Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
Stop giving big corpo any more chance at 3E saying “no this time it’d be different” no the outcome is the same every time.
Meta is a socially transmitted disease. There’s no reason to “wait and see” with Meta, we already know them. Meta is not new, it’s Facebook, with a new name and a fancy new logo to deflect attention away from all the terrible shit they do and have done, to individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole.
So much terrible shit that unlike many Wikipedia articles that have a “controversy” section, Meta/Facebook has entire pages devoted to their terrible shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulation_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
There’s more. Meta is not some new and exciting player in the ActivityPub field. They’re a known quantity, and there’s nothing to gained by allowing them to flood the Fediverse with low-quality shitposts at best, massive social manipulation campaigns at worst, and everything in between. In my humble opinion.
EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.
I’m no fan of Meta or their practices, to be clear. Though I do think there are potential benefits in having the ability to communicate cross-platform, so long as some reasonable safeguards are put into place. I’m firmly in the camp that doesn’t believe that Google killed XMPP because XMPP was never a popular or widespread protocol prior to GTalk, and the users who came and went when Google did what they did were Google users, rather than XMPP users. So much like Eugen here says, it went back to how it was before they got involved.
That said, I do think that Meta in its current incarnation is an entirely different animal. I suspect that early on in a post-federated world, we’ll start seeing dark patterns intended to lure users to Threads. I’m envisioning registration gates similar to paywalls on news sites. “This content is available exclusively on Threads! Click here to register your account!” type stuff. More sinister, there’s nothing to stop Meta from appending advertisements in the body of posts created on Threads. Hell - they could go full evil genius and suppress that they’re doing it entirely on their own platform since they’ll have some other ad delivery mechanism there, which would mean the only people being served those ads would be federated users OFF of Threads who see or interact with content created on Threads.
So while I’m not a doomsayer about Threads and federation, I do think that we as a community are going to have to make some decisions about how to handle them. Having access to a community the scale that Meta will produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And because of how Lemmy / Mastodon / KBin / Fediverse apps work, we as users will always have the ability to control what we see in our feeds. At worst, it makes /All/ less usable, which is admittedly quite a big loss given how useful it has been to get subscribed to worthwhile content since joining Lemmy. And obviously, some instances will elect not to federate with Threads at all, which gives users choice on the type of community and content they want to interact with regularly.
With some care, likely some effort around defining usage rights for user generated content, and some new content control / filtering capabilities yet to be developed, I think that these networks can coexist in a way that is mutually beneficial to a degree, but if not - defederation is a click away.
As has been mentioned before, Meta can scrape most data from the Fediverse already as it is publicly available.
One strategy could be to default to publish to followers only, and not public? It would be a great loss for the open web, but it might be a necessary one to make sure blocked instances do not get access to most of our data.
Another solution could be to publish all posts under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I assume would legally block Meta from using our content in any context as they earn piles of cash on mixing user generated content with ads. Not sure if they would respect it, but it might give us an option for a class lawsuite in the EU?
Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.
It’s just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we’ve seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn’t have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn’t hear where that ended up going.
I’m hoping that this happens irrespective of other steps that may need to be taken with respect to Meta or other corporate interests in the Fediverse. Since the data is all completely public, it would help clarify “ownership” of original content, allow for meme culture and virality to continue to occur, but still give some avenue for people to raise claims against these large entities.
Someone is eventually going to try to marry a blockchain to this tech so that there’s an infinite record of content with receipts to the beginning. Privacy concerns all over the place, but it seems like such a natural extension to the already completely public nature of the content being generated throughout the fediverse.
The Mas.to admin claims to have “blocked Meta’s domains” already. Maybe that could prevent the scraping? Maybe not.
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It’s very… basic. One timeline, can’t filter anything out… ton of garbage. No thanks. Holy shit it’s bad.
I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.
Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.
If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.
Yeah I’ve been taking a similar approach, to social media. I’ve avoided the algorithm.
I mean, I don’t really do social media in the usual sense, never had Facebook, nor Instagram. I did have a Twitter account but I used it to follow certain accounts and didn’t tweet, so it was basically an RSS feed. I used a 3rd party app and only saw my subs, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts.
Same for Reddit, used a 3rd party app, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts, I only ever read a feed of my subs.
My Reddit and Twitter subs/follows have been mostly hobbies, niche areas of interest, products I own, sports etc. no politics or news discussions. So I’ve really avoided being exposed to most of that toxicity I keep reading about.
This is why losing 3rd party apps was a big deal for me. I don’t want to read sponsored/promoted/suggested posts or ads. I’d rather not use the service at all if I have to.
That’s why I’ve fully moved to Lemmy and Mastodon.
And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.
Paid promotion I’m sure — if not, sad that people are admitting they are “addicted” so far.
Umm…read the article.
I did already.
Honestly, I’m kind of bummed that so many people are stomping their feet and saying they don’t want the big guy to find their little cabin in the woods.
If mas.to – where I signed up for Mastodon – defederates Threads, I’m just going to lose access to the vast population that will simply use that easiest means of joining the Fediverse.
Defederating is just going to chase droves of people off independent servers and into the arms of Zuck.
It does either way. As you said defederating threads makes an instance not viable for you. Many people might think that way. This defacto lessens decentralization and increases vulnerability to an eventual takeover.
And defederating threads has the issues you mentioned. Both comes with problems and in the end it might split the fediverse.
Or am I missing something?
But the other side of the coin is that if they don’t defederate, my instance remains completely viable. I will continue to happily chug along on mas.to in my Trunks app.
If we federate now (i.e. don’t actively defederate), even the normies will learn early-on that they can sign up on a non-Threads instance & use a non-Threads app, and not have The Algorithm crammed down their throat like it is now on Threads. And they can still see Taylor Swift or Paris HIlton or whoever’s posts, if they choose. Additionally, if they see non-Threads content up-front, normies have something to be upset about if Meta splits from the Fediverse in a likely inevitable dick move. And if our first move isn’t to chase every normie off a non-Threads platform, there will be stuff they actually value not-on-threads-dot-net.
If we defederate from the beginning, normies don’t know what they’re missing, and they don’t care about non-Threads instances. Anything not Threads fades into obscurity as more & more people trickle away to where the content is. And we just make the doomsday Meta takeover actually more possible.
I think both scenarios are absolutely possible and possibly huge have up and down sides. I just hope this cool place we got here will survive and stay cool. I find it impossible to predict what will happen at this point. Some instances will block meta and some won’t. Which is the nature of decentralization and the thing instance owners should do. Decide for their instance and the people on it what they think is right. People can then leave or join instances that align with their ideas. Shit is going to get real soon around here.
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if they do, you can just folow them for here right? Or does lemmy.world have less features than kbin.social?
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting it… but my impression is that if my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, then I cannot interact, in any way, with anyone on Threads from my account on the defederating instance.
I’m on mas.to. The admin already publicly stated that Meta invited them to talks. They declined. And they even blocked Meta’s access to anything mas.to before Threads was even a thing. Defederation is probably a foregone conclusion there.
Threads being federated fascinates me. In one hand, it ends up being a gateway to mastodon / Lemmy for some. People who grumble about how “evil” Twitter / Facebook is but use it anyhow because “that’s where everyone is” may at least have their toes dipped into those concept and some of that may now see leaving as a viable option to something that isn’t evil as long as they can still see that content. It’s still seems to early to tell.
They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).
I think it will depend on the type of community, whether “the main one” ends up on Threads.
Stuff like FOSS communities will actively avoid threads. It’s just like hipsters avoiding mainstream whatever V2. We’re seeing that same scorn in these threads.
Stuff like “what’s Taylor Swift up to today” communities… 100% threads based.
Really, the only things I think the current Mastodon userbase would care about losing if Meta pulls an inevitable dick move and splits Threads off Fediverse are corporate things.
I’d wager that I’m not the only one who still keeps a Twitter account so I have access to customer support on Twitter for product & services I use. Because, lets face it – customer support on Twitter is almost always better than waiting on hold via the “official” support lines. Those same channels of communication will 100% start showing up in Threads.
I didn’t know you could move Mastodon servers and retain your followers. Very cool.
Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access.
I hope Lemmy also implements the image/media caching in the not so distant future. Currently, Lemmy Web UI sends a lot of HTTP requests to external servers like imgur. (Github Issue)
Block the shit outta it. Hope no one signs up lol
There’s a 90% probability that Threads takes over from the failing Twitter. Nothing will change. No one will learn anything. More of everyone’s data will be stollen.
They had 10 million signups within 7 hours of launch.
So they say
Anecdotally, through what I’ve seen of even just local Twitter accounts (like breweries, reporters, friends talking about Instagrammers they follow, etc), I think I believe them.
Sounds like mastodon doesn’t mind lying with vipers and is trying to justify it
Tell me you’ve not read the article without telling me you’ve not read the article.
Lol are you serious? What, did you want a little bubble on the internet where corporations don’t exist? What does “open source” mean to you, open to only the entities you allow in? Like the article says, join an instance that defederates every corporate entity or make your own, but don’t blame developers of open source software for keeping it open.
I’d like to not embrace the assholes that helped centralize and control the narrative on their massive platforms of idiot users
It’s not embracing Meta. All it says is, once it is federated, they may be interoperable. That’s it. You could view stuff on Threads and Threads users could view stuff elsewhere (unless your instance defederates from Threads).
Then join an instance that’s defederated with them, or create your own. It’s literally that simple. Don’t shit on open source devs for keeping their software open source.
How am I shitting on open source devs? I’m just pointing out how crazy you’d have to be to think any corporate media participation in the fediverse is a good thing. Yes I can run my own instance but it won’t do much good if the largest AP instances let Facebook federate with them. They’re just trying to capitalize on other peoples work while spending a relatively small amount of money and effort on their own activitypub client. If it fails they won’t care and will just abandon it but if it succeeds they’ll be poaching users and data from the fediverse for years to come. Not to mention bringing those cringe IG and Facebook users around.
Also, Quick browse through your comment history and there seems to be quite a bit of shilling going on for Facebook. Hmmm…
Uh, we need participation from everyone in order for the fediverse to have legitimacy. We unfortunately need those cringe users if we want large scale adoption. Without it everything stays small scale, developers aren’t attracted to the concept and people leave for functioning alternatives.
Oh god, “shilling”. Yep, there’s that Reddit paranoia. Everyone who disagrees with me a robot!
There are two topics here, Meta and beans. Of course I’m talking about one of them lmao
And read the original comment I replied to saying Mastadon devs are “in bed with vipers”. That’s what I would consider “shitting on”.
What does reddit have to do with this? Many of your comments seem to downplay the threat these companies are to the fediverse.
Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get us.
My comments downplay the “threat” because I don’t believe it’s a threat, and if a single corporation joining the fediverse somehow actually destroys it then it wasn’t going to be around long anyways.
If you read all my comments you should know that. I’m not a fucking shill because I disagree with you ffs.
Unfortunately, I believe the embrace, extend extinguish, model needs to be taken into account.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Here is some food for thought, if you or anyone else hasn’t seen it yet.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what first came to my mind when I heard about threads planning to federate. I think it is a huge risk.
Everyone has seen it, it isn’t food for thought. It’s a Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s that wasn’t even targeting open source software and wasn’t even successful as a means of targeting competitive freeware.
Dude quit being a dick. You work for Facebook or something? This is a real conversation. This isn’t reddit, this isn’t facebook, this isn’t twitter. We don’t just dunk on people here.
How on earth is that “dunking”? Disagreeing with you is being a dick now? Jesus lol
“Open source” means anyone can use or reuse the source code, it doesn’t require you to show content from entities you don’t trust.
The great thing about the fediverse is that we are all free to create or join instances that have federation policies we prefer.
Exactly. Mastadon devs aren’t “in bed with vipers” because they aren’t somehow closing their open source software to an entity.
None of this has anything to do with Mastodon’s source code though, I don’t know why you keep bringing up open source
Read the first comment in this thread about Mastadon’s devs being “in bed with vipers”
I assumed that was about mastodon.social not defederating and Eugene Rochko saying not to worry about Threads
Eugene Rochko even says to join a server that defederates Meta if you want in the article.
If threads becomes larger than the entire fediverse, then it’s stupid to not be compatible with them to use their content for the mastodon users. You can also begin to pillage users every time the platform does something stupid with theoretically minimal issues of losing followers.
it already is no? Threads has 15 mil users in 24 hours.
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Eugen is not the person I would trust for good judgment on this because his agenda has always been user growth-centric, so a Fediverse that resembles Facebook would just be a “yay” moment for him - either way he can still end up with a career by leveraging his role with ActivityPub.
That said, I don’t believe EEE works here, because AP evolved in an environment that already had to compete like-for-like with corporate options. You’ll still log in for the rest of the fediverse if it brings you better content than Threads…
…and it has an edge on that, because these spaces are not designed around herding around industrial quantities of users. They have a natural size at which moderators shrug and close the gates if a big instance is too troublesome, because it hurts the quality of the experience for their own users. This peeves instance admins who want the power fantasy of “owning” a lot of low-quality users, but it also basically guarantees defederation with corporate social, because it’s never been able to handle its own moderation problem other than in a “pass-the-buck” way.
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I see it as free advertisment. Especially because it won’t be available for some time in most of Europe. Word gets out that you can join Threads(without ever joining it) anyway, that is basically free advertisment for Mastodon instead. It have a fairly big chance of working like a boost for Mastodon it self.
Basically, none of the B-List celebrities are never going to give up their followings on Twitter.
If the A-List comes over to the Fediverse, we could become a thing as a Twitter replacement. But short of a national stampede, they aren’t coming unless ALL of the sheeple go first.
Bluesky seems to be pretty successful at drawing the “B-listers” from twitter, much more than threads at least. We’ll see if they actually stay but it’s been surprisingly positively received so far, for some reason that I can’t comprehend.
It’s been ‘positively received’ because it’s still invite-only, giving it an air of exclusivity. Plus, it has Twitter’s founder on the board and people really miss what it used to be for…some reason.
I think a lot of people getting the fantods over this don’t grok the finer points of federation.
