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!)
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
I’m not sure it quite works that way. They can only make changes to their platform/instance and may thus become incompatible with everyone else but it’s still up to the smaller instances wether they want to go down that road or not. They can’t really steal fediverse from us - we’d have to give it to them.
what you are saying is true if you entirely ignore the power of a majority market share and the demand that puts on small developers.
even if it’s not universal demand, all you need is a slight majority.
see what happened, for example, with xmpp: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
While yes, there are ways around defederation to still get to our content, that does not mean it is not better than simply giving it to them.
Regarding their content, facebook is fucking garbage content. You actually want that? Why are you here then?
I’m not advocating for either or. Just stating the facts. Defederation in no way makes it harder for them to take content from other instances. When you post into the fediverse it’s for everyone to see. You can only control what’s coming back at you.
Yeah, if they wanted to vacuum it up wholesale, sure. But that is not how it is usually transfered and consumed. It is generally done by users subscribing to individual communities. This is seldom done with defederated communities though, as no interaction is possible, removing the whole “social” part of social media.
So while you are technically correct, the end result will be closer to what I describe. Unless they just copy/paste it with something not too far off from repost bots, for their own local consumption.
If they do that, we may have to think of something else to help secure ourselves.
Just require users to be logged in to view posts, and then limit them to seeing a few hundred every day. That should stop them from stealing the content.
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.