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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Regardless of what anyone thinks about politics, nothing good will come by letting them in. I hope all current instances defederate, I know mine will.
Will lemmy.world defederate?
I want to know too, they arent saying despite a lot of their users asking which is irresponsible.
I anticipate they will federate and I will have to close my account and move.
Is there a way to block threads content?
I run my own instance here at twisti.ca and have the full intention of defederating
nice to hear that.
Then let’s warn people against using anything Meta and by doing so drive people away from it.
I am trying to figure out how this will do anything but make a “threads” and a “rest of the fediverse” setup, just like we have now. Nothing will change, and this will be for the best. Meta will make a shitty version of fediverse to rival their own shitty facebook, and the rest of us will be happier for it.
This post feels like fearmongering…
Why would Meta care about small instances? I feel like Meta would only see the big instances as pontential threat.
Honestly, this could actually be an opportunity for fediverse. I don’t want Meta to harvest my data, so I would never make an account there. However I am interested in content/people from Meta and I can follow that from fediverse. I believe there is large group of people who think the same way and they may join fediverse if they haven’t already done that.
I don’t want Meta to harvest my data, so I would never make an account there
The nature of federation means that you don’t have to make an account there for them to harvest your data. They probably do it already.
The nature of federation means that you don’t have to make an account there for them to harvest your data. They probably do it already.
They can do that without Threads though. Everything you upvote, downvote, and comment on is public record. Plus the way federated content works is the host server isn’t accessed unless you actively try to go there, everything else is reposted in your local instance. So they’re not going to get data from Threads that way.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: they don’t care about the Fediverse one way or another. This is just a way to kill Twitter, and they’re doing it through a loose alliance of sorts.
That’s exactly what I meant, they don’t need Threads, it’s all public (except possibly email addresses?) , but @bighi@lemmy.world commented to me and said it doesn’t work that way, so now I’m secend guessing myself.
Either way, they can scoop all that post data up anyway, to me the data is almost becoming a red herring. IMHO, Facebook’s history of being a platform of hate-fueled content, violence, trolling, social manipulation, etc. is of greater concern.
I’m also wary of the day that Facebook is the driving force of the Fediverse due to it’s sheer size. All those users come along with a great deal of inertia, and Facebook could end up being the mega-Corp who decides all the protocol standards forcing others to keep up with their “contributions” or get left behind.
Your posts are only public if you set your profile to public. Otherwise, they’re private. But even if they’re public, I’m pretty sure an instance can make them almost private (as in: you can only see the data if you’re federating with them).
I agree that most of the instances don’t make things private at the moment (I think), but at least they can protect your information if they want to.
But anyway, federating or not, Meta and other companies are already tracking everyone one way or another.
Small correction, I don’t want them to harvest data that is connected to me as a person. With Meta I have to give out many personal info that they don’t actually need for their service to function. It’s just a way for making more money.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only personal info on Fediverse I have to give is my email.
That’s not hot activityPub federation works
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.
But… what kind of Camel milk do you like?
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I mean, we can all defederate. You’re TELLING us to defederate. What makes ours ethical and their unethical??
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They cannot make our instances slower. Your browser / the server doesn’t make any requests to threads when you load a page on your instance. They could send notifications less frequently, but so what.
What makes ours ethical and their unethical??
Their actual history. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
That’s not an ethical argument. That’s a heuristic based on an ad hominem. It’s not that I disagree that they have a history of unethical behaviour but that doesn’t mean every act they perform is tainted with being unethical. You have to make the actual argument.
It’s not just one behavior, it’s a continuous pattern of behavior. If you want to give them a clean slate in every new instance, that’s your choice. At some point it’s the scorpion and the frog. Whether you consider it an ethical argument or not, it’s basic common sense that Meta’s pattern of behavior will continue absent any evidence to the contrary.
And ad hominem is an argument against a person, not a company. My argument is citing their past behavior which would not be an ad hominem argument even if I’d cited Zuckerberg specifically. “Because Zuck is greedy.” would be ad hominem.
Whether or not an action is ethical should be completely independent of who is doing it, all else being equal. That’s not an ethical argument and so it doesn’t answer the specific question I am asking.
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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.
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.
Facebook and Instagram killed off the forums I used. I was highly involved with a niche art independent website forum which was pretty well known to people within the community, and then right around the time average people really started using the internet, Facebook boomed and then Instagram. Using those got huge within the community. The corresponding sub on reddit has never amounted to much at all.
Sorry to hear that. Art and photography definitely had a stronger time on platforms like insta, tumblr, and twitter, where the artists felt they were more directly benefitting and growing their presence and audience. It was more so the discussion-based forums that reddit killed.
Not sure how you’d go about building Lemmy in a way that appeals to them. Perhaps if profiles could be posted to and profiles functioned like communities that could be subscribed to, then users could subscribe directly to artists reddit sort of half-heartedly did this but never really made it very visible that you could directly follow a user and never promoted that content via the “follow” feature. Something like that could be done for Lemmy. A feed of your direct user/author subscriptions. This could however create a power-user problem.
Facebook replaced the discussion part because the average artist wasn’t nerdy/computery enough to use reddit, which was more obscure at the time (around 2011-2013). It’s still obscure compared to FB/IG even now. Then after IG started becoming popular, people hopped there because that’s what the customers were using, and at the same time the industry was flourishing.
It was also frustrating, having been involved in ecommerce website and stats development, to see people using Instagram as an auction site… the most feature-free platform to sell your work. Granted, it’s because our work (primarily glass pipes) wasn’t welcome on eBay, and eBay is overcomplicated and expensive, and Etsy allowed it but is sort of lame… but still, silly to see people have auctions in a chain of instagram comments, and then suffer all these various problems that ecommerce platforms were designed to overcome. Reserve price, reputation, record of bids, backup bids, requirement payment and follow-through. People would be “I sold and the buyer didn’t pay!” or “I bought equipment and they shipped me a brick!” and it’s like no kidding, that’s the reason ebay exists and you’re doing transactions in instagram comments.
So yeah, what you’re suggesting is basically for people to use Lemmy as a personal blog or website. I think that’s a good idea. Sort of something like tumblr. Many people are getting sick of not having an identity, not having a true connection to their customers, getting suddenly cut off from years of followers when a site decides to ban them and being lost on huge generic platforms that cover everything. There’s a bit of a movement towards personal websites. The best way to do that, though, is still to have your own website - I can picture that some people will have problems with instance admins who are just as arbitrary and unaccountable as large corp social media, maybe even more. So the best thing for an artist to do would be to run lemmy or pixelfed on their own domain and server, and federate. Then people from the lemmifediverse can follow and comment, whether they’re on your instance or not, and you could also add sales software, and you can’t be cut off short of losing your domain.
Technically you could hack this together in a certain way with the existing software. An artist buys a domain, hosting, puts up their own Lemmy instances but does not allow registration on it. They put up a single community on that server and make themselves the sole poster on it. They post their art and content, other people on the federation with accounts from elsewhere subscribe to that comm and comment/interact with works.
This is of course not a very clear out-of-the-box way to use Lemmy. And it has the problem of seeking out subscribers. It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to find subscribers and fans by crossposting to art communities on other lemmy sites though. Further customisation and personalisation of that site requires css and html knowledge too to edit and change the front end.
Really for all of this to be viable for that kind of audience it needs to be provided as a simple 1 purchase install and setup for that target group. Then they also need fairly advanced understanding of fediverse combined with knowledge of reddit where subreddit crossposting for growth is very powerful in order to get the growth they’d like.
And even then, it’s not gonna be what Twitter is to them. They will end up spending most of their time on Twitter because that’s where they get the dollars. This setup would be entirely in their own control though, and free of anyone else’s rules on what they can post in their own instance.
Yeah, Lemmy is already perfectly appropriate for that. It would just take an easy way to install it, the way that many hosts will install WordPress or other CMS packages automatically, and an easy theming system. I’m not really a WordPress fan (though I haven’t had to customize it in 12 years), but perhaps more realistically, Automattic is working on an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. I’m not really sure how that will work but it would accomplish the same thing.
I feel like it’d be the other way around honestly. Maybe I’m just shilling but right now the app is literally barebones as shit and it looks and feels like it was made in a week.
are you peppy from osu! ?
no sir :) i am not aware who that is.
are you aku from osu!?
@peppy my instance has been getting dos for a couple months now.
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One thing I don’t understand is why would meta even federate with anyone outside of their own instances anyway?
Makes no sense to ever open up to allow any other instances in. Not like they are crying for users.
The fediverse just makes sense in their own bubble. Turn Facebook, Instagram, and their other apps into the fediverse and federate them all together.
I don’t expect them to ever open up to the actual fediverse. Same with BlueSky. I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.
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BlueSky will use their own protocol, so they will indeed be a closed bubble.
As for Meta, my (totally unjustified) hunch is that they’re expecting that other big names like Twitter, BlueSky, Google or Amazon will migrate or create their own ActivityPub services, and they want to be early adopters. If Threads is successful, I could see them migrating Facebook and Instagram too.
That’s my assessment also. This isn’t about extinguishing us, it’s about the other whales. AFAICT, they want and expect us us to be do well. (Delete could use a confirmation…)
It’s a classic tactic, you open up compatibility with an open source platform so everyone moves to the fancy app that supports it all (threads) then they drop support and kill the platform (fediverse). They’ll do it and will likely be successful unless they’re blocked completely right now.
I don’t see why we can’t just stay on the fediverse, enjoy threads as long as meta wants to play ball, and then wave goodbye when they decide they don’t want to federate anymore. Nobody’s forcing anyone to move from the fediverse to meta, and I think the current demographic here is unlikely to volunteer for another walled garden experience.
Worst case scenario is we end up right back where we are now- a niche community prioritizing independence and decentralization.
The problem with federating with anything owned by meta is that it is a data syphon. I don’t think we can fully protect ourselves from that. If they want the data most of it is easy to come by by just having any ol mastodon account or running a malicious instance or just scraping what is public and inferring the rest. However we shouldn’t be inviting a threat like that into our backyard. We should definitely not be federating with them. Furthermore it gives them the opportunity to bloat things down with ads or DOS small instances with amounts of traffic and data they can’t handle and they could make it prohibitively expensive to run an instance that federates with them. Nipping those problems in the bud requires showing them the door early.
Once they’re federated they have full admin access. So they can see who liked posts, and lots of other info.
They could be doing this already, for all we know. We don’t know who owns all those little instances out there. Large corporations or government surveillance just need to set up a discreetly named instance or two and start subscribing, and they’ll get all the data they want. (In fact, could that be part of the reason for the explosion in silent bot accounts?)
Aw shit, yeah, obviously… The folks mining data are going to be using innocent looking nodes to do it… Okay you convinced me, I won’t pull the plug.
On one hand, I think it could be possible that Meta is planning to federate with the fediverse with the ultimate goal of destroying it and replacing it with their own instances. Similar to what Google did with XMPP according to this article. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
On the other hand, I also think it could be possible Meta is wanting to federate with the fediverse just so it can increase it’s data collection many times quicker. Why manage servers when you can connect to other servers and suck up data as and when Threads users interact with other lemmy instances.
No idea which is more likely.
Thanks for the link about the whole google xmpp affair. Really well written. More people need to see this
I do think this sounds plausible. If they could become a dominant instance in the Fediverse, it would be easier to supplant it altogether. This is why decentralization is paramount.
Threads will be the dominant instance by a huge margin.
We don’t need them and they don’t need us.
Interesting thoughts. I suppose Meta will collect what they want to collect, it’s what they do, and this is all public discussion, anyone can collect it for any reason. And I don’t doubt that their involvement in the fediverse is secretly nefarious in one way or another.
Where I think our current situation is different from the Google/XMPP thing, is that, a bunch of platforms are going down the tubes really quickly and lots of people are looking for the next thing all at the same time. It gives a lot of room for a good platform like this one to gain ground rapidly. As far as I’m concerned, if for example instagram federated, and I could browse some good feeds outside of meta’s app & privacy permissions hell, that would be a plus for me. If they subsequently pulled what Google did with XMPP and suddenly backed out, I wouldn’t react by moving to instagram exclusively and I can’t really see why any user would make such a move.
Wasn’t Meta part of that as well with xmpp? They should not be trusted.
I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.
Just like they did with the Internet.
They of course have no interest in growing the fediverse as an independent alternative, they want to use it for their own ends. They want to serve people the fediverse’s free content under their own umbrella and rules (and ads of course) to monetize stuff that doesn’t belong to them, or anyone else. It’s all pretty straightforward greed and capitalizing on an opportunity.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Well? Apparently, they plan on making it happen. https://help.instagram.com/169559812696339
Everyone is really scrambling now as if they really thought up to now that the Fediverse was immune to corpo bullshit
Well we would be if everyone just blocked them like gab or truth social etc. But I guess mainly Rothko is considering federating which is why everyone is freaking out
If an instance does off because Meta won’t defederates from it, then it probably would have died off anyway.
