Meta will kill small instances! Please read.
Meta will kill small instances! Please read.
I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won't care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won't care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That's not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn't get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
Big corpos don't want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
For those who don't know, the strategy is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The phase comes from Microsoft who used this to (try to) crush competing document editors, Java implementations, browsers, and operating systems. Other big tech companies employ similar strategies.
Facebook coming to the Fediverse is the Embrace phase of this process and that makes Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, and Akkoma the competitors.
I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they've done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they're trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it's how capitalism works.
One thing I don't understand is why would meta even federate with anyone outside of their own instances anyway?
Makes no sense to ever open up to allow any other instances in. Not like they are crying for users.
The fediverse just makes sense in their own bubble. Turn Facebook, Instagram, and their other apps into the fediverse and federate them all together.
I don't expect them to ever open up to the actual fediverse. Same with BlueSky. I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". Hence the fediverse.
From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
We have to stick to our guns and keep supporting the small instances.
Admins needs to strike first and defederate from Meta before they do.
Meta WILL fuck up everything they touch with an aggressive amount of ads. I do not want this future.
Currently Reddit has significantly more users than Lemmy. Has that stopped people from signing up to Lemmy? Twitter has has significantly more users than Mastodon since forever. Has that stopped people from signing up for Mastodon? Has it killed Mastodon?
The common error I see in all the "Threads will kill the Fediverse" mania is that it assumes the same people who sign up for Threads would have otherwise signed up for Mastodon/Lemmy/Kdin/etc. 99.9% of them probably never would have. They want something that's easy and just works; and they're willing to let a company profit off their data to have it.
One of the things that I feel isn't being thought about much, is that it isn't just Meta's ideology and policies that will harm smaller instances and the fediverse itself; but the volume of data that their userbase will generate.
For smaller instances like mine running on six vcores, 4GB of memory, 512GB storage and a 120Mbps network...I feel like all it would take is a handful of users federating with them and the data flow alone would destroy our resources at the network if not disk level.
No, I don't plan on allowing my instance to see or interact with theirs; but the point applies to all small instances and part time hobby servers. We don't have the means to take on the data they could throw out into the federated network.
I will continue to use Mastodon and Lemmy.
Doing my part!
I don't think this will matter at all. The first instance that brands itself as "we only federate with instances that exclude all relationships with Meta," is the instance I will be in and all the people who I want to hang around will be there also. Federating with Meta will be like holding a flashing neon sign that says "stay away from me."
I don't want anything to do with Reddit anymore and I haven't had anything to do with Twitter or Facebook for more than 10 years - and all for similar reasons. Huge groups of people brought together by money are fucking poison.
I'm totally willing to discuss my thoughts since it seems I'm in the minority on this threads mania-
Once Threads launches it'll obviously have a lot more users than the whole fediverse combined, maybe even 90% of all users. Now let's say some instances with barely 1-2% users and small content feed defederate from it. Do people think a new user who does not care about things like open source or privacy will join the niche instance? No, people will go where the content is. Big social media giants will jump on fediverse bandwagon and instances who dont fetch their data will become extremely niche communtites (some might like that but it's not good for overall fediverse health).
Instead let's say we keep federated with threads, and make posts like how YSK: other instances don't track your data, other instances are free from corpo greed, other instances are run by normal people etc etc and make users aware and let them naturally migrate. Ideally, meta will bring the eyeballs which we can help to make fediverse as a whole grow.
imo it's naive to think that us 100k users defederating will put even a dent on threads. Insta tik-tok people will join the new trendy social media and generate content. The only solution is to make people constantly aware that better alternatives to view the same content exist.
yeah, i really, well and truly do not wish to be linked with meta on fediverse. it's obvious the damage it will do either way. may as well stay as we are and avoid the termoil which meta will bring us should they decide to federate.
I don't think this looks very good, but if we want a fighting chance, we can definitely do two things:
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We need to make using other instances of Lemmy and kbin extremely easy. Seamless. Two taps on your phone simple. Sign up with Google. All that jazz. Then the most basic user will have an easier time choosing a non-Threads instance.
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We need to, ironically I guess, advertise our LACK of advertisements. No matter how they do it, I'd bet anything Treads will integrate ads somehow, so this is a way we can quickly stand out.
On another note, users will want to go where the content lives. Of course, that makes this much more difficult. We all know Threads will be big, almost immediately. So, should we defederate with Threads like many of us are planning? This will keep us "safe" but we'll lose all the new content. Or should we instead remain federated to keep seeing the content? Of course this doesn't stop Threads from defederating from us themselves, so I truly don't know the answer.
No matter what, I think we need to stand out to average social media users in a big way. I think my two points above are just a start, though. We need to offer more.
I don't have high hopes, but I'm planning to fight like hell for our little paradise in any way I can.
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Defederate from any instance that federated with meta.
They’ll probably get mad that people can take their ball and go home by going to another instance without ads and signing away access to all of their personal data but get the same content. If they defederate, to me that’s the trash taking itself out.
I don't exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:
Point 1: "Meta will unethically defederate from instances..." I'm assuming that means they'll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don't really see the problem with that. This won't affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn't have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn't for meta. Its a win basically since they'll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.
Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.
"unethically defedrate"? I think you may have misunderstood how federation works, since "defederate" is just another word for "ban yourself from seeing that instance's content", if Threads defederate from a small Mastodon instance, for example, that Mastodon instance can still see all the content on Threads, but the Threads user won't be able to see anything posted by that Mastodon instance.
Also, any instance can and should be able to federate and defederate any other instance for any or even no reason, that's the entire point.
I think you are wildly overestimating the stickiness of the fediverse. The sorts of people who will prefer Threads are going to prefer Threads whether or not it's federated. On the other hand, the sorts of people who prefer the fediverse will never switch to Threads even if it becomes the smoothest experience ever. But the latter cohort is likely much, much smaller than the former.
I agree. Ultimately, I think there is a real chance that there ends up being 2 major fediverses. One that is federated with Meta, and one that is not.
I think that those joined to meta will ultimately become like the losers table in a school cafeteria. They can hear all of the conversations, but nobody will engage them. I’d rather be in the not-federated camp.
I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:
I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.
Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it "must", in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn't subscribe to in the first place, anyway).
I don't see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse "centered" communities?
I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I've seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ...) in the last decade or so.
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users... Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can't afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn't change the economics at all, it doesn't change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don't like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
Where's that Fediverse's anti-Meta treaty again? Should update em clauses by now.
Compared to Meta, all other instances are small.
Meta or any other corporation with interest in social media sphere (to be read: wanting to make profit on the back of the users) will, sooner or later, kill the fediverse if allowed to enter.
Why?
Simple because the reason for a corporation to exist is to make profit and that profit has to grow each year - so there is all the incentive in the world to milk everything from the user until they can then move on to the next "thing".
Better explained here: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
What a huge piece of FUD this is. Threads is already way larger then the Fediverse is. They don't need to come here and try and take users. You are afraid that Meta will hoard the content and users from the Fediverse but they are already doing that. Threads doesn't connect now so it's all there's. Why would they connect to just disconnect later? Why is the answer to being afraid of getting disconnected in the future to never connect? This makes no sense. It's complete fear mongering.
But... what kind of Camel milk do you like?
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I mean, we can all defederate. You're TELLING us to defederate. What makes ours ethical and their unethical??
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They cannot make our instances slower. Your browser / the server doesn't make any requests to threads when you load a page on your instance. They could send notifications less frequently, but so what.
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I would imagine that the kind of people willing to use Threads were already not going to sign up for a "small instance", and a lot of admins of various sized instances have already agreed to defederate regardless https://fedipact.online/
I am trying to figure out how this will do anything but make a "threads" and a "rest of the fediverse" setup, just like we have now. Nothing will change, and this will be for the best. Meta will make a shitty version of fediverse to rival their own shitty facebook, and the rest of us will be happier for it.
This post feels like fearmongering...
Why would Meta care about small instances? I feel like Meta would only see the big instances as pontential threat.
Honestly, this could actually be an opportunity for fediverse. I don't want Meta to harvest my data, so I would never make an account there. However I am interested in content/people from Meta and I can follow that from fediverse. I believe there is large group of people who think the same way and they may join fediverse if they haven't already done that.
I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don’t think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.
Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.
If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.
those people who wouldn't see any alternatives to Meta's instance wouldn't join Fediverse otherwise, no skin off your back
If an instance does off because Meta won't defederates from it, then it probably would have died off anyway.
Can small instances handle the traffic that Threads will be generating? I imagine small instances may get overwhelmed by bandwidth / cpu constraints, due to not having the budget that Meta has. Smaller instances that get bogged down might find people migrating to Threads simply because it will be able to handle the load.
I really need to get familiar with how blocked content is handled. If this is supposed to be federated-as-in-email, users need to get messages when their content is blocked or denied from a server. If you allow a submission to act as if it has been accepted when it really hasn't, not only is it deceitful but it contributes to the problem. What will win out is the service that ends up blocking social content while blocking actual toxicity the best.
The instances defederating Meta will shrink and collapse into their own seperate Defediverse. The debate shows the risk of so many hobbyist instances and admins powertripping their view who the users are allowed to talk to, that a corporation is perhaps more reliable. It hurts the users, hampers communication channels and people will flock more to the Mainfediverse further accelerating more power to fewer instances.
If you were looking for a network seperated from the outside general world, you perhaps should have joined a closed instance, network and forum. It goes against all what the Fediverse tries to be, a multi-purpose communication tool across communities, corporations and cultures with the possibility to create seperated and shielded communities.
This is much a better argument than the XMPP comparison.
Thanks for the post!
And the effects will be
While the effects you list don't seem entirely implausible, you're stating these hypothetical situations as if they are already fact and we have evidence to indicate that. I agree with @substill in that I don't see Threads being a threat to small communities.
Then let's warn people against using anything Meta and by doing so drive people away from it.
Meta or any other big player that looks to ride on the fediverse space ultimately gets nothing that's not already available publicly, and can't push their ads or data-scraping apps on the users of the fedi. In effect they'll either play nice and maybe a few people interact between them, or they don't and things continue as they are today. There have been a couple posts out there of the history with Google/XMPP and now the statement by Mastodon. Private hosting of open protocols has always been a threat to the big players. In the end with the Google affair, XMPP still exists, I used to use it for my household chat, but found other options like RocketChat and now NextCloud Talk more to my taste and easier to maintain. Meta can't kill the ActivityPub system, only the users walking away from it can do that, or, I guess ISPs if they did some sort of shady blocking en-masse but that's another matter all together.
I have no use for Meta in any of their forms, and would certainly push others to use the OG version of things that doesn't scrape all their data to sell them the latest bullshit they don't need, but there's little reason to fear them either.
Love the dialogue here but you always have to follow the money trail. The best way to keep what we love is to bankroll our instances to keep them running and scalable to additional users without ads. Remember, if you aren't paying for the product then you become the product. Meta has nothing without selling ads or monetizing user data. That's their business model. As long as we chip in we can always maintain our independence. I'm fine with never seeing or interacting with content from Threads.
If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won't see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don't matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it's like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.
I don't see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn't stay on shit they control.
And if you're worried about their app collecting data: then don't fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else's phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.
@peppy my instance has been getting dos for a couple months now.
I really don't understand this logic... There is literally absolute no advantage by not federating with Meta.
Why would users prefer the free Fediverse MORE if it's not federated with the "big and good" Metaverse? If anything it just drives them away into Metas arms, because the non-Meta instances are small and all the stuff is on Meta anyway.
Defederating is just the worst case result, but instantly from the beginning... How does that do any good???
I rly don‘t see it that way. The main reason they went for ActivityPub was to fuck Twitter. They just want to bind users long term to Threads and the combination WordPress, thumbler and meta is a very strong argument. I don‘t think they care so much about the data of the small userbase. The care about potential ways to monetise NSFW content without alarming the advertisers. And they care about AP because that can make them even bigger then they are now.
Permanently Deleted
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
Well, that hasn't been my experience so far, and they are not even federating yet :-D
#ChickenLittle
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
They absolutely have limits. For example Threads isn't in the EU yet, because of strict controls that severely limit what Meta can do.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user.
Small instances are already undesirable to the general public and always will be.
Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them.
No they can't. The EU will only allow them to "ethically" defederate.
When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved
If Threads is slow, people will switch to another service that is fast.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
If they ask their best engineers to do something evil, most of them will quit. Why work for an evil corp when you can work almost anywhere you want?
Also they don't have the best in the world - those already left (or refused to work there in the first place).
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
At least on iOS, that type of cross app tracking doesn't work anymore (unless the user opts into it, which nobody ever does). Apple's change to how tracking works is costing Meta billions of dollars... and protecting the privacy of about a billion people. Yay Apple.
But more to the point, people who are worried about privacy will only install Threads if it's the only way to reach thier friends/family. Since Threads will be federated, they won't ahve that reason.
I have Facebook and Facebook Messenger on my phone and once Threads is federated I will be enouraging all my friends to sign up for Threads, so I can reach them. If my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, I'll be leaving that instance (Lemmy, on the other hand, I might not care so much).
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp.
Better in what way? One of my metrics is being able to contact people who will not sign up for Mastodon.
I love the fediverse specifically because it allows me to reach people on other instances. Defederating should be limited to harmful content (and I don't see any evidence of harm in Thread).
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
Even I won't use Signal. Talk to me when I can install it on both my phones, instead of just one of them (using the same account on both phones).