I’ve seen that some instances have already done it preemptively.
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Admins are in agreement that we don’t want federation with Meta.
I don’t see us currently federating with them - https://lemmy.ca/instances
We’ll make sure it stays that way! I’ve added threads.net to our blocklist.
I decided to sign on here because of this stance. Also I missed the company of my fellow Canucks ;)
Great to have an official answer. Thank you!
Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn’t the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn’t the only thing you’re accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you’re just making yourselves invisible to a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?
We’re all still protected, no?
Personal take - I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the meta will operate in good faith. I don’t have confidence that they will moderate their users, and I believe their only interest will be in slurping up 3rd party data to make their platform more appealing and decrease the chance a user will go elsewhere to find things. They don’t want you going anywhere else for that juicy ad revenue.
They want to avoid Meta from repeating history:
I vote to block them as well. Don’t let Meta get its claws on lemmy.ca content or user info.
You’re absolutely right!
Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
I, for one, vote in support of defederation from Threads. No reason to allow Meta to use our content to boost engagement on their for-profit platform. And pull users away from places like Lemmy at that.
The ideals that led to the Fediverse are antithetical to companies like Meta
The ideals of the Fediverse is an open network.
The problem is that it only works if the ideal scenario occurs being that we all work together to make things better. Corporate interaction in open source has shown that embrace, extend, extinguish is a very successful strategy.
Would we be harming the idea of a completely open network? No doubt. The question is whether or not allowing corporations would be better or worse for us in the long run.
I believe there are many instances were corporate involvement has added to open source. A lot of the Linux kernel is maintained by corporations.
Sure, but the Linux kernel is an extremely time consuming thing to maintain and is not worth privatizing for most companies as it rarely is a source of profit instead of infrastructure. There is little competitive edge to doing so. Meta however has a very good reason to bring in a bunch of new users to their platform and theirs only. Considering their history, it is reasonable to be distrustful.
A lot of us just left a site because it was ruined by corporate greed. I don’t think corporations belong in the fediverse. If there’s a vote, I vote for defedding with Threads.
I switched from my lemmy.world account to this one because I assumed this instance would defed from meta.
What are the objectives of defederating?
To protect our data? They can create stealth instances and get the same data. I think we have to accept and be mindful that the things we share on the fediverse can be exploited by people we don’t like.
To exclude their users? I understand they have partnered with Namecheap to offer users customized instances with their own domain. Is it even a technical possibility to exclude all their users’ instances?
To make a statement? Okay, but then we need to do more than just defederate.
This article has been circulating around the fediverse and I think it greatly illustrates why it’s so important to defederate from large corporations before they can get a foothold. It’s about so much more than just them getting our data.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway.
Isn’t this what actually killed XMPP? XMPP still works, is still viable. But everyone stopped using it. That’s got more to do with Facebook than Google, imho.
Yes. What they specifically did though was extend the protocol so that anyone who wasn’t using their version of XMPP via Google Talk would be incompatible or seem “broken” when it really wasn’t. It’s just that they were using non-standard features, both incentivizing people to just switch to Google Talk and for development on the core protocol to slow down.
I bet money Threads is going to do the same thing. They’ll introduce Threads only features that don’t work with all the standard Activitypub implementations, causing frustration with Thread users and putting pressure on people to just jump ship to Threads from standard Activitypub implementations.
Okay, but again… so? That’s just defederation. If that’s the worst they can do to us… So? That’s also your proposed solution, so what!
It’s more about protecting ActivityPub protocol than anything.
Before we know it, thread will impose its proprietary protocol and the fediverse will simply die with it.
Honestly, I’m not sure if it will happen. Social media is already pretty much corporate world so we will see what will happen.
Okay but how does this protect the protocol? What is the difference between us defederating them, and what you describe which is essentially them defederating us? Why would they bother in the first place, then? I don’t really think any of this is about us, but rather about Twitter and Google.
Like, does it endanger the HTTP protocol that we exchange HTTP data with them?
I think it’s about keeping the userbase on ActivityPub as much as possible. When meta will start doing ActivityPub and probably change it, everyone will need to follow because Meta will own all the userbase and “subreddit”.
At some point, they will decide to drop ActivityPub because it’s not good enough for what they want to do. Just like what Google did to XMPP. And maybe Google was right about XMPP, I don’t know.
Another reason is what you are saying, a personnal battle against Meta and big corp.
At the end of the day, will anything the fediverse Admin do will matter ? Only time will tell I guess.
One key difference with HTTP is just like TCP. Everyone uses it so it’s much harder to just change it and fuck everyone else. ActivityPub is an easier target for this strategy.
I don’t see anyone here arguing that this instance should remain federated with Threads. So far it’s unanimous that we should defederate from them. I agree. We should keep this separate.
+1 for defederating
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I don’t know if we are but I think we should. No interest in interacting with facebook in any capacity.
I’m new to federation as a concept, but isn’t the only thing you accomplish from defederating Threads is that this community will miss the opportunity to grow its userbase? Isn’t the whole point of the fediverse that anyone can be anywhere and access anything from anywhere else?
If so, the only people who come out behind are the people signing up on Threads specifically, who are granting every piece of personal data to Meta. But people signed up on other instances are protected.
As far as I understand, the existing fediverse is not at risk of anything, correct?
It is at risk. Meta/Facebook have done this before. They embrace, extend and then extinguish. Eventually they say the only way to be safe as to use their products, force people to switch over as all the content is generated on threads and there goes the fediverse. It’s better to get ahead of them and just not allow them to link up. Facebook is a hostile actor in this space and needs to be treated as such.
I guess people are worried about Meta pulling some moves out of Embrace, Expand, Extinguish playbook.
But isn’t the core design of the fediverse resistant, if not immune, to those sorts of tactics? Should Threads be allowed in the federation, the only thing they can do is defederate, right? That means we may get used to the increased userbase and become disappointed when a large chunk of their traffic goes dark, but the remaining fediverse will have grown and benefited until then.
I think the idea is that Threads can pull in a bunch of users to the federated ecosystem using other instance’s content, implement features exclusive to Threads to entice people to move from whatever instance they’re on now to Threads, and then defederate Threads from everything else afterwards and remove ActivityPub compatibility to trap people on Threads and then enshittify the platform for more money.
But… if we defederate now, won’t we just be trying to create a walled garden of a tiny userbase?
If the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. In the end, the non-corporate federation will grow immensely, I imagine. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
The problem is that corporations can scale their own propaganda campaigns way better than we can. It’s best to cut the problem off at the source than it is to try and compete with them at their own game.
Hmm, perhaps. Although if we never federate in the first place, I guess we’ll never know. It seems like if we tested the waters, what we could gain could far outweigh what we could lose, and we could always cut the line if we see it clearly isn’t working out.
It feels counter productive, but the reality is that the less huge corporations are involved in a federation, the safer it is.
The problem with federation with Meta is that it encourages Meta to develop and contribute to the infrastructure. Which sounds great, but the record is poor on that front.
Once a company with huge money starts working on your infrastructure, they’re going to make changes, changes that maybe the community doesn’t agree with, but since all the money is being funneled through one of two companies, they make the decision.
Then the company decides that they don’t want to keep supporting something that doesn’t make them any money. Since Meta would theoretically bring millions of users from their platforms, they could decide to suddenly cut out all non-Meta instances. Now we’re the odd ones out, your friends are wondering why they can’t reach you anymore, you’re suddenly offline.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. It happened with XAMPP, it happened with Java, CSS, most browsers are Chrome based, ‘exchange’ email servers, etc.
The best thing to maintain software freedom is to never open the door to huge companies.
I’m of a similar mind.
My time online is limited, and if Threads ends up having the most interesting stuff then that’s where I’ll spend my limited time. If I can follow users from Threads over at mstdn.ca then I would very likely stick with the Fediverse to get the best of both worlds. I’m mostly a content consumer so I go where the content is.
Also, I don’t really think Threads and Lemmy are a good match, if Threads is more a Twitter substitute then I think Mastadon is a better match (and all micro-blog class Fediverse platforms). So I suspect not many people will use Lemmy to follow anyone/thing from Threads, defederating them won’t have much practical effect.
Federation with Meta would significantly increase network traffic and storage costs?
Then Meta would help everyone cope with the extra workload … then help some more with a few changes … then offer some new features … then help with increased usage … then offer more features … then push out the smaller instances and take over everything … then wall off ActivityPub … then start charging people and advertisers … then make billions … then watch users rebel and start a new system and repeat it all again in 10 or 20 years.
I honestly don’t give a shit.
Of course you don’t. I’m sure 95% of people don’t. Most people don’t bother taking a stand on things unless it affects something more substantial like their wallets.
I want to know what you guys are talking about, and I think a get the gist of it, but my lord, do I feel old and don’t understand actually most of those words. Is there a “explain to me like I’m 5” place I could ask what are those federations and threads?
