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.
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.
Idiots maybe but probably wealthy idiots once Meta is done with them.
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.
It’s a pretty well established anecdote that most of the time a McDonalds tells you the ice cream machine is broken, it’s because they’ve already cleaned it for the night and if they use it again they’ll need to reclean it. It’s easier to say it’s broken rather than make one dessert and then have to reclean it all over again.
Bullshit. I know everybody loves a good “lazy employees” story, but American machines are designed to break down constantly so Taylor gets repair revenue from McDonald’s franchise owners.
I used to work at McDonald’s and got tired of the constant accusations from customers. Johnny Harris made an excellent video on this topic.
I know a good number of McDonald’s employees are lazy, but that damn machine was the bane of my existence when I was a manager. It would just randomly decide not to work for the day and we had to call Taylor.
I was a manager at a McDonald’s In the UK for five years. Can honestly say our shake/I’ve cream machine never once broke down.
We never took it off early for the nightly clean though, that only took a matter of minutes.
But the regular deap clean, we took it off for that, usually a Monday or Tuesday night as they were quiet, and we were straight up with customers and said it was being cleaned
Most McDonald’s in the UK are corporate owned, not franchised, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they ordered more reliable machines there. The corporate owned locations here in the States always seem to have ice cream as well.
I worked for a privately-owned location and that damn machine would randomly say “FREEZER LOCK” and refuse to work until Taylor could come to reset it, and of course the owner didn’t want us to rack up the repair bills. Johnny Harris and Louis Rossmann covered this on their channels, which I appreciate because it did feel like the machines were intended to break down all the time.
To be fair, I did say “well established anecdote” and not “well established fact”.
That’s not why at all. Watch the video @danielton posted below.
You’re not getting the real McDonalds experience
I’m right there with you. I can already foresee that their apps will be prioritizing monetized users like content creators and everything in there will be a transaction of some sort. Who cares, you just have to block their instances and go about your merry way.
Agree.
But isn’t half life alyx basically hl3?
Nah, that’s a prequel. What everyone wants is a conclusion to the cliffhanger that the current Half-Life story ended on. Good game though!
We need Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and then Half-Life 3.
At this point I’m half-expecting Half-Life 4 to shadow-drop some day before 3 ever does.
This
VR will remain a gimmick until it isn’t a whole-ass lifestyle.
But…it doesn’t have to be a whole-ass lifestyle, even right now with the current state of VR. Even with an Oculus Quest 2, you just put on the headset, play an hour or so, and then put the headset down like a normal person.
The marketing teams at Meta and Apple want to market it as a lifestyle because that’s the only way they know how to promote it without going into the nerdy weeds of VR game design, etc., but from a consumer perspective, it’s only a lifestyle if you choose to make it your lifestyle.
“Vr is a gimmick” -people who haven’t owned a proper vr headset
Not for owners, for sure - but for prospective ones? The catalogue of possible games/uses is a bit thin for a 1k+ piece of kit… I think it would be incredible to own a HOTAS warthog but I’m not playing flying games very often right now, you know?
If I did, I probably would because at that point I want to enjoy the kit I have. Imo, that means right now, a flight sim controller set up due my use case is a bit of a gimmick - but if I already owned it I’d seek out things to utilise it, reducing its gimmicky position in ‘the roster’.
Gimmicky is kind of a subjective term in that way, it’s all about the individual utility offered.
But yeah - that comment was a bit snarky, I get that too.
I do games research for a living and have access to pretty much every relevant VR headset made since the first Oculus.
VR is very much a gimmick. There is no killer app or feature, and the closest thing we get to one are exergames like Beat Saber. Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars. Similarly, virtual desktops are neat but really don’t offer any tangible benefits compared to a large monitor to make up for the added discomfort of having to wear a VR headset. The Snow Crash-style metaverse is and always has been absolute bullshit. It’s just a less convenient version of the metaverse we already have.
VR has some potential to create cool embodied experiences, but the benefits so far are so slight that the technology is looking a lot like 3D TV and HD-DVD: technically impressive, no meaningful improvement in the holistic user experience. Hence, it remains a gimmick.
Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars.
I have to disagree with this statement. Having played through that game multiple times, it just provides a level of immersion that no other VR game has touched yet. Heck, from an immersion perspective, it pretty much beats every game I’ve ever played in my life.
The problem with the VR industry is that so few games approach HL: Alyx’s level of immersion. Of course, it’d be hard to justify the $300-$400 asking price. VR devs are all content on making these simple arcade style games with simple graphics that can run on the Quest 2.
The problem is the size of the potential player base. A VR headset for $300-500 (and that’s on the low end) is already a big ask for one game, but then you also need a gaming PC. To get the full fat immersive experience you’ll need a fairly beefy PC (3070 or better, 11th gen Intel or 3000 series AMD CPU etc) and a Valve Index ($1000 iirc). The costs add up very quickly, and that’s a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people. That’s also why the Quest 2 is such a common target for development: it’s relatively more affordable and as a result has a much bigger install base.
There’s also a whole slew of physical space issues with being tied to a computer that the standalone headsets solves, but that’s a broader argument beyond the cost of the headset itself.
A lot of these issues can be solved by remote streaming. The full fat immersive experience becomes far more manageable if instead of trying to cram a beefy Snapdragon SoC into a complicated headset, you just make the headset be a dedicated streaming device and then focus on bringing the price down to $200. Think Quest 2 but all it needs have is enough logic to do tracking and video decoders to process video streams.
a big ask for one game
That’s just a chicken and egg problem though. We don’t have a good library of PCVR titles so people find it hard to justify buying a PCVR headset. Nobody makes PCVR titles because they think no one’s buying the headset, etc. I feel like a lot of people think PCVR won’t work because the overall setup is too expensive. However, I think there’s enough PC players who already have a gaming PC who would gladly drop an extra $200 on another peripheral if the game library was there.
There are multiple games that wouldn’t be the same without VR. A Township Tale, Gorilla Tag, Echo VR. None of these would be nearly as fun without VR. The biggest issue with VR is probably the lack of some more linear story driven AAA games that many people are used to. And you don’t need to invest several thousand dollars for VR. Stand-alone VR with the quest has been a thing for years
You’re kind of making my point for me here. The games that exist for VR don’t really add anything that didn’t already exist but with less convenient controls. A Township Tale is fundamentally just an MMO in VR, and we have already have dozens of MMOs that are easier to play. Similarly, we have a ton of story-based games on other platforms that work perfectly well. VR as a medium doesn’t really do anything for the gaming experience in those cases.
Games that make use of the inherently different interaction modalities of VR, like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag, show some promise in terms of new ways of playing games. That kind of interaction is really interesting and brings something new to the table. Unfortunately, they’re also effortful to play and as such are generally difficult to play for extended periods of time. To some extent they all become exergames. Since they also need a fair amount of space to play there’s a certain barrier to entry for playing them.
I think the the standalone headsets are the future of VR, mostly due to the lower instep to get started. I even own a Quest 2 that I play sometimes (admittedly mostly Beat Saber and Ragnarock). However, the standalone VR headsets are also kind of limited in terms of computational power, so there’s some competition from the casual and mobile market. The mobile (and console, and PC) platforms also don’t have the added baggage of physical excersion that comes with VR, which makes them more accessible than VR.
Again, there really isn’t much of a case for VR beyond exergames. Games being VR can be a selling point for the true believers in VR, but for most people it’s kind of a fun experience that isn’t very meaningful.
A township tale is fun because of the fact that you use your hands for everything. Putting tools together, hammering nails in, fighting monsters, that’s what differentiates it from other MMOs. I don’t see a problem with VR games being physically exerting, less people sitting in a chair playing games is a good thing. In fact the physical nature of it is what makes it fun. I don’t see VR as the future of gaming or anything, I see it as another way to play. Just like I prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters and controller for platformers. The games I play in VR are games I wouldn’t like in a traditional format. The interactivity and immersion of VR is impossible to replicate in a normal game. That doesn’t mean normal games don’t have their place, they obviously do and I don’t think VR should replace them.
Yeah I really wish PCVR was still alive and well instead of the stagnant industry that it currently is. I bought both a Rift S and a Quest 2 thinking that full-length story driven games were going to become a thing, but then the hardware limitations of standalone kinda killed that. Now I don’t really have any interest in buying a Quest 3 or a Vision Pro because I don’t have any faith that there’s going to be developers making those kinds of experiences anymore.
I don’t get why games can optimize for mobile hardware but can’t just give lower graphics settings on PC for some reason. Maybe stand-alone wouldn’t have been such a big thing if they had done that
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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)
It’s strange how Mastodon is so willingly letting them in. Fishy… Fishy and hairy. Like a fish with some nice bangs. Maybe a mullet. A little mustache too, recently brushed with a little mustache brush.
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.
I have no love for corporations but they’re a fact of life by this point on the internet. They drive a significant about of marketing and users and they’re what make a social media platform take off (which is why Parler and Gab fell apart).
Fediverse SHOULD be an ethical platform, but you have server admins defederating any instance that even has paid subscribers. Isn’t that going too far? Are we trying to force everyone on here into a kibbutz?
I believe the only instances that should be defederated are corporate, self-harm, profanely illegal, and political extremist instances.
Anything further than that and the whole network is going to devolve into a series of micro echo chambers.
Or maybe it won’t, maybe the vast and free instances will flourish while the restrictive instances die out.
Either way, trying to control a community based on wishy washy ideology is not a good look.
I think in these early days we’ll see a lot of power drunk admins who are too eager to push the button, just because they can.
To add to that maybe a general rule of thumb would be to defederate with any instances that go against the sustainability and self interest of the whole fediverse.
Absolutely, and the actions that “go against the sustainability and self-interest of the fediverse” will need to be analyzed and codified into fediverse “law.”
If we make specific and firm rules about what is disallowed on an instance, it makes enforcing those rules simple.
Whats wrong with steam?
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
It’s a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Isnt that based on the assumption that Valves public comment about removing the drm in the case they go under is a lie. It becomes a trust issue then, and to the public view, many put trust in them.
They have no reason to honor that, and are a corporation. I don’t consider that binding or realistic.
There are many things that happen for “no reason”. Its fully a trust issue if you dont think it would happen.
OK. You’re welcome to trust in anything you like. I believe contracts, not promises.
Yeah – it should be in writing with the customers (ToS?) and every contract Valve signs with game developers for it to be something that can actually be performed.
We will need the judicial system to force Valve to remove the DRM.
Wait, do you need Internet access to play your offline games? If so, moving to itch.io
Depends on the game. These ones for example don’t even require you to launch them through Steam.
Cool, thanks for the resource
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.
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.
i think nothing beats literally getting the zip file with all the contents of the game with no middleware like GOG employs. to decentralize the store further requires the devs to at least manage their own website hosting, domains, ownership status accounts for updates. the only step available beyond that is the payment methods, and i don’t think there’s any viable solution to be done in that case besides having more companies like Stripe and Paypal.
in that sense, Itch is handling things pretty good for devs so far,
The main thing I’m for is improved ownership rights, and currently GOG is the best of them. The only downside with it is that you can’t sell it on when you’re done, like old games in physical media. When digital media has none of digital media’s drawbacks, then I’ll leave off about the potential of NFTs.
problem there is that anti-drm and ownership of a license to download and run software don’t combine while financially viable to the stores. aside from the additional problem of having to manage inventories, trades and everything that happens to break those systems, “owning” the license and allowing to sell to someone else doesn’t do much if you don’t employ a DRM to enforce the make-believe of you pretending you’re monetarily compensating a physical larbor of transferring a given copy of a media, people will share things with each other before you can blink and not care where it comes from so long as it runs and it’s clean, specially in places where people won’t pay for games instead of food. only reason CSGO skins works on Steam as the original NFT system is because there’s servers to enforce what people get to see you holding and what you don’t own. and allowing for transferring games between accounts without a DRM is not something you’ll ever see any big company doing under the liability of being accused of promoting “piracy”.
What benefits could give to the user and the producer the descentralization?
Disintermediation would be nice; More of my money going directly into the hands of game developers instead of executives. Also, people who own games should be able to resell them. Can’t do that with centralized platforms. A benefit of decentralized game ownership would be that the developer could be cut into the resale of their games, which shifts the incentive to a more long-term view. A game could be something that is supported by the “used” market, and therefore has a reason to invest in long-term value. No more drive to keep on reinventing the wheel and releasing new games every year, just keep on making the existing game better.
Oh, nice response, I want to be optimistic and see in the future more and more descentralization
No, not in my experience. Some games do exist that do that, but that’s the choice of the developer.
I think under gay space communism we’re gonna have every game from history totally cracked. Imagine the low latency you could get in a space station cluster 1/100th the diameter of earth.
We’ll just have super AIs refactor whatever so we can run 50,000 vs 50,000 games in Battlefield 4 on enormous AI-generated maps. And even if we don’t have ansibles we’ll get that zero latency from gaming in the space cluster.
Like, if you feel like it. You don’t have to live in the gaming cluster you can go skydiving on Jupiter or whatever if you’re into that physical crap.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
100% agree. I’ve been shocked at what seems like extreme naivety or willful ignorance in some of the discussions on federating with corps. Corps only want profit. People are the product at meta. They just want more product.
There’s either a streak of loud and stupid that started up when the NDAs came to light or some of these “Facebook would never do anything bad” people are suspicious af.
If the Lemmy admins sides with people like zuck, which they shouldn’t because they’re literal communists I’m going to laugh so hard, internet would pretty much be fucked lol
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the big difference is Lemmy and other sites got popular now as a result of people finally realizing “wow the modernized internet is pretty much complete dogshit”
the only thing that’s been basically different is people trying and rather unsuccessfully to create an alternative to the bigger sites. 9/10 most of them have failed, but with Lemmy considering how much and how dedicated the userbase has been so far.
My point was mostly “if Lemmy can be bought out” (which I really doubt) “then the internet is just blatantly fucked and there’s not anywhere to go period.”
Lemmy, which I’m currently using through liftoff seems like the best solution and has a rather dedicated userbase in general. I’m excited to be here but there’s always the worry something could go wrong with it
From my perspective there was nowhere to go besides disparate discord communities, until I learned Lemmy existed and it got an IV injection of life from spez screwing with reddit
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.
My voices say that de-fed is best and I worry that not everyone will perceive the terrible consequences of not doing so. and yay for star trek :-)
By sheer user count allowing them to federate would mean the end of non-Meta content on the All feed. Threads is already much bigger than the entire combined Fediverse so the total engagement would drown any Lemmy content, unless of course driven by Meta comments itself. This would no longer be Lemmy, it would be Threads that you could use your Lemmy account for. Maybe not if the algorithm was changed to filter out posts from Threads from the All feed, but you’d still get your communities flooded with Facebook comments.
This is in addition to the rest of the problematic issues with Meta as a company.
I’m fine with threads federating with mastodon as it means more content which means people won’t immediately dismiss mastodon because it’s too boring for them, but I don’t want Lemmy to federate with Lemmy any more than I want to read tweets on reddit. They’re different types of platforms for different things.
This is what I’ve been thinking lately. There’s no way to unring that bell after an influx of several million people “join” Mastodon through Threads.
Plus threads has an entire team of engineers who can be abused to get out better looking apps, sys admins who ensure the threads servers are running at minimal load - ensuring a top tier Fediverse experience. Already we’ve seen a burst of indie developers for Lemmy and Mastodon, but what if I’m not concerned that my microblog app needs to know health biometric data - threads is up when my niche instance goes down.
That’s how they get you. Come to threads for a “better user experience”! You can still follow the weird Bean memes, but with a better UI/UX! Don’t worry, we at Facebook won’t defederate with everyone else once we hit critical mass!
Users can still block instances though with Lemmy, yeah? So even if admins of instances don’t block Threads, I’d imagine users would be able to. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the capabilities of the software, however.
You can block communities at user level but not whole instances yet, it’s been requested as a feature I think, though.
If the fediverse can’t survive meta it can’t survive. If decentralization’s Achilles heel is corporations then decentralization is not viable strategy in the current world and we should give up on it now.
Threads wasn’t first, and it’s going to be very very far from last. There is no escape from corporate interests in any g7 nation - other than being deemed too small to matter
True, not the first and definitely not the last. But (realistically) the fediverse is still in it’s infancy.
Decentralization is not what makes it weak, it makes it strong, but allowing facebook and trying to keep the decentralised voice is like asking a baby to fight a lion.
Facebook is a known bad actor, they can’t be trusted to join the fediverse. They are a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Facebook is the worst non Nestle company out there, but exactly zero corporations can be classified as sheep. If Google starts sniffing around don’t think they’ll be any better.
My point is that defederation is our defense against corporate interests. And Facebook isn’t just “a corporation”, it’s specifically a known hostile actor with massive experience in social manipulation. It’s not a perfect defense, but you don’t resist corporate subsumation by letting them straight through the door.
Perhaps what is eventually needed is some sort of Fediverse Alliance that operates under established usage/ethical guidelines.
To join the Alliance, an instance must sign a Terms of Agreement/Charter/Constitution that is written (and owned w/ potential for future amendment) by said alliance. It would contain all of the data usage rules and operational ethics that must be adhered to in order to be a member of the Alliance (and therefore have access/be joined to the group of allied Fediverse instances via federation).
If such an Alliance were successfully formed (especially if top-instances banded together) it becomes a powerful mechanism to filter out the bad and protect the users. For example: perhaps one charter rule is no for-profits or corporate instances?
If an instance violates the charter they would face defederation from the Alliance—perhaps by vote? ( ie group level defederation). At this point the offending instance(s) could of course create their own Alliance. However the benefits of being in the “Primary Alliance” are lost (or gained!).
Just thinking out loud.
Edit: Alliance self-governance would need to be thought of very very carefully in order to protect against corruption and hostile acts….
I think this is a really good long term strategy, and something that is already happening to some level.
Many instances are open about blocking others, and warn eachother of bad instances (like a instance full of spam bots or bigots). I could definetly see this evolving into an alliance type network like you described.
What does it defend us against though? The only thing we get from federating with them is more users. Lack of users is the biggest reason people won’t use mastodon. Once threads starts federating it makes it easier to convince people to move. By accessing threads content from mastodon, meta gets no data from us other than the stuff that’s already public for anyone to see. You don’t need to give them device permissions, you don’t need an instagram account. I don’t see the issue. I don’t think all instances should defederate, some should so people have the option to not see threads posts though.
Social manipulation, brazen EEE or EEC. None of this is necessarily specifically about privacy, which I explained in the post, but about open and brazen manipulation.
What is EEE and EEC
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume (my version of EEE, where an instance becomes so dominant that defederation would ruin the experience for every other instance and essentially locks them into federation to be useful).
This right here! The ability to defederate is what makes this community viable. We still have the power in this space to ignore corporations. Something we are losing the ability to do in real life. Corporations live and die by their ability to interact with us. Defederation is one of the strongest tools on the internet now.
How do you identify corporations? What if they buy huge instances and not tell anyone? Anyone can be bought, there isn’t really any stopping this. They then can just merge it with their own branded instance.
A corporation is technically a group of people acting as a legal single entity. But in this case I’m using the more layman definition of large monied interests trying to monetize everything and crush creativity in the process. If they buy huge instances… then we make others. Just look at how many people (like me) did their research to try something new when they fell out with Reddit. Switching to a new instance is not that hard.
It’s less of a defense and more of a stick to shove in our spokes. We can get bled to death by simple user inertia, it happens all the time. We can see it happening right here in the Fediverse as we speak, where the majority of active users just think of beehaw as “that weird server where people won’t see my replies.”
Threads is an aircraft carrier at full speed and we’re a rowboat being attached to its side whether we like it or not. If we just cut ourselves loose we will be crushed in their wake.
This assumes that the people joining threads actually consider themselves part of the Fediverse, which I would bet is not the case. They’re just using their existing IG account, and if more communities and groups start being formed on Threads than anywhere else Facebook essentially gets control over most of the fediverse, due to it’s large size.
It also assumes that the instances defederating are going to be a small minority, which doesn’t have to be the case at all. We already have pretty thriving communities here, we don’t need Threads to grow - just improving our user experiences to grow steadily until we are as the Fediverse strong enough to seriously resist this kind of corporate agglomeration. ^.^
The only response to a corporation specifically known for mass social manipulation is to defederate rather than let them get their hooks in. In your analogy, this is using our high speed engine and maneuverability to get as far away as possible before they just obliterate us.
I think most lemmy users are against federation with meta.
Mann … I’d spin up an instance and defederat from them if the majority of admins decided to federate with meta.
I used xmpp for years before Google talk federated, and I was so excited. I thought xmpp was finally going to be mainstream, but then they used their weight to control the direction of the protocol, then cut and run. Xmpp has mostly recovered and still a great protocol, but Google kind of messed it up before kicking it to the curb.
Edit: This page no longer exists, but as recently as 2020, Google had a page about how dedicated they were to open chat standards, 7 years after they introduced hangouts, which was once again a closed/proprietary protocol.
For what it’s worth, Eugen, the fellow behind mastodon doesn’t think this is a XMPP situation:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Eugen is either naive or is in cohorts with Meta. As a tech worker, I know firsthand how foolish can techbros be. He.probably thinks he can “negotiate an advantageous position” with Meta.
I only joined Lemmy because of its open source, non-manipulative, not-for-profit nature. If Meta joins it will be a good reason for me to quit. Hell, even Reddit would be better than a Fediverse with Meta IMO.
Hopefully .world decides to defederate Threads and Meta, but if they refuse you can migrate to another instance that does defederate them. The solution here should be to refuse Meta, not give up on Lemmy and the Fediverse.
They won’t be able to bribe every instance without making it known to the world but another mass migration even if within the same federation would discourage a lot of new users from joining/staying though.
This makes me so fucking angry that these fuckers wouldn’t even let us have a small corner of the internet to ourselves.
“People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.”
Who gets to appoint the gatekeepers?
I actually support making it easier for people to join the Fediverse. For instance, by having each instance compile lists of other instances which self-determine the kinds of topics they want and pointing new users to instances that are less overloaded, and by making the signup process easier, and improving UI. Letting Facebook consume us and destroy us via EEE is not that.
The “gatekeepers” are the people willing to set up instances ^.^.
The gatekeepers are the instance mods/admins. The model is known to have problems…unfortunately, it’s the best option we have IMO
The OP wasn’t speaking for their server though they were speaking for the fediverse. Everyone should be able to run their server how they see fit but don’t speak for other people.
I don’t know, I think we have a responsibility to eachother to keep the Fediverse ecosystem healthy - Facebook/Meta isn’t exactly a humanist… well, anything.
I think it’s fair the white blood cells of our ‘body’ are calling for re-enforcements on this.
This would probably relegate the fediverse to a zombie-product-status niche if this sort of policy extremism takes on. But maybe some users would prefer that. Please read the rebuttal on this view at https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking
It’s not a zombie network now, but it will be if Facebook EEEs us. We don’t need to grow by becoming attached to Facebook nya.
And calling engaging with an FOSS protocol immediately with NDAs suspicious is not “tinfoil hat behaviour”, when we are talking about Facebook, which again, is well known for social manipulation and astroturfing.
NDAs are completely normal working with any established company on their pre-release product. I have signed NDAs when visiting an office because I might be in the presence of non-public data on someone’s nearby monitor. The NDA issue being a signal of negative intent really shows the level of sensitivity people have regarding this.
The intended purpose of defederation I thought was to keep the Nazis out, and prevent brigading from other communities — in general, a tool to use sparingly to isolate bad nodes to maintain the overall network health. Defederation because an instance has been accused of a pre-crime is a very troubling stance. It’s also surprising to see this posted here due to lemmy.world being defederated from already by other instances due to moderation concerns. That defederation is actually why I intentionally avoided a lemmy.world account — it’s just a headache for users
defed meta!
we need to force defederation from thread’s
Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.
People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.
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
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
Considering the hate and threats that the admin of Universeodon got for just doing due diligence in meeting with Meta might explain that.
They’re going to have to let us know eventually
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I just got here after I recently dereddited but I defacebooked a long time ago.
If lemmy.world federates with meta I will delemmy.world.
If all Lemmy instances federate with meta I will delemmy.
Its pretty simple.
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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Warning: very bright
Eyes have to adjust after looking at that site
Everything looks wrong for a minute or two afterwards
I can only hope that in some senior Meta management meeting they pulled this website up as an issue/concern, and a bunch of overpaid middle managers had to stare at the pinkness for hours upon end in a depressing corporate boardroom.
Is lemmy.world admin on there? Wefwef acts like it will let me search the page on my iOS device but then it does nothing.
No, neither Is his mastadon server
I don’t think there’s much risk to Lemmy. Moreso Mastodon.
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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.
Did you read any of my arguments?
I don’t know if the person is an ex-redditor but if they are, their comment is appallingly short sighted and is reminiscent of German appeasement in the lead up to WWII. “They took Poland, you all are just scare mongering that they will come for France.”Lemmy is growing because corporate fucks fucked reddit. Now corporate fucks are trying to fuck lemmy and mastodon, and their best take is “y’all are fear mongering” despite mountains of evidence that corporate fucks will fuck anything they are allowed to fuck.
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Couldn’t agree more. I want nothing to with Meta because their end goal is to either have control of the Fediverse or end the parts they don’t.
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This is an amazing use of the word fuck.
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This was a fascinating and well written paper. It reminded me of how Labor and social movements are co-opted historically.
