common sense regarding companies.
I actually agree with that sentiment. Put more billionaires in tin cans and drop them in the ocean where its deepest.
Well, billionaires are wonderful people deep down.
3km deep down, preferably
I think I fall on the side of preemptive defederation, not just because of data harvesting etc but also because the incoming communities will be huge and dwarf anything already here - look at what has happened here already as communities try to merge and establish. Everything dominant will become meta along with whatever mods and rules etc they already have in place. Scary.
Cannot agree harder
Wouldn’t creating a walled off garden ourselves bolster these corporations? There will just be more users on threads than anything else and people are already moving to threads anyways because that’s where “all the people are” especially people who have a major following and want to interact with where a majority of their followers are. This would just create more harm to artists/influencers on the mastodon platform than it will help and just make Meta even more powerful than they already are. This will just take us back to where we were, a bunch of people separated by social media servers rather than unified. I don’t want to have to make 3 different social media accounts just to talk to people that I’ve known for years. All you’re relying on is assumptions on what the future will be like without actually seeing it first hand. We need to be reasonable and we need to see for ourselves how this will all go before we defederate from millions of people. Sure, Instance admins need to be cautious but the people shouldn’t be separated just because of fear. You’re extinguishing a service already by doing this.
At the end of the day, I will respect whatever the instance admins on the various mastodon servers decide (especially smaller instances with minority groups that do want a safe space) because I believe Open Source is the freedom to choose. I just simply think it’s too cautious and the people of those major services like Threads are not willing to go use a service like Mastodon. It’s too new and they’ll never understand until we slowly but carefully mass educate them on what even is going on here and what even is a fediverse? We need to get people to see that mastodon is the safe space they need to be because there are people there who want specific things that threads already fails to provide (due to strict ruling and such). We need to be available for them just as mastodon is available to us.
Allowing Threads will increase its power. Not even the totality of Mastodon instances can fight zuckerbot’s size and money. Long term, they want to destroy the competition and be the -only- option.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to Facebook/Meta is a mistake. They’ve been caught lying to investors, the Metaverse failed harder than the Sega 32x, they aren’t growing in any of their owned platforms (Face, Insta, Whatsapp) because, for all intents and purposes, there’s nowhere for them to grow. Twitter’s slow implosion is opening space for competition, which is what Threads wants to dethrone
The practicality and ease of use of Threads will naturally bring the majority of people there. Allowing them to federate means that people will prefer it over any Mastodon instance. Given time, Meta WILL apply changes to their ActivityPub protocol in a way to make the Mastodon users’ experience worse, annoying them and possibly cutting off the whole fediverse, forcing anyone whose interactions were mostly with Threads users to migrate there.
Their Activitypub protocol? We’re all using the same protocol unless you’re implying they’re making their own which isn’t the case since they’re using the activity pub protocol that we’re all using. The most they can do however to make the Mastodon user base much worse is if they bar off features like DMs or something to their own app otherwise. If they’re slowing down overall service in general then absolutely defederate especially if they’re not contributing themselves.
ActivityPub is open source. They can use it “as is”, like all mastodon instances currently do, or add their own custom stuff to the json object. There’s nothing stopping them from changing how Threads interacts with the protocol, and we won’t have access to those changes’ source.
To give an example, this is the current standard - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
It lists things such as “id”, “context”, “content” etc. What’s stopping anyone from adding a brand new object to that json list, like “replicate_to_instances”? Or appending a spammy message at the end of any message sent to any instance that isn’t “threads.com”?
The above could theoretically happen to any given instance. It’s possible because that’s how it’s supposed to work. Hell, Akkoma has some stuff that Mastodon lacks, mainly discord-esque reactions to posts (toots), but the two are still compatible.
Now, suppose that Akkoma added a bunch of closed source things, and they kept working on top of that, adding more and more stuff, until only the barest of ActivityPub remained compatible with the rest of Mastodon, while only people running Akkoma could get “the full experience”. That’s what everyone is expecting to happen from Threads.
Defederating won’t do any harm to artists, everyone here will remain here, threads will just be a replacement for twitter and nothing will change. Creating a “walled off garden” as you say is actually a protection. We’re excluding the well known threat that is the Zuck. But we’re not excluding any users, anyone can join lemmy/mastodon… Would you partner up with a country run by nazis, even though the people in the country are the first victims ? No because you know their goals are not compatible with yours (I hope), and you know it will only benefit the nazi leaders and not the people anyway. If we just wait and see, it will probably be to late to act, big corporations are the best at fooling people (otherwise they couldn’t have become so powerful)
Did you read my post? Meta/FB is a well known threat. We already know they are continuously engaging in information warfare towards their own ends and federating with threads just saps our momentum and redirects it towards them >.<
Defederating doesn’t stop people who want “exposure” from creating an account on Threads or even starting a masto instance. I highly doubt FB will make it obvious to Threads users that Mastodon even exists, which you would know if you read my comments on how their app acts as a silo.
From the very last page on their own setup screen.
One tiny thing on the last page.
And what about after they get setup the first time?
Its right front and center. It won’t impact the user until they see mastodon accounts start appearing and hell it might appear again in an update just to tell them that it’s happening.
Also i know this might be off topic and or meaningless to you but this is a quote from Adam Mosseri who heads the project:
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
Up to you to decide what they mean by this and how you want to treat it. For now my own personal theory as to why they’re doing this is because of pressure from the EU’s Digital Market/Services Act and it’s one protocol for all policy they’ve been promising it seems.
Sources for that theory: https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement/amp/?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9#amp_tf=From %251%24s&aoh=16887684879256&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2022%2F03%2F24%2Fdma-political-agreement%2F
https://www-theregister-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/03/29/eu_mandated_messaging_interop_paper/?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9#amp_tf=From %251%24s&aoh=16887684879256&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theregister.com%2F2023%2F03%2F29%2Feu_mandated_messaging_interop_paper%2F
And the reb00ted article I got this idea from: https://reb00ted.org/tech/20230627-meta-activitypub-eu-digital-services-act/
They’re just using us just to clear out from regulations.
“You may one day end up leaving threads” … Do you really expect meta to be ok with that ? It would go against their plan of world domination. Their whole business works by getting people addicted and unable to leave. They use all kinds of manipulation, even at the detriment of the quality of their services. You can’t trust whatever they say, it’s just corpo bullshit as always. Whatever they do, the question is never “what’s in it for users”, but “what’s in it for meta” and “what will it cost to not only users, but anyone that might be impacted”. Any big corpo want only their own good, at the detriment of any other, they never do anything for anyone unless it eventually benefits them more, bonus points if it harms the other, because they want to crush any competition. And meta doesn’t care about its users, depending on how you chose to view it, they are either just consumers being preyed upon, or actually the products, whose personal data is sold for a profit.
Yeah i know. Thats why i clarified with the additional theory that the only reason they’re doing this is because of regulations or what not and piggy backing off of us similar to redhat in a way but much bigger. That’s why I’m really weirded by that quote too. Its way out of character for Meta to do this and they might have a completely different exterior motive we have no clue about.
The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:
Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups
I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume
The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.
They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.
Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.
Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation
One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @[email protected]) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.
We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):
@threads.<whatever their url>Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta
Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.
I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.
Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.
I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).
Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!
Note on This Post
I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p
More Random Shit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-29/facebook-whistleblower-sophie-zhang-government-manipulation/100103408
I don’t understand what’s the big deal. If they join fediverse - cool, more content for us. If they decide to quit, how is it different from a regular instance defederating? Why people think that users would abandon fediverse just to follow them? I’m still new here but I’d say that if some community vanishes, I just search for another ones that are available here or just stay with those I already have. Maybe I just can’t see something but I left reddit because it decided to restrict its users, I thought the fediverse wouldn’t do the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Nice write up. But: what’s the gain for meta? Embrace, extend, extinguish is what you do to competition. Don’t forget meta is a Corp. Corps do things for money. All I see in your example is a cash drain. Corps don’t do cash drains. By joining the fediverse they get all that sweet content… For free. No hosting. No administration, just… Content. That’s the best deal ever for any data firm.
I do see plusses for meta so my take is: embrace? Yes. Extend? Yes. Extinguish? No visible upside, just downsides. So no.
This is no Microsoft in the 90s. Meta’s product is data. Not office suites or an OS. Why pay for data when the fediverse provides you that for free?
They want more. Not less.
The purpose of the extinguish phase is simple; control
He will defederate only when he deems the data from the rest of the fediverse to be insignificant and the public reaction is small enough to control. I don’t see that happening in the near future at least.
I will agree that this is a cash-drain. I don’t know whether his investors will agree with this long-term play (he already burned his metaverse) but I think it’s possible. We should keep our guard up.
I truly don’t scrapped data is as useful as people think.
Facebook wants to utilized the connected nature of the fediberse for its trove of data. They will have access to the entire fediverae if we don’t defederate from them.
If someone wants to join facebook, just go to that webpage, and if you want lemmy, then come here. I don’t get why we have to have a centralized social media platform for all the internet…
same opinion