Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
I'm not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.
Here is a link if someone don't know what Meta's Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
You're viewing a single thread.
So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta's Threads?
That's what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta's folks and be in touch with Meta's community would end up creating accounts there. We'd be handing users to Meta by doing that.
Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they'll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they're launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:
- We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
- We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.
What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the "decentralize so that no one can gain too much power" model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the "fediverse" are people without resources, then what's even the point? Who wants an email service that can't send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?
The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I'd prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.
EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:
We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.
Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:
- Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
- Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
- Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
- Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
- Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.
That’s all well and good.
But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.
Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
I'd be interested to hear how Facebook would seek to alleviate those concern, regardless of weather such concerns are realisticly founded or not, as social networks inherently deal with humans and public opinions.
- What kind of technical solution from Facebook do you think would best help appease concerned users in the Fediverse?
- Could there be a technical solution to resolve the social dilemma of (real or appearance of) power imbalance between Facebook and the rest of the Fediverse?
I'm trying to think of how Facebook could gracefully relinquish control over its platform while guaranteeing Facebook could not later subvert those concessions. Would that ever be in Facebook's best interests? I guess improved user trust and positive PR could help abate the calls for regulation and monopoly busting.
There are skeptic rumours that Facebook is hoping to leverage the Fediverse as a relief valve for regulatory pressure due to EU's DMA:
- Theory: the only reason Meta cares about the fediverse / ActivityPub is so that threads isn’t labeled a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act”
- https://lemmy.world/post/1105955
I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.
But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so.
Hmm, that sounds fairly applicable to the Paradox of Tolerance, where the we are beholden to be inclusive to an industry that has a repeated history of running afoul in society.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toleranceWell, Meta has a history of bad behavior in terms of how they treat users on their own systems, but no history at all for how they treat federated systems. You could even go the other way a bit and say that Meta has contributed meaningfully to the open source community with projects like React. (Obviously this is short on parallels as it doesn't involve their main income streams.)
I would absolutely say that users should not join Threads directly. Meta is already hoovering everything they possibly can about their users. But the mechanism for that hoovering is the app, not the protocol. Any data they get about users that are not on Threads directly is data they were going to get anyway because that's the design of the protocol; anyone can get that data.
It seems that members of a federated system can't decide how to treat an entity until that entity interacts with other members. You assess the nature of those interactions, and if they turn out to be bad, you defederate.
What the Mastodon community is doing now looks a bit like "this person drives over the speed limit all the time, so they're obviously going to steal food if we let them volunteer at the homeless shelter!" But we have no evidence for such unwanted behavior whatsoever.
edit: I saw on another thread that apparently Meta reached out to some Mastodon instances to try to get them to sign NDAs. If true, that's inexcusable and signals intent pretty clearly. Public protocols must be developed publicly.
Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.
My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:
- Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
- Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.
I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.
The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.
Honestly you sound really naive. You seem to be under this delusion that people who hold intolerant ideas are only doing so out of honest ignorance and they can simply be convinced otherwise. Have you ever interacted with an anti-vaxxer? A covid-denier? A religious fanatic? A slavery apologist? The world is absolutely filled to the brim with incredibly unreasonable people who will ignore all evidence for things that don't fit their world view. They aren't looking to be convinced otherwise.
How do you plan on "respectfully asking" a homophobe to stop hating gay people, for instance? What if they just want to post about how much they wish gay people would die, what argument do you think would sway someone dedicated to their religion? Since its just speech and not action, they should be free to hate as much as they want according to you.
Your whole point doesn't make any sense either, the idea that people would jump ship to make threads accounts if they were defederated is absurd. The fediverse is an incredibly niche corner of social media, the only reason you would specifically search out for communities here is if you were disatisfied with corporate social media (like threads) to begin with.
You’re positing we not try to convince people who hold wrong worldviews?
No, I'm saying some people won't let themselves be convinced either way and that should be taken into account. You didn't respond with how you would convince homophobic people not to hate gays for instance, it sounds like you want people to waste their breaths arguing with the unreasonable just so you can maintain some moral high ground of being oh-so-much-more tolerant than the rest.
Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper's quote in the wiki article above:
... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive ...
Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.
I'll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation's historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it's future actions.
I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- etc
… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …
If we can't convince people of our point of view, then that's our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we're saying "we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to". That doesn't seem appropriate.
corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.
If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it's hosted. If we don't do that, we're not really a fediverse.
I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:
That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they'd all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become "too big". The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****
I don't agree that defederating with Meta is against the definition of Fediverse.
This is the header on fediverse.to:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics. Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
Meta-owned instances go directly against every one of those points. For me, Fediverse should always be run by people not doing it for monetary gains. The main advantage of fediverse is not that you can and should connect with anyone, but that it's a community that is not ran for profit, and the servers are run for the people with good and self-less intentions, instead of users being heavily monetized and their behavior fed into algorithms to manipulate them even further with the content they are shown. And the federation is there mostly to alleviate a problem that usually happens in such comunities - people move on, servers die, admins can't run an instance any more. With fediverse, this is not that big of an issue, thanks to the way it's designed.
Allowing Meta, or any large company in that regard, in will destroy this idea of community run and privacy-centric social network for everyone, and only result in Meta profiting from it and the content the users create.
Well just look at what happened with XMPP and google: https://lemmy.world/comment/906346
And even if we don't defederate, I doubt anyone in threads will notice us local instance users and contribute at all to our growth. There are 30 million+ of them backed by Instagram and like what, 10k of us? They just have too much weight to throw around.
Hell I'm not even convinced reddit is going to die and Lemmy is going to continue to grow. Just look at their front page. Absolute nonsensical drivel still gets several thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments, while any Lemmy instance is lucky to get 100 upvotes and 10 comments on a popular post
I've read that XMPP article before, but it doesn't convince me.
Yes, Meta may "kill" the fediverse. That's a risk. But either we take that risk, or we "kill" the fediverse ourselves by defederating. That's my opinion.
EDIT: Besides, defederating just hands them more users. Wouldn't you rather keep the users, and allow them to see Meta content? Maybe even attract some Meta users here by inviting them? The launch of a Meta competitor is what's causing the risk to the fediverse. Federating with them is how we can mitigate that risk.
I read your edit, you make very good points there and here. We really should leave the power in the hands of users/sub/community mods to decide what they want, rather than instance owners acting like sub mods and making blanket decisions for all their users. That's the reddit model.
I assume filtering requirements requires changes to the Lemmy code base, which if they don't already exist is surprising.
This is an interesting take on the matter, and you do have pretty good points. For me personally, I don't think that bringing in the Meta crowd would bring us much value, as I've already stated in the other comment. I'm not interested in the style of content both Facebook and Instagram provides, and I don't really like the userbase - but that's also only my personal view, and it's not something that would warrant defederation.
I'm worried that due to sheer amount of people they have, it would simply drown any content from other instances and would make it harder to find (and also really hard to moderate - Meta has significant resources to moderate that many millions of users, something smaller instances can never reach). Hot and Top would simply be filled by influencers, and it would take significant effort to just unsubscribe or block all of them (I'm actually not sure here how does the frontpage works, if you select all instances - is it like All on Reddit, or like frontpage with a set of default communities, but not everything shows there?), while also making it pretty hard to find smaller communities with different crowd - which is what I like on Lemmy as of the current state.
As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.
I don't really agree with this. It's only my own take on things, but I don't believe in the slightest that Meta wants to contribute to the Fediverse or has any of it's interests in mind. Nothing good will come out of it, Meta will only exploit the Fediverse for free content they don't have to host or pay for to kickstart their own platform, and then slowly bring users over there with QoL they have resources to implement for their instance. I'm not worried that they will bring down the Fediverse - that's where the decentralization will work as it should since other instances can defederate as soon as a problem appears, and keep their content and their userbase. What I think is an issue is that unless we defederate soon enough, Meta will exploit Fediverse for their gain only, slowly make people used to the QoL they are providing and have resources for, and when it finally gets bad enough that instances decide to start defederating from them, it will be too late, and Fediverse will loose users and content creators, because they were used to and interacting with communities on Meta's instance - which were the best choice simply due to a high number of users coming from Meta's userbase. Which brings me to
That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.
This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation. As I've said in the previous paragraph - Meta's communities will be larger and have more content, and more people will leave once we defederate because they are used to those communities, including people that would not leave there now.
And the last issue is the fact that it serves so much data about users and their interactions right into Meta's algorithms, without them having to make any effort for it. And I really don't like that, and it's the reason why I'm avoiding anything Meta even touches. But then again - that's my personal issue.
To sum it up - some commenters said that it's a risk that we should try and take to see how it will go - I'd personally rather not risk it, and just keep Meta or any other multi-billion corporations out of this ecosystem. You can be sure that they don't have anyone's best interest in heart, and will only exploit it for monetary gain. And they have teams of experts in the field already working on strategies about how to exploit us as much as possible. I say don't give them a chance, this is something we cannot win and it will only make everything worse.
I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven't convinced me yet :)
I'm in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit "the fediverse" for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.
But... my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won't last very long at all. And, even if it does, it's not as valuable to me that way, so I'll be leaving. What's the value of a fediverse if it doesn't even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?
This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.
I honestly don't think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don't call it a "fediverse". It's just a forum. Would we say that it's fair for Google to say "From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don't agree with them"?
EDIT 1: I haven't made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.
EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.
I see your point, and I think that we both simply have different views on what is more important, and there's no need to convince eachother. For me, one of the main advantages of the Fediverse is that you're not directly feeding analytics and algorithms of a large company that is trying to monetize and manipulate you through content that you see - a company which business model is literally to change your behavior (which is a hyperbole, but still a quite from Social Dillema), and it's really important for me to not give them any chance to do that. And I don't see a scenario under which we would federate with Meta (or another multi-billion company) and this would not happen - and even if they wouldn't be able to directly affect what you see in your feed, your data and behavior will still help them train their models and AIs to be better at it, even if you didn't interact with the instance. I simply don't see anything of value federating with meta would provide, that would be worth this, along with the really probable risk that Meta is simply going for EEE, as mentioned in the other comments. And I think this was the main idea of Fediverse - to have a network of community-ran instances, where you are not the product, but the actors are indeed benevolent and selfless.
But I also understand your point of view, because you are right that defederating with them by default goes against some of the principles of decentralized ecosystems, and that there is a lot of content and userbase that we would be missing on. For me, I don't really mind if the growth of Fediverse is slower, but the community has similiar values as I hold, and I'd rather see it fail because it tried to uphold them, than see it turn into, or be destroyed by, Meta. Be it planned as part of EEE, or only a casualty. But then again, that's my point of view and so I vote to defederate, but It's good that there's someone like you with opposite side of view. I also don't think that either side is wrong, we just have different views about what the Fediverse should be.
And one last thing - I don't feel like the example with email is fair, because it's comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users, and none of the risks there are with Meta federating would apply. I've tried comming up with a better comparison, but couldn't come up with anything for quite some time, so I'll just leave it as is. Maybe someone else can think of something.
Absolutely fair enough. Am happy to agree to disagree. I enjoyed the debate haha!
And yes, you have a good point: Meta would indeed get value through federation, and perhaps you don't want to support Meta's goals, so you don't want to allow them to proceed. Perhaps we could enhance our user/community level moderation tools to achieve these goals? Maybe you as a user could say something like "never shall any of my posts be sent to Meta's instance". Or maybe community mods could say "Meta users can't join/post/see our community". I'm even happy if instances enable such filters by default! I just don't think defederation is the right tool for the job, because it defeats the vision of a connected universe.
I don’t feel like the example with email is fair, because it’s comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users
Yeah, but I believe the principle holds.
Again, thanks for the opposing viewpoint. Glad we had the debate. Cheers!
I've just stumbled upon something that I think makes a pretty solid argument that federating with Meta goes directly against the idea of Fediverse (because I was actually intrigued about whether I'm not just projecting my dislike for Meta into it).
Take a look at https://www.fediverse.to/ (which I'm actually not sure if it's the official main page, but it is the first search result), this is literally the first selling point, written in (absolutely hideous :D) large font on the landing page:
The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.
Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.
Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.
I think that with that in mind, there's no way how we should even consider federating with them. That is, of course, unless it's what majority of people wants.
Good point. I guess my vision differs somewhat from that quote there. Dang.
Welp, good find! I still think my idea for federation would be more resilient, but either way, we’re all wishing the best for this instance, and I really appreciate these discussions we’re having. Cheers to that!
You've officially changed my mind.
Up until now, I've been harping on the concept of "controlling interest" in which a single entity is large enough to control the direction taken. But I hadn't considered that the new direction might be one that limits the potential for a negative result.
Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it's a risk we have to take. If this federation experiment fails, then what is learned can be used in the next experiment.
Now to track down and add a note to all those comments I made...
Personally, I think that a sufficiently large instance does represent a major risk. But now I think it’s a risk we have to take.
If we had to white board a decision matrix on Facebook federation, what would be the number of risk's and rewards for either approach? How would you weight or quantify them? Just trying to approach this from a little more of an analytical angle, given most of us are developers anyway.
Risks/rewards for whom?
For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.
But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a "fediverse", where all instances' users can talk to one another if they choose. If that's what we care about, there's no choice here: federate, or you've already broken the vision.
Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta's content on their home page. Let's beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:
- Let users block all @meta.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
- Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
- Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
- Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user's post or a @meta.com community post on "all" or "local". Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities. That's all well and good.
But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: "Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won't allow it. Go create an account there instead.". As soon as you do that, it's not a fediverse anymore.
I appreciate your reconsidering your position! Thanks for taking my argument in good faith hahaha. I was worried I’d get some hate for it.
Cheers!