this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Meta (lemm.ee)

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Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it's not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it's likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.


Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

  • As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.
  • Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
  • Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
  • In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

By the way, we're not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

  • Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
  • Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
  • We don't really know what to defederate from - it's completely possible that "threads.net" will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.


Update:

By now, it's clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

  • lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
  • Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it's still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

  • The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
  • Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
  • We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

  • There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
  • Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
  • There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won't please everybody, but I really believe it's the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

(page 2) 43 comments
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[–] Kuvwert@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Threads, Facebook, Meta, ZucctheSucc can go pound sand.

If Lemm.ee doesn't defederate I'll need to move to anther instance or host my own. I'm not willing to feed them data to enrich the evil shits that run that company.

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[–] Ghostc1212@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I don't believe that federating with Threads will be completely apocalyptic, and I actually believe that the commercialization of the Fediverse is the way it will take over the internet. You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all. The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else, meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.

That being said, I believe that for technical reasons, as well as the fact that it'd be very easy for Meta to strangle their competition in the cradle if we (Referring to the Fediverse as a whole, as this isn't even my instance) cooperated with them, nobody should federate with Threads until the Fediverse is large, resilient, and technologically matured enough to survive a hostile takeover attempt by a corporation like Meta. Basically, defederate from them for now, and reconsider at a later date when the Fediverse has had time to establish itself. I think in the future, the Fediverse will be able to easily deal with Threads being popular and enshittifying itself, but I simply don't think we're there yet.

[–] Eve@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all.

Actually..

Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn't exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.

Most content on the internet is produced for free by users. Websites like Reddit can't exist without the free work of their moderators.

So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That's cheap compared to the other costs..

The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else,

Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can't just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side. That's how they got us. The main selling point of Thread today: "come, many people you know are already there!"

meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.

They wouldn't get into it without a plan to monetize it, that's the type of things they're known for..

Overall, I think people over-estimate the cost of running things on the internet. We already "paying" most of it just by producing meaningful content. We don't need tech companies to take their share in the process, we only need time and brain work to make the Fediverse easier to use so that our friends on the other side decide to join us here.

[–] Lethocerus@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I read this post and have been pondering this question for a good chunk of the day. I had a thought that may or may not have any impact. I hope I can convey this correctly.

Say Lemme.ee defederates fromThreads. But we are federated to Lemmy.world. Because we are federated with them, and they are federated with Threads, is there going to be some...Threads posts leaking though to our all. Or does the all feed only extend one..."hop"?

My brain keeps going to something akin to six degrees of Kevin Bacon. I know it's not the same, but wasn't sure how the fediverse handles the "all feed". One hop.. two hop....etc.

Thanks for any insights from people who actually know how this works.

[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

In this scenario, Threads posts would not reach us, but we could still be indirectly affected by their Algorithm as it applies to non-Threads posts.

Here's how:

  1. The Threads Algorithm decides what posts to show their users, these posts get massive amount of activity due to sheer number of Threads users
  2. If lemmy.world decides to federate with Threads, then their front page could be fully dictated by Threads (because Threads votes would completely overshadow any organic votes from lemmy.world users)
  3. lemmy.world users interact with these posts they see on their front page, thus boosting those posts to the front pages of other instances

It's a hypothetical scenario which makes a few assumptions (most notably proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy), but if it happens then it's a real problem that we can't really defeat unless all big instances defederate (or other tools are added).

[–] RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 years ago

Updoot from me. Fuck the zuck suck.

[–] backshift0022@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago

Strongly in favour of defederating. Firstly because I don't want advertising or big businesses taking over feeds, but the point you made about moderation is critical. The sheer amount of content that instance admins will have to deal with will be unmanageable.

[–] Eh_I@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't know what difference it makes at all, but I know this is a real shit way of deciding! 👍

[–] Tigerfishy@lemmy.world -1 points 2 years ago

Calling for a casual early voice of opinion? In a post that states clearly "I'm not asking because you have a say, but because I'd like to hear"?

[–] ghariksforge@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I have a lot of friends on Twitter who are now migrating to Threads. They are not going to come to the Fediverse no matter how much I annoy them. Federating with Threads will allow me to interact with them.

Also if the Fediverse works with Threads, a few of those people might come over.

[–] redshadowhero@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago

Federating with threads leads to the same issue that happened to google talk years ago - it once embraced the XMPP protocol, meaning anyone could set up an XMPP server and immediately start chatting with other XMPP users or google talk (or facebook chat, now that I think about it). This was amazing because if you had gmail, you suddenly had in-browser access to a lot of friends. I remember some friends way back then talking to me about getting a regular jabber account because it would be so easy to just use that. I also remember soundly rejecting that idea because "Why would I do that when I can already chat with you?"

The problem was that Google decided that XMPP wasn't sufficient for their needs and started to extend their internal implementation. Suddenly if you were on "regular" XMPP you were a second-class citizen. There were times when you couldn't connect cleanly to google's XMPP implementation and it created problems (admittedly, some of these problems were with the XMPP protocol, and others were Google deciding to "embrace" XMPP by inventing their own software to interact with it). From my younger and naive point of view it just seemed like my friends who used jabber et al were just running the inferior software/client.

Then, suddenly - Google decides to kill talk and replace the in-gmail version with something else entirely. All those friends I had were just "offline". You couldn't reach them; I also didn't see the need to create a jabber account because of all the perceived difficulties of interacting with them at that point. Some of them gave up and got google talk/hangout/whatever else accounts. Big corporations are pros at killing open source; the example above is just one of many. You can see examples all over the place such at VSCode and how they've been closing up access to their plugins, Apple with the GPL3 change to the open-source software they use, and now Facebook with threads.

You aren't going to be able to convince your friends; they aren't going to move regardless. And if Threads federates and, months/years down the road decides to defederate because they claim to have more content/features/whatever anyway, to all your friends on Threads you'll just go "offline" - and your friends will just wonder why you didn't use Threads in the first place.

[–] Raphael@lemmy.world -1 points 2 years ago

Begging for upvotes

[–] zarquon@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

I don't want to block them over the bad stuff they are probably going to do. Why not just wait and see what they do then block if needed? Defederation now is clearly taking a curation stance on what we all see.

I'm actually hoping it takes off. There is content on Facebook I would like to read but I cannot agree to their TOS. If they let it federate out that's great. I would never be willing to make an account on there.

I don't see any sensitive content they get from us that's not publicly posted anyway.

[–] Levsgetso@lemmy.zip -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not a lemm.ee user but I think we should all defederate from threads. The fediverse is supposed to provide a safe space from these corporations, not welcome them with open arms, especially Facebook.

[–] FlihpFlorp@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

Someone else said what I was thinking. If it was a corporation like Home Depot or something maybe MAYBE, but a company with a proven track record like meta….. yeeeeeeeeaaaah no

[–] DelilahBlack@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago

Federate with threads. More exposure and more people

[–] w3dd1e@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I’m not saying lemm.ee shouldn’t defederate but I think we should take a wait and see what happens approach. As you mentioned they aren’t even supported by Activity Pub yet. Let’s see where it goes.

I downvoted but I’m not opposed to defense rating in the future should they prove to be as evil as we suspect.

[–] pohui@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

Does it even matter? Interacting with Lemmy from Mastodon is wonky and borderline useless. If Threads is the same, I doubt federating or defederating with them will make any difference.

[–] PatFussy@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

I can only see negative on this topic. What are the pro's of letting lemm.ee federate?

[–] BeansLeg@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

My personal opinion is that I think large instances should "take one for the team" and suffer through federation with threads, at least in the beginning.

It's no secret that the fediverse still has a (shrinking) content gap with the centralized alternatives. Exposing potential users to our content is really the only way to get a critical mass of users. While there has been an explosion of content, a quick perusal of niche communities demonstrates that we have not yet reached the critical point.

So ultimately, I think that at least one of the large instances, i.e. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or Lemm.ee, should be tasked to suffer for the greater community, for a while.

[–] ziggurism@lemmy.world -1 points 2 years ago

Stick to your rules. Defederate if you have to. Otherwise let the users decide if they want threads content in their feed.

[–] moeka89@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

best way is wait and see because Facebook does not implement the policy yet

[–] awesome_person@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I am personally against defederaring from Threads.

Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.

If Facebook goes out of their way to push ads like that then yes, defederation is perfectly justified and invalidates everything else. However, there's no way to know what they will actually do until they do it. While at the moment it doesn't have ads, it obviously will in the future. But will those ads be actual posts, or just shown in the Threads UI? Can the users interact with them? What if they are posts, but without artificially inflated counts, so they'll have less interaction than regular posts anyway.

Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.

If other fediverse users can see posts on Threads, it works the other way around too. Threads users will be able to interact with posts outside of it. "But they'll only show posts from other Threads users!!", until a user wants to follow someone not on Threads. Yes, that number is shrinking, but it doesn't have to once they federate. You can simply not make an account on Threads, users on Threads will follow you just fine, and you will show up next to everyone else. Threads may be a majority, but it won't be all of it.

Hell, having a Threads majority might not be a good thing. What if the content is good? What if it's stuff you actually want to see?

Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.

...i don't really see how that's the case. Since using Threads requires an Instagram account, that's already an okay protection against bots. As for trolls, you can use the federation to your advantage, to make tools on non-Threads platforms like bots to handle it. If anything, the main Threads instance itself will be way less moderated than smaller ones. Also the only difference between trolls/bots on Threads and other platforms is the amount, you can do bad shit here too.

In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

Then don't use Threads itself. That's the entire fucking point of the Fediverse. You can use whatdver instance you want. If you don't use Meta's instance, all they can collect is publically available data they could get without the existence of Threads no issue. They cant shove in ads that aren't actual posts which likely won't get interactions and can be blocked, and if they put ads as actual posts with inflated numbers then it's perfectly fair to defederate. Assuming they go the EEE route, you can still enjoy Threads while it's at the first E, and then not follow with them when they go for the 2nd.

However

By defederating, you're locking out everyone on Threads. While that might sound like a good thing to some, that's still thousands if not millions of people that would be interested in the content here and would post. There's a good chance they won't know they can just make an account somewhere else, and just miss out. Why punish the user for what the company did?

You should at least give Threads a chance, at least as an early bird before they look into ads. When they start turning it profitable, then is the actual discussion for whether you should defederate, which will likely go through. We could even take this as an occasion to get Threads users off of Threads, off of Facebook.

Or I could just be a clown for giving Meta a chance. Only the future will tell

Edit: I have since changed my mind on this, and I want to explain why

I forgot we're talking about Meta here. Obviously they won't make this in a way that's mutually beneficial. They want to make money off of it. So when time comes to ad adds, they'll obviously make sure everyone sees them. And if we keep them for now, when we inevitability have to federate because Threads becomes profit driven, things will suck way more than if we never federated, because users from over here will lose access to content they were interested in on Threads, and vice versa. By embracing the first E, all we're doing is welcoming Facebook in the one place meant to keep distance from them.

I completely forgot the point of the fediverse is for it to not be controlled by a single entity. And while Threads can't replace the fediverse, they can definitely conquer it, and since we're talking about Meta, if they can they will, and Mark "they trust me, dumb fucks" Zuckerberk will obviously find a way to monetize users on non-Threads fediverse if given the chance.

[–] StoicLime@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

I think that if we lord the fact that our platform is open for everyone, we need to walk the talk.

Also, when people realise that there is a way to enjoy the same content as Threads but ad-free, they'll switch over.

Also, what's the issue with remaining federated with Meta? The app privacy concerns don't apply to us if we use Lemmy apps. They can't push ads to us. Our entire userbase is a rounding error for them. At least give it a chance, and don't be pretentious.

[–] focusforte@lemmy.world -1 points 2 years ago

One of the biggest problems with Facebook has been it's monopolistic control over social media.

People can't migrate away from it because of the effective monopoly. I've tried to move social platforms dozens of times and the thing that makes me come back is the fact that there are certain people that are on Facebook that refuse to migrate. They are happy with the status quo over there. And the only way for me to communicate with them is for me to maintain my Facebook account.

Federation allows me to move off of Facebook and still keep in contact with those who refuse to move off of Facebook. I've always wanted Facebook to support federation for this big reason.

All of this translates to threads, there are some people who just aren't nerds, people who aren't like us and aren't willing to deal with the growing pains of something like lemme or mastodon or other federated platforms.

There really is no benefit to de-federating with them that outweighs that as far as I can tell.

[–] eee@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I downvoted.

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.

[–] vamp07@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

Why don’t we wait to see if they send out ads to other instances before we judge them for that behavior.

[–] Boldizzle@lemmy.world -1 points 2 years ago

D-Federation X.

[–] HowShouldIKnow@lemm.ee -1 points 2 years ago

Firstly, I am anti-Meta. If someone on lemmy/mastodon wants to use Threads and their instance blocks it then they are free to get a Threads account. Likewise if someone is using Threads and see what they feel is an incomplete experience, they are free to find a lemmy instance and sign up. Here's my question, and it's one I haven't seen anyone else ask. Is refederating possible? Difficult? If we assume the worst and are wrong have we cut off our noses to spite our faces?

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