Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
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Meta is a socially transmitted disease. There’s no reason to “wait and see” with Meta, we already know them. Meta is not new, it’s Facebook, with a new name and a fancy new logo to deflect attention away from all the terrible shit they do and have done, to individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole.
So much terrible shit that unlike many Wikipedia articles that have a “controversy” section, Meta/Facebook has entire pages devoted to their terrible shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulation_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
There’s more. Meta is not some new and exciting player in the ActivityPub field. They’re a known quantity, and there’s nothing to gained by allowing them to flood the Fediverse with low-quality shitposts at best, massive social manipulation campaigns at worst, and everything in between. In my humble opinion.
I’m no fan of Meta or their practices, to be clear. Though I do think there are potential benefits in having the ability to communicate cross-platform, so long as some reasonable safeguards are put into place. I’m firmly in the camp that doesn’t believe that Google killed XMPP because XMPP was never a popular or widespread protocol prior to GTalk, and the users who came and went when Google did what they did were Google users, rather than XMPP users. So much like Eugen here says, it went back to how it was before they got involved.
That said, I do think that Meta in its current incarnation is an entirely different animal. I suspect that early on in a post-federated world, we’ll start seeing dark patterns intended to lure users to Threads. I’m envisioning registration gates similar to paywalls on news sites. “This content is available exclusively on Threads! Click here to register your account!” type stuff. More sinister, there’s nothing to stop Meta from appending advertisements in the body of posts created on Threads. Hell - they could go full evil genius and suppress that they’re doing it entirely on their own platform since they’ll have some other ad delivery mechanism there, which would mean the only people being served those ads would be federated users OFF of Threads who see or interact with content created on Threads.
So while I’m not a doomsayer about Threads and federation, I do think that we as a community are going to have to make some decisions about how to handle them. Having access to a community the scale that Meta will produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And because of how Lemmy / Mastodon / KBin / Fediverse apps work, we as users will always have the ability to control what we see in our feeds. At worst, it makes /All/ less usable, which is admittedly quite a big loss given how useful it has been to get subscribed to worthwhile content since joining Lemmy. And obviously, some instances will elect not to federate with Threads at all, which gives users choice on the type of community and content they want to interact with regularly.
With some care, likely some effort around defining usage rights for user generated content, and some new content control / filtering capabilities yet to be developed, I think that these networks can coexist in a way that is mutually beneficial to a degree, but if not - defederation is a click away.
EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.
Sounds like mastodon doesn’t mind lying with vipers and is trying to justify it
Tell me you’ve not read the article without telling me you’ve not read the article.
Lol are you serious? What, did you want a little bubble on the internet where corporations don’t exist? What does “open source” mean to you, open to only the entities you allow in? Like the article says, join an instance that defederates every corporate entity or make your own, but don’t blame developers of open source software for keeping it open.
I’d like to not embrace the assholes that helped centralize and control the narrative on their massive platforms of idiot users
It’s not embracing Meta. All it says is, once it is federated, they may be interoperable. That’s it. You could view stuff on Threads and Threads users could view stuff elsewhere (unless your instance defederates from Threads).
Then join an instance that’s defederated with them, or create your own. It’s literally that simple. Don’t shit on open source devs for keeping their software open source.
How am I shitting on open source devs? I’m just pointing out how crazy you’d have to be to think any corporate media participation in the fediverse is a good thing. Yes I can run my own instance but it won’t do much good if the largest AP instances let Facebook federate with them. They’re just trying to capitalize on other peoples work while spending a relatively small amount of money and effort on their own activitypub client. If it fails they won’t care and will just abandon it but if it succeeds they’ll be poaching users and data from the fediverse for years to come. Not to mention bringing those cringe IG and Facebook users around.
Also, Quick browse through your comment history and there seems to be quite a bit of shilling going on for Facebook. Hmmm…
Uh, we need participation from everyone in order for the fediverse to have legitimacy. We unfortunately need those cringe users if we want large scale adoption. Without it everything stays small scale, developers aren’t attracted to the concept and people leave for functioning alternatives.
Oh god, “shilling”. Yep, there’s that Reddit paranoia. Everyone who disagrees with me a robot!
There are two topics here, Meta and beans. Of course I’m talking about one of them lmao
And read the original comment I replied to saying Mastadon devs are “in bed with vipers”. That’s what I would consider “shitting on”.
What does reddit have to do with this? Many of your comments seem to downplay the threat these companies are to the fediverse.
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us.
My comments downplay the “threat” because I don’t believe it’s a threat, and if a single corporation joining the fediverse somehow actually destroys it then it wasn’t going to be around long anyways.
If you read all my comments you should know that. I’m not a fucking shill because I disagree with you ffs.
Unfortunately, I believe the embrace, extend extinguish, model needs to be taken into account.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Here is some food for thought, if you or anyone else hasn’t seen it yet.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what first came to my mind when I heard about threads planning to federate. I think it is a huge risk.
Everyone has seen it, it isn’t food for thought. It’s a Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s that wasn’t even targeting open source software and wasn’t even successful as a means of targeting competitive freeware.
Dude quit being a dick. You work for Facebook or something? This is a real conversation. This isn’t reddit, this isn’t facebook, this isn’t twitter. We don’t just dunk on people here.
How on earth is that “dunking”? Disagreeing with you is being a dick now? Jesus lol
“Open source” means anyone can use or reuse the source code, it doesn’t require you to show content from entities you don’t trust.
The great thing about the fediverse is that we are all free to create or join instances that have federation policies we prefer.
Exactly. Mastadon devs aren’t “in bed with vipers” because they aren’t somehow closing their open source software to an entity.
None of this has anything to do with Mastodon’s source code though, I don’t know why you keep bringing up open source
Read the first comment in this thread about Mastadon’s devs being “in bed with vipers”
I assumed that was about mastodon.social not defederating and Eugene Rochko saying not to worry about Threads
Eugene Rochko even says to join a server that defederates Meta if you want in the article.
If threads becomes larger than the entire fediverse, then it’s stupid to not be compatible with them to use their content for the mastodon users. You can also begin to pillage users every time the platform does something stupid with theoretically minimal issues of losing followers.
it already is no? Threads has 15 mil users in 24 hours.
It’s very… basic. One timeline, can’t filter anything out… ton of garbage. No thanks. Holy shit it’s bad.
And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.
Paid promotion I’m sure — if not, sad that people are admitting they are “addicted” so far.
Umm…read the article.
I did already.
I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.
Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.
If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.
Yeah I’ve been taking a similar approach, to social media. I’ve avoided the algorithm.
I mean, I don’t really do social media in the usual sense, never had Facebook, nor Instagram. I did have a Twitter account but I used it to follow certain accounts and didn’t tweet, so it was basically an RSS feed. I used a 3rd party app and only saw my subs, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts.
Same for Reddit, used a 3rd party app, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts, I only ever read a feed of my subs.
My Reddit and Twitter subs/follows have been mostly hobbies, niche areas of interest, products I own, sports etc. no politics or news discussions. So I’ve really avoided being exposed to most of that toxicity I keep reading about.
This is why losing 3rd party apps was a big deal for me. I don’t want to read sponsored/promoted/suggested posts or ads. I’d rather not use the service at all if I have to.
That’s why I’ve fully moved to Lemmy and Mastodon.
Locking post as comments are getting off topic and are not following the rules of the community.
I think a lot of people getting the fantods over this don’t grok the finer points of federation.
I see it as free advertisment. Especially because it won’t be available for some time in most of Europe. Word gets out that you can join Threads(without ever joining it) anyway, that is basically free advertisment for Mastodon instead. It have a fairly big chance of working like a boost for Mastodon it self.
I didn’t know you could move Mastodon servers and retain your followers. Very cool.
Calling Eugene Mastodon’s CEO is kind of a threat. Granted he is Mastodon GHmb’s CEO, but by no means is that what most people think of as mastodon. Then again he’s let the #twittermigration go to his head.
Thankfully I haven’t seen this, yet, from the lemmy.ml guys, the fact that lemmy.world is already bigger probably helps that too. (Well that ant they, allegedly, anti-capitalists).
I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.
yeah, I wasn’t referring to you, but to the author of the article.
He was talking to Meta before they announced Threads and he signed an NDA. I strongly agree with @CCL@links.hackliberty.org’s opinion that the recent popularity Mastodon has enjoyed has gone to his head.
Put plainly, I don’t trust him at all.
You don’t have to. He might have developed Mastodon but it’s all open source, and he certainly doesn’t “own” ActivityPub.
Sounds like we are the winners.
Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access.
I hope Lemmy also implements the image/media caching in the not so distant future. Currently, Lemmy Web UI sends a lot of HTTP requests to external servers like imgur. (Github Issue)
Very sensible. Nothing wrong with increasing the scope of the fediverse. If things start getting evil we can take steps at that point.
They’re a notoriously shady business and therefore have a lot of incentives to be a bad actor in the name of profit IMO.
I am just afraid at that point it will be too late… Anything created by facebook is imho quite dangerous and the fact they want to come to fediverse is a bit scary for me.
I think E/E/E is still a risk. If some “high follower” type people start joining Threads, and people on Mastodon start following them and making that content a big part of their feed, those people are not going to be happy if Threads accounts suddenly disappear because Meta make arbitrary, incompatible changes.
Hopefully it won’t actually extinguish Mastodon/the Fediverse, but it can still do damage.
The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.
If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.
Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.
You could argue that this is what happened to Jabber.
Although Facebook Messenger never made a good faith attempt to interoperate with Jabber in the first place.
It was Google’s GTalk not Facebook’s Messenger.
Facebook never needed Jabber for their messenger.
It was both, but Facebook Messenger was less widely known and was kind of janky. here’s a source that explains part of what was going on.
Ah I see, so they never federated with XMPP. This would be comparable if they would take Mastodon server and build Threads from it, but never connected it to the Fediverse.
GTalk used Jabber to help bootstrap their I’m then stole part of Jabber’s user base.
IMHO this is 100% the plan. If they play their cards right they stand to take out two birds with one stone (heh). They’ve already paid celebrities to be on there.
Still, this can only happen if Threads gets massive enough relative to the rest of the fediverse that the incompatibility doesn’t hurt them equally.
…that is to say, it’s all pretty likely, unless other strong competitors show up with ActivityPub support.They’re already over 2 million in like 2 hours.
I don’t think Meta really gives a shit about the Fediverse. They are hoping to take out Twitter though, and the Fediverse could be collateral damage.
Exactly, They don’t give a shit about Fediverse.
So why using acticitypub at the first place?
Probably partly to avoid regulatory scrutiny. They can say they’re not being monopolistic (even though they 100% are) because they’re embracing open standards.
That’s why they’re not launching in the EU.
Extra data to scrape through their servers.
Marketing and content boost for the start maybe? Mastodon has come up a lot recently (hell, even in local radio), so Meta can use this to promote their own product. And already have content right there for users joining Threads, it’s not a blank slate.
After the initial boost and when sucking up millions of users they can just defederate and have their Facebook (or rather Twitter) 2.0.
I think the people that value being on a decentralized service will stay on a decentralized server. The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite “high follower” poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with. Meta may absolutely take a large share of users to their platform in the future if they shut off federation and our favorite celebrities and shitposters are no longer visible. But I don’t really see how that is any different than Twitter currently having all the celebrities and high volume shitposters. We already can’t see them. The EEE argument just strikes me as sour grapes that “their” users are going somewhere else. And I’m on the fediverse (both Mastodon and kbin) so I see the value here. But I’m not going to get angry that normies don’t want to put the effort into learning this ecosystem when they have their own lives and struggles and a limited number of social causes to care about.
Now what does bother me is Meta having an outsized influence on the development of the protocol of ActivityPub. We’ve seen something similar to this with Google using Chrome to push some additions to how browsers handle HTML standards/elements, like supporting DRM.
The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite “high follower” poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with
Thats now how things work. Let’s say that now you are following people from fediverse. Those people are motivated to post things, because someone needs to, because they want to grow the community, etc. Meta joins, then meta people post a trillion things(because they are a trillion people, some of which might even be paid by meta). Those initial fediverse people no longer post things because “they have already been posted”.
Then you defederate meta. Congratulations, now you have 0 content and 0 content submitters. You will start to start from the beginning, from an even worse point than we are atm. You are now dead.
Very few people are as ideologically driven as they think they are. Ultimately it is about quality of life. And maybe you can tolerate some junk because of your ideology but everyone has their limit. Content is king, not only for the “normies” but for everyone. What is the point of a fediverse that has nothing to interact with and noone to interact with you?
Then the fediverse was only a temporary stopgap until Meta (or any other corporation) made a better product than Twitter. It was doomed from the start.
Big companies can do whatever they want. But we are enabling them to do it easier if we federate with them. When i joined reddit 15? years ago, it wasnt that dissimilar to the fediverse. Of course it is even harder now to replicate the thunder in a bottle that reddit was and to scale but still.
The culture may have been similar to fediverse culture, but the underlying structure was nowhere near similar. It was just as much a private site run by (benevolent) dictators.
All I can say is that, I started using Jabber before GTalk federation, but ultimately Google made me leave Jabber.
What actually happened is that some friends who originally were on Jabber switched to GTalk, because later Google added it to Gmail, making it more convenient.
So essentially when they defederated, my network was pretty empty.
Why didn’t your friends return to Jabber once GTalk locked them out?
Because GTalk integrated with Gmail and with ability to still having access to other friends was much more convenient and they didn’t care about who owns their favorite instant messaging network. And majority of their friends were also on Google.
The truth is that only purists will stay, and most people (even tech people) don’t give damn about being locked out.
Google also broke things in a subtle way. You could see the person is online, if they messaged you you would get their message, if you messaged them, your message would show as delivered, but never get to them.
So first thing you thought that maybe they are just busy. When you started suspecting something is not right then it made you think that maybe there’s an issue with Jabber etc
I don’t think the defederation was ever announced, it was more like a bug that was never fixed.
Because thats not how human nature works. Convenience tramps everything and almost noone is as ideologically driven as they think they are.
Then the only real solution is to disallow big companies from making convenient products. At some point the onus has to be put on the average user. Throwing your hands up and saying “the normies are too stupid to consider their own self interest” may be true but it is also an unsolvable problem if they choose to never put any thought into their own lives and problems.
My point is that we shouldnt enable those big companies even more than they currently are. We shouldnt let them into our own garden. This is a lemmy.world thread, i didnt even know that, i am using kbin. Tomorrow, this might have been a threads thread and i might have not even noticed it. But if for x, y, w reasons, kbin defederates from threads one day, i will notice that most of my feed will have 0 content all of a sudden.
Taking stuff away is a very powerful motivator. We will end fighting human nature. While if we never federate with threads and naturally grow the rest of the fediverse, this wont happen. It’s easier to grow a garden amongst other gardens than to grow it next to a skyscraper.
If this is how it will play out, then we’re already doomed. Meta will throw money at the platform until everyone you want to follow is there, which will leech fediverse users until there are only the hardcore users left.
The solution to that, which I would fully support, would be for kbin, lemmyworld, etc to deferate from threads from the beginning. You can’t lose something you never had and personally, I don’t want to interact with a meta owned product so the prospect of what you just described bothers me. If lemmyworld doesn’t defederate from them I would 100% move to another instance that does.
Edit: So there is actually a pact for instances to sign pledging to block meta and I don’t see lemmy.world on it. That said, it’s a long list and it’s manually updated so I may have just missed it. https://fedipact.online/
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EEE was my first thought on seeing that threads would federate, so I felt a bit of relief when I looked at the op just now and saw that Rochko directly addressed this, then I read what he said and it doesn’t seem like he addressed it at all.
Yeah, I don’t find his answer on E/E/E comforting. However if nothing changes hopefully the niche that’s already on Mastodon and kbin/Lemmy could survive regardless of Threads as I’m fairly happy with the state it is right now.
Google effectively killed XMPP this way. During the time the federation was working the protocol essentially stood still, because they were afraid of breaking GTalk. Once GTalk gained enough momentum Google just pulled the plug.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
It’s not gonna extinguish the fediverse in the same way nobody leaving reddit joined Mastodon as a replacement. They’re technically compatible, but these are entirely different styles of sites we’re talking about. Lemmy and Kbin are gonna keep on trucking regardless of what happens to the Twitter-likes.
But they’re definitely going to try and kill Mastodon/similar through social engineering. Everybody’s favorite content creators, organizations, and brands will be on Threads, not Mastodon, and when they lock it down we’ll lose access to them and end up needing a Threads account. I don’t understand why anyone trusts this company won’t try to secure market dominance and then monopolize it. The guy says “we’ll just be right back where we are now,” but this could easily decrease the Mastodon population by pulling away anyone who doesn’t care about federation or open source and just wanted a decent Twitter alternative.
Except that I don’t need a Twitter account so I won’t need a threads account either. But I do not, in any way, want to interact with a meta owned product and don’t like the idea of them being involved in the fediverse.
Exactly, Jabber got worse after Google defederated, not the same as it was, because people that did not care about decentralized network jumped GTalk. I suspect majority of current mastodon users don’t care about it either and won’t want to stay on the empty network.
Stop giving big corpo any more chance at 3E saying “no this time it’d be different” no the outcome is the same every time.
Nice to see a balanced opinion, this whole facebook/meta discussion has been pretty virulent at times
I feel like he’s out of touch. There are many concerns: our data; embrace, extend, extinguish; and lastly, our communities. Meta has already proven in the past few hours that threads are not different from anything else when corpos drop. Within a few hours, accounts like Libs of TikTok, Gay Against Groomers, and other LGBT harassment accounts joined and are still active. Is this what we really want federating with us?
What does spam/abusive use have to do with Threads specifically.
Also, can you justify your concerns? You just stated a few words without saying why it is a concern. This article did a pretty good job of not only stating the same concern words you used, but why the fears are a bit overblown.
Poor moderation certinly has something to do with it.
I don’t know the others you mentioned, but how is libs of tik tok a ‘harassment’ account?
Are you fucking serious? Do you genuinely not know who Chaya Raichik is? Because if you’re acting in good faith and actually aren’t aware of the vile hatred and harassment orchestrated at her hands, you really need to drop her name in the old Google machine and do some reading.
How is the account harassment? How does the account harass people?
I don’t really care what kind of a person anyone is, the question is how the account harasses lgb people
The account is specifically for mocking people, thus the name. They take someone to direct their hate at and that translates to real harassment. It’s built to hurt people, especially LGBT people. Groups built on “destroying the woke mind virus” are a scourge to humanity.
