I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
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I’m hoping that ALL admins across the Fediverse will defederate from Meta. At least we get to have our own separate platform then.
That will just drive many Fedi-users to Meta.
Different instances will make different decisions and users will go to the instances that suit their preferences. That’a how it is supposed to work and the only way it hurts the Fediverse is if we get flooded with threads complaining that other people have different preference, dammit.
They shouldn’t just defederate from Meta, they should defederate from any other instances that federate with Meta. Like a firewall against late stage capitalism
I feel like this will just hurt us more then help.
Meta willingly under-moderated across large swaths of east Asia and Africa, leading to unchecked rumors and tangible acts of genocide. Zuckerberg has compared himself to Augustus Caesar.
I think it’s acceptable to cut off a wildfire before it spreads.
Lemmy is run by a bunch of tankies and the entire fediverse is under-moderated.
Cutting off a ton of users and content from the fediverse is stupid and everyone in here just keeps coming up with vague generalities because they’re scared of Meta rather than have actually thought through what will happen and be able to articulate any actual harms.
“Boo hoo tankies bad, but big corpo run by billionaires who spread misinformation and intentionally act to topple legitimate governments in favor of their fascist agenda are akshually good”
Arguing with people like you (corporate shill) is a waste of time, so I’d rather have fun instead.
i’ll take those “tankies” over completely unaccountable thiel’s buddies any day. actual tankies seem to be contained to lemmygrad where they don’t bother anyone outside of their instance
The reactions you are seeing are based off of Metas history. We will see how it works out.
Do you really want the Instagram crowd to interact with us…?
At least there would be people and content to interact with.
Based on your posts so far my friend, its becoming clearer why you think there’s no one to interact with.
Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.
Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.
The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”
And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.
It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.
And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.
I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don’t think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.
Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.
If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.
If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won’t see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don’t matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it’s like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.
I don’t see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn’t stay on shit they control.
And if you’re worried about their app collecting data: then don’t fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else’s phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.
I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they’ve done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they’re trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it’s how capitalism works.
Spot on. Anyone cooperating with them is a fool.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
Love the dialogue here but you always have to follow the money trail. The best way to keep what we love is to bankroll our instances to keep them running and scalable to additional users without ads. Remember, if you aren’t paying for the product then you become the product. Meta has nothing without selling ads or monetizing user data. That’s their business model. As long as we chip in we can always maintain our independence. I’m fine with never seeing or interacting with content from Threads.
Luckily, they can’t force federated access to be slow. Once you federate with them, their content is copied to your instance. It’s not necessary for every fediverse user to contact Threads, it’ll just be served from each user’s home instance
Yet
There’s no yet about it. The architecture of how federation works makes it impossible. They can potentially make images load slow, but for the rest of the content it is fundamentally impossible
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I don’t exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:
Point 1: “Meta will unethically defederate from instances…” I’m assuming that means they’ll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don’t really see the problem with that. This won’t affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn’t have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn’t for meta. Its a win basically since they’ll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.
Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.
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Do I think facebook et al will kill “The Fediverse”: Maybe. But that will be because we’ll finally stress test things and find all those issues and determine what is a fundamental flaw versus something updatable. But I would rather use a good product/software than get cranky that one specific protocol/implementation which is demonstrably inferior got pushed out.
This just means that you’re not really here for the stated purpose of fediverse (to create a digital commons) you’re here for an alternative to reddit. You don’t care if it’s centralised and in the hands of one person or not, you’re just mad at what reddit did.
What this misses is that reddit didn’t do what it did just because Spez is a meanie. It did what it did because it’s what EVERY capitalist would have done in the run up to IPO.
What you miss here is that you’re just advocating for exactly the same conditions that caused what you didn’t like. And for some reason you don’t think those conditions would re-create exactly the same outcome in future.
You fail to understand that these outcomes are not the project of individuals with the wrong ideas. They are systemic issues and the entire point of fediverse is to subvert that system and the many problems it creates.
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I also think they don’t care about us, I doubt they even know we exist.
That doesn’t change that they would destroy us unintentionally. Like Vogons.
I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:
I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.
Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it “must”, in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn’t subscribe to in the first place, anyway).
I don’t see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse “centered” communities?
I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I’ve seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, …) in the last decade or so.
I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn
But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media
How would they ensure this latter thing?
In my current understanding, it’s readily possible today (on Lemmy and related software), what could Meta do to keep this from continuing to work?
Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.
Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive
Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers
Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals
As for the first points, yes, that may happen, but is it a problem for users who already are part of a ‘better’ experience here than on the for-profit platforms?
I, for one, find much better discourse here than anywhere on reddit, let alone Meta or Twitter.
Also exemplified by me engaging much more here than ever on the others. I do prefer quality over quantity - everyone is invited to join the table, but I don’t see much benefit in luring people there who would ultimately only dilute or be disruptive - ie, not really into the thing that’s happening here.
For the last point, well, legislators can certainly try. While telling people it’s all for their benefit and upholding freedom and democracy and equal opportunity and whatnot. And even keep a straight face.
By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.
Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”
They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative
Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back
Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south
Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it
And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.
They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.
We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible
I’m more concerned of them integrating new features and bullying everyone else into following to integrate them or else.
Or else what? I guess they can’t do much?
“Join our fed or this code in the post body will not work for you”
I don’t care about their code in the post body. If there’s a possibility I just block the whole instance. Don’t want to see anything from them.
You missed the point. Let me rephrase.
They coule add features that makes their instance/own client add things to posts, that don’t work in other clients/instances properly.
This in effect could get some users who just don’t care about avoiding meta, and also FOMO type of users, to switch.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t care, but it’s bad for Lemmy.
I don’t really see how this is bad for Lemmy. Let me rephrase what I said as well:
Let them add those features. People who use metas instance wouldn’t have come to Lemmy in the first place. The users who “just don’t care avoiding meta” aren’t on here now (maybe there’s a miniscule amount that’s how I see it). They will come when this threads thing properly rolls out. In my opinion Lemmy won’t significantly change when this happens since people who wanted to stay on reddit did and those who are here now are trying out the better Boss way of living and probably won’t switch to meta as soon as it comes out. Therefore this won’t cause any trouble. Just block the meta instance “out of sight out of mind”.
Imagine hanging out with a group of friends and someone from outside starts harassing you and that person really doesn’t like you. Are you going to start hanging out with them? Obviously not. Just chill with your friends and don’t mind them. Nothing about your friends is going to change.
I doubt that someone who got used to the free libre FOSS style of life and really enjoys it would switch to meta. No clue what meta would have to offer to them to switch. I think its easier to switch in the other direction.
“We have to defederate or else they’ll run incompatible code that won’t let us federate with them”
This seems like a self-solving problem to me, I still don’t understand what the hyperventilation is about.
They won’t do that until after absorbing the users. Much like how Reddit killed off almost all internet forums.
You really think Facebook is gonna poach users from the Fediverse, people who are explicitly here because we don’t want to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc? C’mon. This isn’t a realistic outcome.
Yes of course I do. Almost everyone here is still using corporate social media while also using fediverse, side by side, I wager you’ve looked at something corporate today. Why? Because fediverse does not have everything that they want to consume on a day to day basis.
Creating enclosures where that content exists pulls the users over because they can not get it anywhere else.
Let’s say you cook a meal, fish and potatoes. You get your fish from the river (publicly available) but the potatoes are only being grown on the corporate land. You are forced to get it from there, so you begrudgingly do because you want your full meal obviously.
Later on they find a way to enclose some of the fish too, and eventually all of it, removing it from the public space. The fediverse still exists, but it’s a shell without anything you want on it. You begrudginingly go to the corporation’s space for it.
People want their content, and enclosing on public commons by walling off that content is easy to do bit by bit, like thinly slicing a salami until it’s all gone. People will even defend against it and pretend that it’s not going to happen, like right now.
Later on they find a way to enclose some of the fish too, and eventually all of it, removing it from the public space. The fediverse still exists, but it’s a shell without anything you want on it.
This analogy doesn’t make sense. How are they gonna take what we already have and enclose it away from us? We run the servers, not them.
If they close it off again, we go back to how things are now. Which we’re all clearly fine with, because we’re already here. Are they gonna hypnotize us on the way out and lead us pied piper style?
We run the servers, not them.
So did internet forums. Where are they these days? Oh, they all became subreddits as users moved away to the convenience of reddit.
They will find a way to drown everything through big-data analysis if you give them even the slightest bit of leeway. They must be treated as a completely hostile bad-actor because that is precisely what they are.
So did internet forums. Where are they these days? Oh, they all became subreddits as users moved away to the convenience of reddit.
Moving from isolated forums to an aggregate community is a huge quality of life change. We’re talking about them convincing people who are already on the Fediverse to move to their Fediverse server, which is a side grade, offered to people who almost all hate Facebook already. There’s no hook there, and nobody has given me an even slightly plausible pathway that’ll convince anybody to move over. There’s just vague gesturing and unspoken implications.
Nobody here wants to use their server. We all know how bad they are. We’re here because of them. But suddenly a nonspecific siren call is gonna move us all over? It just doesn’t make sense. I can think of plausible ways we can gain users from this. I can’t find any plausible way to lose users or cause damage to the Fediverse that doesn’t involve mind control.
The content I want to have will never be on a meta server. And even if, I will not federate with them and not use them.
For the exact same reasons I also don’t use Facebook.
You won’t necessarily know if the person you are interacting with at say @[email protected] is being hosted by threads.
We will have block list like with ads, if necessary.
Simple as that, of some instances federate with them I will not use them.
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
Maybe they want to use Activity Pub so that they can influence further development of it. I don’t know procedure how w3c is makeing decisions and updates to it, but I doubt someone that is not using it can have influence.
Honestly, I still have more hope for Signal compared to Lemmy/fediverse. As much as I like it here, Signal is just so much more user-friendly and explainable. I am also slowly making people around me set it up.
Were you previously messaging everyone you know through reddit?
