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!)
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)?