Why Defederating from Facebook/Meta is So Important

Defed every corporation. McDonald's starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.

We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development--open source. All of our content--available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.

However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.

He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.

Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That's the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.

The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.

Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.

Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.

If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.

Not only did I add threads.net to my blocked instances list, I also went scorched Earth and outright blocked Facebook's entire IP range through my firewall. Don't want them "accidentally" reading any data from my server ;)

For reference, their IP range is 157.240.0.0/16:

Edit: Actually, I might have more IPs to block:

https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/THEFA-3/nets

100% agree. I've been shocked at what seems like extreme naivety or willful ignorance in some of the discussions on federating with corps. Corps only want profit. People are the product at meta. They just want more product.

There's either a streak of loud and stupid that started up when the NDAs came to light or some of these "Facebook would never do anything bad" people are suspicious af.

My gut tells me we should defed all corporate instances as a matter of policy. Our uniqueness is at jeopardy , think of threads like the borg.

Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.

The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook's Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I've used the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Consume", to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they're so big, most instances will comply in the service of "content".

Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it's users and non-users.

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for "user safety", where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add "secure messaging" (lol, it's facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it's public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
• Meta's algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-"paid"/"verified" Threads users.
• It's already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

Instance Admins, and the "Friendliness" of Meta

Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do "due dilligence", but I've seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn't make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta's orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they'd probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

Note on This Post

I've realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don't have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p

Reddit and twitters recent moves were the driving force behind me switching to mastadon and lemmy, but I ditched meta/Facebook services long ago. Adding those back into this fold really makes the choice for me kind of easy. Inviting meta to the party is just a non starter.

Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn't matter whether you're on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.

Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.

OP is correct. We have very little to to gain and everything to lose.

I'm still baffled that some people can argue "why are you so worried?" about this. We have twenty years of history of shit hitting the fan, how much more do you need to not trust Facebook/Meta?

Agreed. It's not cowardly or "anti-competitive" to choose to avoid stepping in crap. Because that's what Facebook and Twitter are. Single ownership of an entire social media is a terrible idea, because that platform will always be promoting and protecting the interests of its owners, not its users.

Tl;dr - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

This is how google killed XMPP

For what it's worth, I'd like to put my voice. Out here in support of defederating them.

Our goals and their goals are like parallel Lines, They'll never cross.

I support defederation

Definitely defederate. I did not come here to let Meta monetize my content on their platform. Also - Facebook and Instagram crowd is among the worst userbase on the internet, with the blandest cotent, right behind Tik-Toc. I don't think it has much value, and it would make everything hell to moderate - it's just a lot of users.

So, defederate, I say.

Absolutely agree, cut them off.

Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<

The creator of Mastodon went to some kind of Meta round table meeting (couldn’t find the original thread, here’s someone declining the offer), so it’s entirely possible that he was told a bunch of lies and believed them.

That said, Meta is going to pay the admins of whatever instances Threads decides to federate with, and they’ve said that’ll be the biggest instances, which… well, that’s mastodon.social, by far the biggest Mastodon instance. So, I don’t know. I don’t have any reason to believe that he’s a bad person, but what kind of money are we talking about here? No one is immune to that kind of temptation.

I dunno, this whole situation has a weird vibe.

A problem I haven't seen anyone discuss: What of server costs?

When even just 1% of the still growing 30 MILLION Threads users (300k) are interacting with an average Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. instance every day, just how much data do you think that will generate? As Threads scales and users are posting content that users on smaller instances try to interact with, the hosts of these smaller instances bear the brunt of the costs.

Threads need only exist, and as everything scales upward and more people join the Fediverse, their sheer mass will wipe out all the smaller players just by virtue of the smaller servers being unable to cover growing server costs. 300k users creating 1kb of content each, per day, comes out to 292 megabytes of data. (But that's not realistic. The OP contains 5,171 characters, or roughly 5kb of data.) This does not account for images, or videos, which also cost money to store. If 1% of those 300k users (1% of the 1%, 3,000 people out of 30 million) are posting images, if we assume the maximum file size Mastodon can store (8mb per image) and arbitrarily set the file size at 1mb to try to be conservative, we're still adding an additional 3,000 megabytes of data per day in addition to the original 292, or 3.21 gigabytes of data. We're not even yet accounting for the additional data to store the database references for all of this either, keep in mind.

Those numbers are small. They don't include videos, and they vastly underestimate the amount of users interacting with any of our smaller instances. Every time a reply containing an image or video is posted to Threads, if smaller instances want to keep a copy for their own users to reply to or interact with, they have to store that data.

Server owners will be buried under the server costs -- costs which Meta can easily subsidize with Instagram and Facebook revenue, not unlike Walmart intentionally under-pricing everything in a new branch in a small town right up until every local store ceases to exist, at which point they jack up the prices and put another new store somewhere else.

Bravo. This goes straight to the main goal of Meta: they want us exposed to their manipulation, their astroturfed content and their psychological traps. They want our attention to their content, and the best defense we can have is negating them from having any of it.

Seal the doors! Mark/Meta’s obsession over user base and data control has to be put in check. They’re like a social culture vulture. Riding the next wave but the attempt ends up being stale, killing the mood for everyone that just wanted to enjoy something to themselves.

I'm 100% in favor of defederating and completely blocking communications with whatever Meta, Bluesky and other big companies throw.

More importantly, I was not aware of how Google killed XMPP, and that's the most important thing that every Mastodon and Akkoma admin should read about. Their instances will slowly stop working with Threads, people in their instances might eventually migrate back into Meta owned shit, thus slowly killing their instances.

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Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.

People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.

Never underestimate what corporate greed can and willing to do.

Yeah, absolutely defederate. Nothing good can come from interacting with Meta.

Ban meta and its instance on a firewall level

There's nothing good coming out of Facebook or any for-profit public enterprise. F* Zuck, Musk & all billionaire scums.

Defederate from those ass holes, zuck can get bent and a whole slew of other bad things. Stupid ass hasn't done anything of value and still acts like the dumb ass college kid bragging about getting people to give them all their personal details to use his crummy site.

Tl:Dr the only federation we join should have Jean luc Picard in it not Mark Zuckerberg

While lemmy.world is not my main instance, so I have no say in whether you defederate or not, I would like to bring this arugment into the discussion, because it's applicable for all instances, and make de-federation an absolute must for every instance.

Allowing Meta in goes directly against the idea of Fediverse, and we should fight it as much as possible.

This is a literal quote from the main header on https://www.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.

I've seen a lot of comments mentioning that defederating with Meta goes against the principles and main ideas of the Fediverse, that it should be inclusive and allow people to connect. But, judging by this main selling point of the Fediverse, it sounds to me like Meta shouldn't be in the Fediverse do begin with.

I'll just leave these here....

Behind the Bastards Part One: Let's Look at the Facebook Papers

Behind the Bastards Part Two: Let's Look at the Facebook Papers

By sheer user count allowing them to federate would mean the end of non-Meta content on the All feed. Threads is already much bigger than the entire combined Fediverse so the total engagement would drown any Lemmy content, unless of course driven by Meta comments itself. This would no longer be Lemmy, it would be Threads that you could use your Lemmy account for. Maybe not if the algorithm was changed to filter out posts from Threads from the All feed, but you'd still get your communities flooded with Facebook comments.

This is in addition to the rest of the problematic issues with Meta as a company.

I’m all for defederation. It might seem alright in the beginning but slowly the problems would arise to a point that being on Facebook’s Threads would be easier. At that point they won because the rest of Fediverse would be deserted and thus killed. Just remember what happened with XMPP and Google Talk. It’s so incredibly sad that the Internet feels like a battlefield again. We free users who would like to enjoy a nice service without any enshittification and without being commodified vs another faceless corporation that would like to make money out of us all.

Facebook is a company you should never interact with. They are plain evil.

Even if all evidence showed that they have good intentions, I wouldn't trust them - just based on what they have done in the past.

I absolutely support not allowing the ZuckFuck and his corporate shills any access to the fediverse. Defederate them!

What's the point of joining the fediverse when other antisocial network are abundantly available? They are well marketed in front of the public. I see nothing good coming out of integrating fediverse when you know they don't really care about you.

This one is easy. I remember the 90s when microsoft pretended to play nice with everyone while they simultaneously did their damndest to destroy any competitor by their embrace and extend tactic. I also remember when AOL opened up their walled garden and the amount of garbage that flooded every usenet group. Im aware that the redditpocalypse probably had the same effect on lemmy but I still support defederation.

Cat: Yeah, don't give Meta a single inch. They need to GTFO.

We have a moral and ethical obligation as humans to exclude any participation from Facebook or Meta. Facebook knew their algorithm increased suicide rates among it's users, but actively suppressed this information because they also knew their algorithm made them more money. The more depressed and addicted Facebook users became, the more money Facebook made. And when they went before Congress to answer for this, Zuckerberg just did nothing, took no accountability, and nothing changed.

This isn't about boycotting and trying to do some kind of ethical capitalism, it's about not letting Hitler submit changes to your git repo regardless of what those changes technically are. They could be the most technically brilliant changes ever made to an open source project, but they would still be Hitler's changes.

It's guaranteed that they'll use their instance to datamine and further build profiles on people in other federated instances as well.

I don't trust them at all with their handling of data besides their ability to track people who aren't even on their platforms. Also it's almost impossible to reach out to them unless you buy their shitty VR headset, as you will find out if someone ever fraudulently takes your account to buy ads with your money and gets your FB account banned.

Fuck the Zuck.

While I don't support preemptive defederation and was willing to give them a chance, it should be clear by now that Facebook is uninterested in being good actors, and allowing a nearly unmoderated large instance with hate groups and also collects this much info from their users is dangerous regardless of who runs it.

I support defed due to malicious behavior, although I still think Threads is going to fail regardless of what any of us does.

Facebook sucks, there's nothing but dumb boomers on there now. And the amount of data they harvest from their users is insane. If they think you're a bot, they'll demand to see your government issued ID or your SSN to "verify" you and totally not to get deeper insight into who you are and how to sell shit to you.

Everyone here talking about XMPP and EEE.

Meta can Zuck it.

Nope. Im out. Im not waiting for admins to do the right thing. I did that with reddit and we all see where that went.

I only join Lemmy because of its open source, non-manipulative, not for profit nature. If Meta joins it will be a good reason for me to quit. Hell, even Reddit would be better than a Fediverse with Meta IMO.

How Google killed XMPP

Google didn't kill XMPP, it died on its own. XMPP still lacks encryption by default and proper file transfers (there are 3 implementations of file transfers and all of them suck). The problem is that XMPP never had a normal protocol, and as a result, clients were forced to implement the features themselves through extensions which were not supported by all clients and servers. So it's hard to blame Google for starting to do their own implementation of features. Matrix did everything better, but for some reason people don't use it. They don't, because there's Telegram, Discord and so on.

Don't defend XMPP. It's obsolete. If you want a federation, use Matrix.

I feel like defederating is a good short term solution, but the events described with XMPP could have happened in any number of ways.

The real focus should be on how to make ActivityPub robust enough to prevent the events from the article from happening again.

I think I fall on the side of preemptive defederation, not just because of data harvesting etc but also because the incoming communities will be huge and dwarf anything already here - look at what has happened here already as communities try to merge and establish. Everything dominant will become meta along with whatever mods and rules etc they already have in place. Scary.

Agreed. More instances should defederate from anything related to Meta. Im here because a corporate entity utterly destroyed something I liked. I don't want that again.

There must never be a single dominant instance. If one instance becomes too large, they end up having too much influential power. And with all that power, big corporations or power tripping admins will use that power to coerce other instances to do certain things. "Don't want to follow our unilaterally-imposed rule? We're gonna cut off your entire instance and your users will lose access to our communities."

If Meta doesn't get defederated, they will become the dominant instance. They already have the most amount of users since I'm assuming you can use your Facebook/Instagram account, they'll have the most amount of user activity, and of course the most amount of power.

I am sure this might have been mentioned by someone else but my concern - someone that is financially motivated and saavy could work on becoming one of the larger instances in hopes Meta will buy them out. Similar to a startup, make a good product (community) and hope to get bought out for big bucks.

This means we need to trust instance owners and they in turn, as they get larger, need to be over transparent of their motivations, goals, and actions

Quesion: I don't know if the tech limits this, but if an instance owner flips to the dark side- could past posts and content be opened up for Meta mandated data scraping? Or would any code change like that not be retroactive? Aka if we select an instance that turns bad could we be feeding the machine in the future without knowing it today?

I'm imagining Zuckerbot finding your post and his eye screen going red and it has your name and photo with a big flashing red PRIMARY TARGET

defed meta!

I’m still getting used to this platform, so this might be a stupid question. Are we able to see their content/can they see ours?

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One thing that people are not talking about is that it would be fairly trivial to create communities in the fediverse on open servers and then just sync a bunch of your corporate drivel from what ever company like meta into those communities. Its already happening. Reddit was the first one to do this. There are communities where every single link goes to Reddit here on Lemmy

I'm having trouble conceptualizing the attack strategies here. I also lack much understanding of what (exactly, precisely, at the technical level) federation is so I don't understand how defederation is a defense against those attacks.

Would someone help me break this down conceptually? Are there any analogies? Is this like closing the gate of a castle? Is it like quarantining infected people? Like blocking a phone number? Not loaning someone money?

Please don't just say "yes to all those analogies". I'm casting about for understanding here.

How can I better understand OP's argument here? (I have a background in tech and understand passwords, certificates, signatures, etc if that helps). Is email a federated thing? What's federation precisely?

OP I completely agree with all of your points. ESPECIALLY (BIG BOLD LETTERS) we need to create better "front-ends" Anecdotally, I put a post a on mastodon that didn't get responses (the vibe there seems a bit different on this issue, because I usually do get responses) Since the reddit migration, I've gone into a homelab frenzy. I have reached out to others. I have been in awe at the developers who worked on the overloading of servers and the jump on the creation of third party apps. The pre-existing community that explained a complicated process to many people.

We saw how many uses came over from reddit and found it too complicated. We had those discussions too. How there were solutions like simplifying what the fediverse is, what instances are, etc. etc. This took time for people who already cared about what was happening on reddit_ which is a small minority of internet uses.

And that would have been okay, right? We had our space, we could have had time to build.

I have been going on about this issue ad nauseum with my partner. I have a computer science background and work in cyber tech so this came to me a bit faster, but still a learning curve. I showed her videos, articles, walked her through the apps. But this is someone who is a social media user.

I had a fever for a few days (very irritated as it disrupted my home lab fever, pardon that pun) when my partner is comes running in thrilled*___* that she gets to be involved with my project and finally understands it because she saw Threads and the word "fediverse"

This is someone who is yes intelligent, who lives with someone who is way more involved with this issue that the average internet "normie", and still, because of the front end UI, the simplification of it. The exact quote was "this is a space on the fediverse for me"

A lot of fighting happened, lol anyways if you have made it this far, especially to OP:

1. We need to organize. I do not think anything can get done with siloed passionate informed users like ourselves. How do we organize? This will take crowd funding. Resources. Project roadmaps. Mission statements. Unfortunately, some of the ick of how we work together in a corp to roll to market.
2. We need to move fast
3. We need things pretty

How do we get this done?

I think one of the ways we could combat as well as defederating them from instances is provide such a good user experience to consume content on the fediverse that threads - or whatever else - becomes just a shittier, ad-ridden version of what we use.

Look at Reddit for example, if they didn't have the power to remove our access to APIs, third party apps would still provide the best experience. Can any of the features Reddit provides that third party apps don't justify the number of ads thrown in your face? Nope.

Same here, if we focus on improving the experience of a Lemmy or kbin user and ignore whatever meta is doing, nothing is stopping us from becoming just the better way of consuming all fediverse content. Then if threads were to drop federation, we would still have the upper hand.

The only thing that might hurt us in the end is if we start giving in and host communities on their instance. But if we don't, and keep our ground, we can have the best of both worlds. See their content without their ads, and keep control of our own content, without their rules.

All i have to say afterr reading that is: HOLLY SHIT!!! I didnt even know a fucking city tryed to go opensource, let alone Munich, and fucking MicrosoftOffice of all the fucking things prevented them from doing so. Fuck. We absofuckinglutely must keep motherfucking Meta as far fucking away from our comunities. The fucking problem is gonna be when those meta fuckers start fucking offering money to the admins, keeping a server is fucking expensive and they are gona have to get money from somewhere. Fuck, whe really need a solution for this otherwise we are fucked.

Thank you for this. While new to the fediverse, the activites of the large players ring true. I'll be watching.

To be honest, federation is presently too complicated for a majority of users. Until that is solved, distributed social networks aren't going to really take off.

If you understand tech, you will get it. But lets face it, most people don't know wtf they are doing lol

I'm really out of touch here. So, Meta is joining the fediverse?

Coincidentally, I just read an article about the impact large players can have on a financial market when they create a new ETF. The article went into some detail about the various ways the market can be manipulated, and also the unintentional influences the mere presence of a new, huge, monolithic owner of a large share of a commodity can have. It's rarely a positive event for the smaller players.

There are similarities between financial markets and social media spaces, and social media should take heed from the lessons offered by the much older financial space. Unlike financial markets, the ActivityPub sphere has controls small players can exercise to counter movements like Threads. How effective they are remains to be seen, but I think you're absolutely right: the existing AP players would be better served by locking out Meta, than to allow the wolf into the playground.

If the attention this post is getting isn't a strong indicator of what our communities want, and the direction that the fediverse and all instance admins should follow, then nothing will be.

Especially now, because of the extra obstacles of joinin the fediverse, users are on average more aware of the implications of such a thing. We should listen our people.

Cannot agree harder

^.^

AI Summary:

This text is talking about why it is important to stop being part of the Facebook/Threads/Meta social media platforms. It says that these companies have done bad things like help with genocides and manipulate people's opinions. They have also invaded people's privacy and tried to control the internet. The text says that we shouldn't believe anything these companies say because they are not trustworthy. It also says that by leaving these platforms, we are protecting ourselves and our network. It is like our immune system fighting against harmful things. The text suggests that we should focus on making our own social media platforms better instead of relying on these big companies.

I would not sing up for Meta run instance, but it is because I don't really trust it will last. In a big corporate scheme of things, it is an experiment and can be killed anytime because it is really nobodys passion project to maintain. So I really doubt a Meta run instance will be better than a multitude of community run instances in the long run.

But yeah, I'd sway for defederate. Meta is a corporation and it's intentions are what they are. It's not "fair" but also its not like Meta is comparable to another community in the fediverse.

Wasn't there a post showing how bad defederation is as a defence when other instances were doing so? Why don't we just have a bot that removes comments from META and messages the user, that in order to comment they must use another instance? This way we can use METAs own tactics against them. Drive users to our instances, regulate communities automatically and still increase overall content generated rather than styfile.

fuck zuck, hoping kbin also defederates

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Wait... FB/Meta is going to create instances? Somehow I missed this news and I'll be trying to look this up after by post.

Anyway, yes they should not be allowed. They have a vested interest to destroy the Fediverse. How would they do this? Well, Microsoft has pioneered this strategy known as Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish. It's much harder to apply these things to opensource, but we've all seen how much Microsoft has been Embracing Linux in the past 6-7 years.

Not related to the topic, but if I can give one piece of feedback, it would be to stop using ^.^ and >.<.

Hold on, is Lemmy part of meta? Cause if it is I'm fuckin out of here as well. I do not support meta fb, or any other company like them.

Simply the fact that they harbor known harassers like LibsOfTikTok would be enough to de-federate pretty much any other fediverse instance. Why would their moderation have a free pass just because they're big?

I'd like to go against the grain and be against defederating. I have so many friends who couldnt give less of a fuck about this stuff and because I care I am forced to isolate myself from all their mainstream services. I would love for once to be able to see the same posts they see and share stuff with them and maybe show them that its not so bad over here.

They'll start setting standards, other instances will comply, and meta will control (or destroy) the fediverse.

Hey what's a good response to "can't we just 'silence' threads.net instead"?

I think that this is the best take on this topic

Thanks so much for your article.

I'll probably keep a presence on a non-threads-federated instance and one on a threads-federated instance, just to compare and to talk to grandma. I doubt I'll spend much time scrolling through whatever it is Instagram users write about but you never know.

If there is not a solid confirmation of defeding by 30 July my recurring donations stop.

Can someone explain what it means to defederste from meta/threads? I didn't think those were federated so I'm a bit confused

I know tonfuck of reasons why we shouldn't have them here. Are there any advantages?

If I start seeing meta on here, I'll leave. I left facebook over a decade ago, and want nothing to do with it. This seems like an obvious no brainer.

we need to force defederation from thread's

Is Meta really playing Microsoft’s EEE card with Threads?

Lemmy is federated with facebook?

"People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it."

Who gets to appoint the gatekeepers?

Is Threads going to have communities like Lemmy? If not, this seems like much more of an issue for Mastodon, not as much for the “Threadiverse” part of the Fediverse.

Petition to Defederate mastodon.social and .online from Threads

The corpos ruined everything, don't let them do it again.

If there is not a solid confirmation of defeding by 3 Aug my recurring donations stop.

This was a fascinating and well written paper. It reminded me of how Labor and social movements are co-opted historically.

I thought I would just chime in here if I am allowed. I looked for an official Facebook lemmy but couldn't find one.

I have become a bit satisfied with Facebook as of late. They used to allow tools for embedding social pages into private websites and whilst technically they still do their level of support for such seems to have plummeted to non existent. I don't know if that is a conscious effort by Meta to close down forum support or whether it is because they are moving more towards a "pay to play" business model. This in, my opinion, suddenly erects a huge barrier to entry, to even get started developing with their platform. It would seem to me it would have been more prudent, as a business model, to provide free support to get started but start charging when their products are established or at least have some way to talk to a support person.

What I am saying, in a roundabout way, is maybe the world is ready for a decent alternative, even in the business space, and Facebook no longer seems to be it. I really can't understand how their support has collapsed so badly for developers.

@sapient_cogbag I hope my instance admins will take a look at this great article.
Have a nice weekend everyone @abel @wazaby

is there a good twitter app out there instead of the original for android?

Have any of you read Daemon by Daniel Suarez? The fediverse seems like that book coming to life, without the sword wielding killer motorcycles lol!

I disagree. I fully understand the harsh feelings towards Meta/Facebook. They have brought it upon themselves. I am not making excuses for them at all. However, this is likely the only real shot that the fediverse has for widespread growth and adoption.

I am so looking forward to following Threads users on Mastodon. I’ll have the ad-free chronological timeline on Mastodon, and I’ll still be able to keep up with sports writers, teams, and other users that would likely never even try Mastodon.

Currently, not enough people understand federated social media. We will eventually sway some of those Threads users over to Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. once they realize the advantages these platforms have to offer.

I can see the disadvantages, but I do think the pros outweigh the cons. You are not hurting Meta by defederating from Threads. They will succeed regardless of the choices of a few instances.

This is an incredible opportunity to inform more people about the fediverse. The beauty of an open, decentralized platform is that if you want nothing to do with Meta/Threads, you are free to move to a server that chooses to defederate.

threads will never federate.

This would probably relegate the fediverse to a zombie-product-status niche if this sort of policy extremism takes on. But maybe some users would prefer that. Please read the rebuttal on this view at https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking

If the fediverse can't survive meta it can't survive. If decentralization's Achilles heel is corporations then decentralization is not viable strategy in the current world and we should give up on it now.

Threads wasn't first, and it's going to be very very far from last. There is no escape from corporate interests in any g7 nation - other than being deemed too small to matter

Wouldn't creating a walled off garden ourselves bolster these corporations? There will just be more users on threads than anything else and people are already moving to threads anyways because that's where "all the people are" especially people who have a major following and want to interact with where a majority of their followers are. This would just create more harm to artists/influencers on the mastodon platform than it will help and just make Meta even more powerful than they already are. This will just take us back to where we were, a bunch of people separated by social media servers rather than unified. I don't want to have to make 3 different social media accounts just to talk to people that I've known for years. All you're relying on is assumptions on what the future will be like without actually seeing it first hand. We need to be reasonable and we need to see for ourselves how this will all go before we defederate from millions of people. Sure, Instance admins need to be cautious but the people shouldn't be separated just because of fear. You're extinguishing a service already by doing this.

At the end of the day, I will respect whatever the instance admins on the various mastodon servers decide (especially smaller instances with minority groups that do want a safe space) because I believe Open Source is the freedom to choose. I just simply think it's too cautious and the people of those major services like Threads are not willing to go use a service like Mastodon. It's too new and they'll never understand until we slowly but carefully mass educate them on what even is going on here and what even is a fediverse? We need to get people to see that mastodon is the safe space they need to be because there are people there who want specific things that threads already fails to provide (due to strict ruling and such). We need to be available for them just as mastodon is available to us.

Pretty weak show of confidence against Meta. I feel like the fediverse will become a collection if defederated sites with how quick everyone is to defederate.

I disagree.

Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP "take a stand" against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.

Bluds read one article and shit their pants.

Controvercial take: Mastodon is already build on a no trust architecture with only public stuff leaving your instance so it doesn't fucking matter and thisdebarte is fucking stupid!!! Damn I needed a Reddit like place to leave stuff like this really bad!

why does everyone and their mom want to defederate from everything immediately. some fediverse. If I don't want to see threads stuff then I'll just block it myself. And what if I want to? Then I'd have to go there and create an account there and, oops, it's defederated from everything so maybe I'll just end up spending all my time there since yall mfers wanna make shit so much more difficult.

If threads alone could kill lemmy then it prob was never gonna take off anyway. there surely will be some who migrate to lemmy from threads, you cant tell me it would be literally 0 i just don't believe that. threads already has many times more users than lemmy even just a small fraction would be a lot.

i just want lemmy to grow huge. and someone comes along with all these users and everyones first reaction is dur hur meta bad no federation ! like cmon.

I don't understand what's the big deal. If they join fediverse - cool, more content for us. If they decide to quit, how is it different from a regular instance defederating? Why people think that users would abandon fediverse just to follow them? I'm still new here but I'd say that if some community vanishes, I just search for another ones that are available here or just stay with those I already have. Maybe I just can't see something but I left reddit because it decided to restrict its users, I thought the fediverse wouldn't do the same.

Maybe this is a naive take but what exactly is meta supposed to be embracing extending and extinguishing? Mastodon isn't some huge community that they're trying to consume. Facebook has a really good track record of contributing to the FOSS community (react et al). Don't get me wrong I dislike meta as much as the next guy but maybe there's something good that could come out of it. I'd like it if it was a mainstream entry into the fediverse.

Lolol this thread and the rest are pure compium without a plan.

Without monetization this place is DoA. Either step up, start a non profit e.g Mozilla foundation, and start charging users and hitting staff.

Otherwise you're post is going to the void, accomplishing nothing.

Server performance: garbage Comment: garbage