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.
Stupid idea:
Could a server like lemmy.world pretend to have a very popular post by faking interaction with it to get it to show up to everyone using threads? It seems like it would be doable to run a server that allows for vote and comment manipulation, allowing for anyone to get anything to show up on threads. This could be bad for meta, as any actual user posts would be overshadowed by fake posts/spam from federated instances.
I have no idea about how lemmy works, but anyone could make a server that would be running modificated code, right?
Your intuition is correct. Someone could certainly modify their backend to create faulty data with the intention of sharing it across platforms. There’s no real standard for preventing that right now as far as I know.
What’s the point of joining the fediverse when other antisocial network are abundantly available? They are well marketed in front of the public. I see nothing good coming out of integrating fediverse when you know they don’t really care about you.
Exactly, while mainstreaming the fediverse might bring initial attention to it, in the long run it will just destroy the values that the fediverse stands for. Especially when it’s a predatorial company like Meta
They’re not federated yet but they plan to be. (They launched in a bit of a hurry to take advantage of Musk’s latest screw ups.)
The problem for the OP’s argument is that it demands suicide from the Fediverse (instead of the murder that happened to XMPP).
If no instances federate with the massive network, some people will be forced to hand their data over to Zuckerberg to access that network. That would be a daft. I want to get Meta’s data without having to give Meta my data.
Some instances will defederate (when the opportunity arises) and that’s good. As long as it’s not all of them. That would be bad.
OP I completely agree with all of your points. ESPECIALLY (BIG BOLD LETTERS) we need to create better “front-ends”
Anecdotally, I put a post a on mastodon that didn’t get responses (the vibe there seems a bit different on this issue, because I usually do get responses)
Since the reddit migration, I’ve gone into a homelab frenzy. I have reached out to others. I have been in awe at the developers who worked on the overloading of servers and the jump on the creation of third party apps. The pre-existing community that explained a complicated process to many people.
We saw how many uses came over from reddit and found it too complicated. We had those discussions too. How there were solutions like simplifying what the fediverse is, what instances are, etc. etc. This took time for people
who already cared about what was happening on reddit_ which is a small minority of internet uses.
And that would have been okay, right? We had our space, we could have had time to build.
I have been going on about this issue ad nauseum with my partner. I have a computer science background and work in cyber tech so this came to me a bit faster, but still a learning curve. I showed her videos, articles, walked her through the apps. But this is someone who is a social media user.
I had a fever for a few days (very irritated as it disrupted my home lab fever, pardon that pun) when my partner is comes running in thrilled*___* that she gets to be involved with my project and finally understands it because she saw Threads and the word “fediverse”
This is someone who is yes intelligent, who lives with someone who is way more involved with this issue that the average internet “normie”, and still, because of the front end UI, the simplification of it. The exact quote was “this is a space on the fediverse for me”
A lot of fighting happened, lol anyways if you have made it this far, especially to OP:
We need to organize. I do not think anything can get done with siloed passionate informed users like ourselves. How do we organize? This will take crowd funding. Resources. Project roadmaps. Mission statements. Unfortunately, some of the ick of how we work together in a corp to roll to market.
We need to organize. I do not think anything can get done with siloed passionate informed users like ourselves. How do we organize? This will take crowd funding. Resources. Project roadmaps. Mission statements. Unfortunately, some of the ick of how we work together in a corp to roll to market.
Communities without leadership, or pulverized leadership, suffer a lot when it comes to progress. When one person orders something and everyone works on it, things tend to happen quickly. When everyone can complain and question decisions, things slow down
I wish there was a silver bullet for this problem. The best my monkey brain can think of is electing people to take these decisions, which leads to politicking problems.
This is someone who is yes intelligent, who lives with someone who is way more involved with this issue that the average internet “normie”, and still, because of the front end UI, the simplification of it. The exact quote was “this is a space on the fediverse for me”
This is exactly what I want to see and what I’ve been fighting for recently. This is complicated and brand new to all of us but if people realize they’re a part of something bigger than them. They would want to be part of that too!
This is complicated and brand new to all of us but if people realize they’re a part of something bigger than them. They would want to be part of that too!
That’s not how this works. The overwhelming majority of Threads users just saw whatever thing FB put on the instagram accounts and clicked it. They have probably never heard of the fediverse and even if they like the idea they’ll just go “oh, I’m already on it, no need to bother”.
We can get exposure without letting a company specialised in manipulation and astroturfing straight through the door.
even if they like the idea they’ll just go “oh, I’m already on it, no need to bother”.
We can get exposure without letting a company specialised in manipulation and astroturfing straight through the door.
They were going to stay whether if there’s fediverse integration or not. Atleast having the option to communicate with threads is enough for the people on mastodon to stay on mastodon and have the choice to do so. Blocking them off will just cause mastodon users to have to make a seperate account just to merely communicate with their friends on Threads. Defeating the purpose of the fediverse entirely and going back to square one. Giving a corpo more power than they already need by being the only influence in their own platform and splitting off communites into the big bubbles of social media we had before the fediverse.
Besides should i have to wait till facebook fucks up before i even get a slight uptick in mastodon accounts again and potientially see my friends (if they’re even encouraged to even try it)?
Atleast having the option to communicate with threads is enough for the people on mastodon to stay on mastodon and have the choice to do so. Blocking them off will just cause mastodon users to have to make a seperate account just to merely communicate with their friends on Threads. Defeating the purpose of the fediverse entirely and going back to square one.
It doesn’t defeat the purpose to prevent a known-hostile actor from interacting with everyone on Fedi.
It’s not just your friends, it’s Facebook, with algorithms specifically designed to manipulate you and the communities you are part of - including your friends - and by engaging with them you end up locked back into FB’s reach and make it easier for them to EEE or EEC us or do even worse >.<
If you want to talk to your friends, use another app (including threads if you really feel that much need to interact with people who are only on there), or post links promoting Fedi on other platforms, to your friends.
Defederation exists to protect our network from groups like Meta/FB. It doesn’t defeat the purpose of federation to choose who to federate with.
Telling people to use another app is not a solution to the problem and again like I said would take us back to where we were from the start; locking the people that do want to use mastodon and other alternatives away from other users and forcing users to go use threads instead. We need to adopt a universal social media, not just seperate each other again and again. Just implying this isolationist attitude is whats going to give billionaires enough influence to force those users to accept changes and removed features and force them into a platform. Its a domino effect that goes back to us. I don’t want to have “move to threads” to talk to people i know. I want to use one unified mastodon account or lemmy account even and reach out to all my friends everywhere, even corpos.
Look hear me out though, I despise Meta as much as the next guy. In fact, threads is incredibly out of touch with the audience that actually uses twitter. There’s barely any features on it like hashtags, a search (not a followers search), followers only tab, even a desktop version of it. In fact the only gimmick that they really have is the fact they’re connecting to services like Mastodon. We should all be cautious about what they might do to us and the entire fediverse but bigger instances have the job of allowing and experimenting to see how this major influx of users will fair towards our own communites. The most I’m focused on is not just whether they should integrate but how they could be integrated and how as a community we should treat these people. What’s the cultural impact and everything.
I know that we all want the same thing for people to realize that corpos are gross and to get out of that shit. It’s ironic of me to say this too but i simply do believe that a user/instance has a choice in whether or not they want to interact with Meta and should have the choice. At the end of the day it all comes down to it. We shouldn’t all defederate but we should all have the choice to. Simple as that. I just want a social media that is as unified as email. I’m definitely going off a tangent but i just want a world that doesn’t tie users down to “just download x app here to talk to them”. Its not a solution, it’s the problem.
In fact I’d say the biggest threat to us is if Meta or whatever big bozo corporation decides to make their own version of ActivityPub (which is why i hate bluesky with a dying passion besides the AI crap).
“even if they like the idea they’ll just go “oh, I’m already on it, no need to bother”.”
“We can get exposure without letting a company specialised in manipulation and astroturfing straight through the door.”
They were going to stay whether if there’s fediverse integration or not. Atleast having the option to communicate with threads is enough for the people on mastodon to stay on mastodon and have the choice to do so. Blocking them off will just cause mastodon users to have to make a seperate account just to merely communicate with their friends on Threads. Defeating the purpose of the fediverse entirely and going back to square one. Giving a corpo more power than they already need by being the only influence in their own platform and splitting off communites into the big bubbles of social media we had before the fediverse.
Besides should i have to wait till facebook fucks up before i even get a slight uptick in mastodon accounts again and potientially see my friends (if they’re even encouraged to even try it)?
Reddit and twitters recent moves were the driving force behind me switching to mastadon and lemmy, but I ditched meta/Facebook services long ago. Adding those back into this fold really makes the choice for me kind of easy. Inviting meta to the party is just a non starter.
This would probably relegate the fediverse to a zombie-product-status niche if this sort of policy extremism
takes on. But maybe some users would prefer that. Please read the rebuttal on this view at https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking
It’s not a zombie network now, but it will be if Facebook EEEs us. We don’t need to grow by becoming attached to Facebook nya.
And calling engaging with an FOSS protocol immediately with NDAs suspicious is not “tinfoil hat behaviour”, when we are talking about Facebook, which again, is well known for social manipulation and astroturfing.
NDAs are completely normal working with any established company on their pre-release product. I have signed NDAs when visiting an office because I might be in the presence of non-public data on someone’s nearby monitor. The NDA issue being a signal of negative intent really shows the level of sensitivity people have regarding this.
The intended purpose of defederation I thought was to keep the Nazis out, and prevent brigading from other communities — in general, a tool to use sparingly to isolate bad nodes to maintain the overall network health. Defederation because an instance has been accused of a pre-crime is a very troubling stance. It’s also surprising to see this posted here due to lemmy.world being defederated from already by other instances due to moderation concerns. That defederation is actually why I intentionally avoided a lemmy.world account — it’s just a headache for users
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.
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.
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)
Their new Twitter clone, “Threads” will likely attempt to federate with Mastodon, and therefore Lemmy and kbin unless instance operators decide to defederate their service, possibly preemptively if we can.
In my opinion they absolutely should do that there’s not much good that will come out of being Federated with a Facebook/Meta product and an insane amount of bad things that will come out of it, we need to nip this in the bud just like we did with Gab (though I will admit that was for different reasons).
Defederating is a pretty good solution, it stops them from being able to directly communicate with your servers, preventing them and their users from posting on the instances that they have been defederated from. One example of a server that will be doing this is pawb.social I’m sure others will follow as well.
I’m not sure if it would be necessary but you could also go the extra mile and block their IP range at the firewall level on your Lemmy server. That’s mainly something that you would do for spammers, but since Facebook/Meta do have a bad track record it couldn’t hurt.
Most of Lemmy and the associated instances seem to be very anti-Meta so far. I think it’s not likely for lemmy as a whole, though we might see a minority of instances that federate with Meta. Got to wait and see ^.^
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.
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Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Lolol this thread and the rest are pure compium without a plan.
Without monetization this place is DoA. Either step up, start a non profit e.g Mozilla foundation, and start charging users and hitting staff.
Otherwise you’re post is going to the void, accomplishing nothing.
Server performance: garbage Comment: garbage
The goal IMO of the fediverse was to have thousands of small local servers. Individuals can swings some money here and there for a small server.
You only need monitization to run a large instance
Tl:Dr the only federation we join should have Jean luc Picard in it not Mark Zuckerberg
Is Zuckerberg Borg then?
“We will add your
biologicaland technological distinctiveness to our own instance”.Zuckerborg
If You look at pictures of him in Congress testifying, he looks like a robot
Stupid idea: Could a server like lemmy.world pretend to have a very popular post by faking interaction with it to get it to show up to everyone using threads? It seems like it would be doable to run a server that allows for vote and comment manipulation, allowing for anyone to get anything to show up on threads. This could be bad for meta, as any actual user posts would be overshadowed by fake posts/spam from federated instances. I have no idea about how lemmy works, but anyone could make a server that would be running modificated code, right?
Your intuition is correct. Someone could certainly modify their backend to create faulty data with the intention of sharing it across platforms. There’s no real standard for preventing that right now as far as I know.
Maybe we need a system like email to flag bad actors and give them a ‘reputation’
This is exactly what we need. All admins need to see it.
What’s the point of joining the fediverse when other antisocial network are abundantly available? They are well marketed in front of the public. I see nothing good coming out of integrating fediverse when you know they don’t really care about you.
Exactly, while mainstreaming the fediverse might bring initial attention to it, in the long run it will just destroy the values that the fediverse stands for. Especially when it’s a predatorial company like Meta
Can someone explain what it means to defederste from meta/threads? I didn’t think those were federated so I’m a bit confused
It means we do not see content from them, and any posts they make or comments or similar won’t show up.
They’re not federated yet but they plan to be. (They launched in a bit of a hurry to take advantage of Musk’s latest screw ups.)
The problem for the OP’s argument is that it demands suicide from the Fediverse (instead of the murder that happened to XMPP).
If no instances federate with the massive network, some people will be forced to hand their data over to Zuckerberg to access that network. That would be a daft. I want to get Meta’s data without having to give Meta my data.
Some instances will defederate (when the opportunity arises) and that’s good. As long as it’s not all of them. That would be bad.
OP I completely agree with all of your points. ESPECIALLY (BIG BOLD LETTERS) we need to create better “front-ends” Anecdotally, I put a post a on mastodon that didn’t get responses (the vibe there seems a bit different on this issue, because I usually do get responses) Since the reddit migration, I’ve gone into a homelab frenzy. I have reached out to others. I have been in awe at the developers who worked on the overloading of servers and the jump on the creation of third party apps. The pre-existing community that explained a complicated process to many people.
We saw how many uses came over from reddit and found it too complicated. We had those discussions too. How there were solutions like simplifying what the fediverse is, what instances are, etc. etc. This took time for people who already cared about what was happening on reddit_ which is a small minority of internet uses.
And that would have been okay, right? We had our space, we could have had time to build.
I have been going on about this issue ad nauseum with my partner. I have a computer science background and work in cyber tech so this came to me a bit faster, but still a learning curve. I showed her videos, articles, walked her through the apps. But this is someone who is a social media user.
I had a fever for a few days (very irritated as it disrupted my home lab fever, pardon that pun) when my partner is comes running in thrilled*___* that she gets to be involved with my project and finally understands it because she saw Threads and the word “fediverse”
This is someone who is yes intelligent, who lives with someone who is way more involved with this issue that the average internet “normie”, and still, because of the front end UI, the simplification of it. The exact quote was “this is a space on the fediverse for me”
A lot of fighting happened, lol anyways if you have made it this far, especially to OP:
How do we get this done?
Communities without leadership, or pulverized leadership, suffer a lot when it comes to progress. When one person orders something and everyone works on it, things tend to happen quickly. When everyone can complain and question decisions, things slow down
I wish there was a silver bullet for this problem. The best my monkey brain can think of is electing people to take these decisions, which leads to politicking problems.
Do you think it would take electing people or organizing around leaders within an instance?
Probably pinned threads for each instance to vote/decide and show who ends up elected
This is exactly what I want to see and what I’ve been fighting for recently. This is complicated and brand new to all of us but if people realize they’re a part of something bigger than them. They would want to be part of that too!
That’s not how this works. The overwhelming majority of Threads users just saw whatever thing FB put on the instagram accounts and clicked it. They have probably never heard of the fediverse and even if they like the idea they’ll just go “oh, I’m already on it, no need to bother”.
We can get exposure without letting a company specialised in manipulation and astroturfing straight through the door.
They were going to stay whether if there’s fediverse integration or not. Atleast having the option to communicate with threads is enough for the people on mastodon to stay on mastodon and have the choice to do so. Blocking them off will just cause mastodon users to have to make a seperate account just to merely communicate with their friends on Threads. Defeating the purpose of the fediverse entirely and going back to square one. Giving a corpo more power than they already need by being the only influence in their own platform and splitting off communites into the big bubbles of social media we had before the fediverse.
Besides should i have to wait till facebook fucks up before i even get a slight uptick in mastodon accounts again and potientially see my friends (if they’re even encouraged to even try it)?
It doesn’t defeat the purpose to prevent a known-hostile actor from interacting with everyone on Fedi.
It’s not just your friends, it’s Facebook, with algorithms specifically designed to manipulate you and the communities you are part of - including your friends - and by engaging with them you end up locked back into FB’s reach and make it easier for them to EEE or EEC us or do even worse >.<
If you want to talk to your friends, use another app (including threads if you really feel that much need to interact with people who are only on there), or post links promoting Fedi on other platforms, to your friends.
Defederation exists to protect our network from groups like Meta/FB. It doesn’t defeat the purpose of federation to choose who to federate with.
Telling people to use another app is not a solution to the problem and again like I said would take us back to where we were from the start; locking the people that do want to use mastodon and other alternatives away from other users and forcing users to go use threads instead. We need to adopt a universal social media, not just seperate each other again and again. Just implying this isolationist attitude is whats going to give billionaires enough influence to force those users to accept changes and removed features and force them into a platform. Its a domino effect that goes back to us. I don’t want to have “move to threads” to talk to people i know. I want to use one unified mastodon account or lemmy account even and reach out to all my friends everywhere, even corpos.
Look hear me out though, I despise Meta as much as the next guy. In fact, threads is incredibly out of touch with the audience that actually uses twitter. There’s barely any features on it like hashtags, a search (not a followers search), followers only tab, even a desktop version of it. In fact the only gimmick that they really have is the fact they’re connecting to services like Mastodon. We should all be cautious about what they might do to us and the entire fediverse but bigger instances have the job of allowing and experimenting to see how this major influx of users will fair towards our own communites. The most I’m focused on is not just whether they should integrate but how they could be integrated and how as a community we should treat these people. What’s the cultural impact and everything.
I know that we all want the same thing for people to realize that corpos are gross and to get out of that shit. It’s ironic of me to say this too but i simply do believe that a user/instance has a choice in whether or not they want to interact with Meta and should have the choice. At the end of the day it all comes down to it. We shouldn’t all defederate but we should all have the choice to. Simple as that. I just want a social media that is as unified as email. I’m definitely going off a tangent but i just want a world that doesn’t tie users down to “just download x app here to talk to them”. Its not a solution, it’s the problem.
In fact I’d say the biggest threat to us is if Meta or whatever big bozo corporation decides to make their own version of ActivityPub (which is why i hate bluesky with a dying passion besides the AI crap).
They were going to stay whether if there’s fediverse integration or not. Atleast having the option to communicate with threads is enough for the people on mastodon to stay on mastodon and have the choice to do so. Blocking them off will just cause mastodon users to have to make a seperate account just to merely communicate with their friends on Threads. Defeating the purpose of the fediverse entirely and going back to square one. Giving a corpo more power than they already need by being the only influence in their own platform and splitting off communites into the big bubbles of social media we had before the fediverse.
Besides should i have to wait till facebook fucks up before i even get a slight uptick in mastodon accounts again and potientially see my friends (if they’re even encouraged to even try it)?
I’m imagining Zuckerbot finding your post and his eye screen going red and it has your name and photo with a big flashing red PRIMARY TARGET
And all of us in this thread: SECONDARY TARGETS
fuck zuck, hoping kbin also defederates
Reddit and twitters recent moves were the driving force behind me switching to mastadon and lemmy, but I ditched meta/Facebook services long ago. Adding those back into this fold really makes the choice for me kind of easy. Inviting meta to the party is just a non starter.
This would probably relegate the fediverse to a zombie-product-status niche if this sort of policy extremism takes on. But maybe some users would prefer that. Please read the rebuttal on this view at https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking
It’s not a zombie network now, but it will be if Facebook EEEs us. We don’t need to grow by becoming attached to Facebook nya.
And calling engaging with an FOSS protocol immediately with NDAs suspicious is not “tinfoil hat behaviour”, when we are talking about Facebook, which again, is well known for social manipulation and astroturfing.
NDAs are completely normal working with any established company on their pre-release product. I have signed NDAs when visiting an office because I might be in the presence of non-public data on someone’s nearby monitor. The NDA issue being a signal of negative intent really shows the level of sensitivity people have regarding this.
The intended purpose of defederation I thought was to keep the Nazis out, and prevent brigading from other communities — in general, a tool to use sparingly to isolate bad nodes to maintain the overall network health. Defederation because an instance has been accused of a pre-crime is a very troubling stance. It’s also surprising to see this posted here due to lemmy.world being defederated from already by other instances due to moderation concerns. That defederation is actually why I intentionally avoided a lemmy.world account — it’s just a headache for users
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.
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.
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)
Lemmy is federated with facebook?
Their new Twitter clone, “Threads” will likely attempt to federate with Mastodon, and therefore Lemmy and kbin unless instance operators decide to defederate their service, possibly preemptively if we can.
In my opinion they absolutely should do that there’s not much good that will come out of being Federated with a Facebook/Meta product and an insane amount of bad things that will come out of it, we need to nip this in the bud just like we did with Gab (though I will admit that was for different reasons).
i agree, but will there be a way to avoid the facebook shithole twitter?
Defederating is a pretty good solution, it stops them from being able to directly communicate with your servers, preventing them and their users from posting on the instances that they have been defederated from. One example of a server that will be doing this is pawb.social I’m sure others will follow as well.
I’m not sure if it would be necessary but you could also go the extra mile and block their IP range at the firewall level on your Lemmy server. That’s mainly something that you would do for spammers, but since Facebook/Meta do have a bad track record it couldn’t hurt.
Not yet. And hopefully most of the instances decide to pre-emptively defederate.
Do you think it will happen?
Most of Lemmy and the associated instances seem to be very anti-Meta so far. I think it’s not likely for lemmy as a whole, though we might see a minority of instances that federate with Meta. Got to wait and see ^.^
Mastodon I’m somewhat more worried about.
Where does lemmy.world stand on this?
Is Meta really playing Microsoft’s EEE card with Threads?
Yes.
Bluds read one article and shit their pants.
Meta can Zuck it.