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:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- 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.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
Defed every corporation. McDonald’s starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.
Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
Yes, reputation is very important. The cluster of people known as Meta has proven it is nefarious at best.
It’s good to consider the case-by-case basis instead of just making general rules.
Like if Lowes wanted to make an instance I wouldn’t worry much about its corporate influence. But Meta is actually an evil organization.
(Though their React docs are some of the best docs I’ve ever read)
No Gabe, go make half life 3.
This make me chuckle.
I mean, they aren’t fucking wrong. Half life 3 has a federated communication system built into multiplayer? Go do it Gabe.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
I dont think mastodon would, but i think lemmy kbin would. The target audience is different, one is twitter and the other is reddit like. I dont think twitter user hate fb as much as we do.
They always did strike me as idiots
This is an extremely weird ass take to have. Why would the average user give a shit?
Compared to most problems people have, the intricacies of social media platforms is not high on a lot of people’s list. They just go where the content is.
What a very insufferable opinion to have lol.
Like god damn, I knew that the early adopters will have the hardcore with em, but some of you guys need to relax.
I’ve been radicalized by corporate social media’s deliberate harm, what can I say.
I’ve never had any problems at McDonald’s with their ice cream / milkshake machines in Europe. Maybe the US simply gets the faulty machines?
The company that maintains the machines has a contractually enforced monopoly over the franchisee’s. This means it’s impossible to get parts or fix the machines outside of them doing it.
There’s heaps of vids on yt about the MacDonald’s ice cream machine racket.
Whats wrong with steam?
It’s a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Wait, do you need Internet access to play your offline games? If so, moving to itch.io
I like itch, but it’s no steam killer. We need a way to somehow own our digital games in a way that is not centralized to one marketplace.
Depends on the game. These ones for example don’t even require you to launch them through Steam.
Should Note that if a game isn’t on that list, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t DRM free. For example “Rain world” is not on that list and it is not required to launch it through Steam. So this list is by no means exhaustive.
Right now we’re losing tons of information after snapchat bought and deleted the gyffcaf website.
Now imagine losing all games when Gabe dies and the new patron loses the company to a newfound addiction to whatever
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.
Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.
Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.
If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.
Ultimately this is the thing to worry about. Threads will get the largest communities and as a result the main amount of attention and when/if Meta decides to defederate, it will ruin things. Also, people will generally give zero shits about federation because 99.9% of content will be on meta’s instance.
Ironically, the main thing keeping fediverse from being more popular (the decentralized approach and “multiple places the same community can exist”) are going to be the thing that kills it if Meta gets involved and becomes the big boy.
Idunno what is arguably worse. The fediverse being restricted to more “technical” folks who give a shit, and thus a far more limited audience than a central platform, or being suddenly disconnected from the hivemind after taking all the content.
(Fwiw, I absolutely think that the Threads fediverse plan is to totally absorb all the content and become the main place for it then possibly pull the plug but honestly at that point they won’t even need to the usage stats will basically do the same thing for them.)
I think there are multiple illusions into using one community. I don’t think people do. The average user love instagram when it was for sharing photos, facebook before it was for grandparents, vine (now tik tok) when it was for funny clips, youtube for silly content, reddit for thread format speaking, snapchat for stupid private chats. If we are talking about centralized communication I’m not so sure that is the case either. The reason all of those platforms I just mentioned got ruined for the most part is being of the growth of influencing and monetization. Once capitalism came in it completely changed the original intent of why the user liked those platforms, I doubt most of them even remember why they liked it when they joined it changed so fast. What people want, without actually realizing it, are the same services without the garbage product they’ve excepted and its turned into.
I don’t think accepting reality is making excuses.
Comparing meta to beehaw, or really anything else, is truly coming up short. Meta is the 8 ton gorilla in the corner. If the numbers that were released about 30 mllion people on Threads is true, they instantly have 10x the total population, and that numbers going to go up as more people stumble upon it.
Point being, Threads doesn’t need any other communities. People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy. These people are also the same ones who don’t care about if their content is coming from a federated source, or just Threads.
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta.
You’re surprised Zuck has bots?
He’s basically one himself.
They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.
What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.
You can be sure a good deal of Meta bootlickers here are astroturfing accounts. Meta’s business is to manipulate public perceptions and opinions, and astroturfing is definitely one of the tools employed.
We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.
However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.
He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.
Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.
Another option is to make migration of everything from one instance easy and let them buy whichever instances they want but let the users go somewhere else. Turn their weaponized capitalism into free money for instance admins until they wisen up and stop throwing money at it.
Or set up the terms and services to give the instances responsibilities that must be honoured even after they get purchased by another entity such that buying them becomes unattractive. Like mandate a certain portion of the topmost parent company’s profits (along with clauses to prevent Hollywood accounting from dodging that, maybe say revenue instead of profit and all related companies instead of just the topmost) must be invested back into the fediverse and that changing the TOS to remove that requires a certain number of users to agree. Set it up so that it is designed to only work if the whole point of the entity is to host a community rather than extract profit from hosted communities.
Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads’ users on our discussions.
I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook’s terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.
no, defederation does not “just” do those things
defederation refuses to give them an in to slowly make changes to the platform that will eventually give way to a centralized power dynamic over the whole fediverse
see also: the chrome/chromium monopoly and its effect on the modern web
There are under the hood data that is not displayed on the site which they can scrap. FB would be broke if they only rely on the FB posts alone without all the tracking everywhere. Even your movement on the screen or where you pause on the page are tracked.
So no they dont get all the data unless we federate them.
They can do that on Facebook because it’s their code and their platform. They can probably do that on their app and and instance too to some extent but I don’t think they can grab much more than the content of your messages and your likes if you’re on a different instance. Lemmy is open source; if there was a way to get that data we’d know about it.
Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn’t matter whether you’re on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.
Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.
Billionaire and neolib bootlickers are one of the most disgusting things on the internet. Everything for the imperialist/corporatist agenda even when it goes against their own wellbeing.
While lemmy.world is not my main instance, so I have no say in whether you defederate or not, I would like to bring this arugment into the discussion, because it’s applicable for all instances, and make de-federation an absolute must for every instance.
Allowing Meta in goes directly against the idea of Fediverse, and we should fight it as much as possible.
This is a literal quote from the main header on https://www.fediverse.to/
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.
Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
I’ve seen a lot of comments mentioning that defederating with Meta goes against the principles and main ideas of the Fediverse, that it should be inclusive and allow people to connect. But, judging by this main selling point of the Fediverse, it sounds to me like Meta shouldn’t be in the Fediverse do begin with.
Wait… FB/Meta is going to create instances? Somehow I missed this news and I’ll be trying to look this up after by post.
Anyway, yes they should not be allowed. They have a vested interest to destroy the Fediverse. How would they do this? Well, Microsoft has pioneered this strategy known as Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish. It’s much harder to apply these things to opensource, but we’ve all seen how much Microsoft has been Embracing Linux in the past 6-7 years.
Agreed. More instances should defederate from anything related to Meta. Im here because a corporate entity utterly destroyed something I liked. I don’t want that again.
My gut tells me we should defed all corporate instances as a matter of policy. Our uniqueness is at jeopardy , think of threads like the borg.
In that case, could hear them at some point going, “We are the Threads. Deactivate your firewalls, surrender your instances. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your federated culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is Futile.”, to make you think on how you are going to respond to that.
Obligatory upvote for Star Trek reference That’s the beauty of individual servers, isn’t it? If you’re on an instance that doesn’t defend those corporate instances, but want to, them just move to one that does. The voices will speak.
Not only did I add
threads.netto my blocked instances list, I also went scorched Earth and outright blocked Facebook’s entire IP range through my firewall. Don’t want them “accidentally” reading any data from my server ;)For reference, their IP range is
157.240.0.0/16:Edit: Actually, I might have more IPs to block:
Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.
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The fact they’ve been silent makes me think they are going to let them in and they don’t want the blowback from users like us
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I don’t think there’s much risk to Lemmy. Moreso Mastodon.
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Is there a good list of admins/instances that have committed to defederating with Threads? Im totally down to bail on Lemmy.world if they don’t defederate.
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I’m with you, already tired of this constant whining about Meta. I hope they don’t de federate until it makes sense, this is just scare mongering.
There must never be a single dominant instance. If one instance becomes too large, they end up having too much influential power. And with all that power, big corporations or power tripping admins will use that power to coerce other instances to do certain things. “Don’t want to follow our unilaterally-imposed rule? We’re gonna cut off your entire instance and your users will lose access to our communities.”
If Meta doesn’t get defederated, they will become the dominant instance. They already have the most amount of users since I’m assuming you can use your Facebook/Instagram account, they’ll have the most amount of user activity, and of course the most amount of power.
That’s how majority-vik party becomes the government on display.
Denying big powerful entities from controlling you is both anarchist and communist, and is based.
I’m sure if it comes to being ruled by Meta, many previously .lm users would get it.
From the side of Fediverse, there’s like no argument to accept Facebook but WE NEED TO GROW. And no, the influx of some millions of users won’t bring life or quality to Lemmy, it would replace it for what culture of communicating is in the Insta. And I don’t feel like many people there would vote to have this.
Once you accept it, your community is overtaken (and you need to serve another thousands of users as an admin). I don’t feel anyone would be open to include them.
I’m still baffled that some people can argue “why are you so worried?” about this. We have twenty years of history of shit hitting the fan, how much more do you need to not trust Facebook/Meta?
I’m struggling to understand it too, especially from instance owners. FB is diametrically opposed to FOSS and decentralized ideals. My only guess is the hopefulness people feel for decentralized internet extends to naivete about FB doing the right thing this time.
We’ve seen similar embrace, extend, extinguish with protocols before. It reminds me of XMPP, which used to be the defacto chat protocol and once upon a time you could use self-hosted providers to chat directly with people on things like Google Talk. Obviously once enough people were on Google Talk, they switched the protocol to a propriety protocol and XMPP basically died.
The lesson is that if you want a protocol to be resilient then you want to avoid corporations having a majority user share on it.
If I start seeing meta on here, I’ll leave. I left facebook over a decade ago, and want nothing to do with it. This seems like an obvious no brainer.
we need to force defederation from thread’s
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
- 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
