Are we going to block Meta’s Threads.net? I get it if people want to keep things open. However, Meta is a proven bad actor. They claim they didn’t put in ActivityPub because it was too complicated to get it done at launch, and they can’t get EU approval of their service because of the rampant and invasive data they gather. IMHO, they are going to attempt to muscle the fediverse out of the equation.
A week or more ago when I first learned of Meta’s project my immediate gut reaction was to defederate, because fuck them. And that attitude is understandable by anyone who is on Lemmy out of grievances with Reddit or corporate tech or whatever. But when I then tried to think more about the actual reasons why the Fediverse would be worse off with Meta participating, it’s not that simple.
The privacy concerns immediately fall apart when you realize Meta doesn’t have to have their brand-name service to get access to everything going across ActivityPub. Literally anyone can spin up an instance and has access to everything. You will never stop them. In fact, they probably already have instances on the network.
From a technical standpoint you could be concerned about the amount of data that will flow into the network from such a product. From what (little) I understand about federation, it’s a peer-to-peer system that naturally births incredible amounts of data duplication, so the performance hit from Threads coming online will certainly be felt. But, if you’re already ok with the idea of the Fediverse growing organically, it will eventually face those problems anyway and so now’s as good a time as any to solve them.
So it seems it may come down to what kind of community do you want embodied by the Fediverse? Facebook-quality content just seems disgusting to me, but the users posting that stuff can always just join Lemmy outside the bounds of Meta products. So I’m kind of landing in the same space with your quote; this is a test to see if what is happening here is really something that is more than just anti-Reddit posturing and will stand on its own over time. If it is, it will exist alongside Threads and will not be muscled out, and that will be great.
I think the one thing that would really give me pause and would motivate me to fight against it is if Meta gets a presence in the WWWC or whoever it is that governs ActivityPub and begins to influence it’s direction. Then we might see a Google-Kills-XMPP story play out again. They will certainly want to integrate new features into ActivityPub… namely, advertising. And it’s all downhill from there.
This is a good analysis, but I think you’re missing one important factor, in assuming that Facebook-quality content is purely the result of the users on Facebook. Sure, there are a lot of jerks on Facebook, but more than that, Facebook knows that enragement drives engagement, and uses an array of psychological tricks to push that. They also have a proven track record of poor moderation. So in Facebook land, the most toxic voices are amplified, and regular folks are constantly pushed to be more aggressive. Wouldn’t we want to block any instance that acted like that?
This is my biggest concern as well. Especially with the ties to Instagram, I have a feeling that Threads is going to have a similar majority-right wing userbase like Instagram does and have problems with things like, as with Instagram, rampant transphobia and racism.
This is a good point. They would be able to manipulate the feeds of users on their servers. And if the algorithmically inspire bad content above some threshold, that would be a concrete reason for instances to defederate. But I still wouldn’t defederate preemptively.
There’s far less incentive to scrape that content when you remove the ability to interact with and find it through Threads. It’s unlikely facebook itself will be combing though lemmy instances looking for quality content to
rip off“share” – it will be the users.Defederation creates a far higher barrier for Thread users to find and engage with posts on the wider
lemmyActivityPub network, which means far less of the fediverse’s content being used for Meta’s benefit.Very well written response. I appreciate it.
It will be interesting to see how much growth will remain thats not just anti-twitter anti-reddit users willing to momentarily move out of spite and will remain here in the long term.
I really hope ActivityPub/WWWC does not get overrun with corporate interests but only time will tell