I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create “better” front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
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.
Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.
No Gabe, go make half life 3.
This make me chuckle.
Whats wrong with steam?
It’s a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Wait, do you need Internet access to play your offline games? If so, moving to itch.io
Depends on the game. These ones for example don’t even require you to launch them through Steam.
Cool, thanks for the resource
I have no love for corporations but they’re a fact of life by this point on the internet. They drive a significant about of marketing and users and they’re what make a social media platform take off (which is why Parler and Gab fell apart).
Fediverse SHOULD be an ethical platform, but you have server admins defederating any instance that even has paid subscribers. Isn’t that going too far? Are we trying to force everyone on here into a kibbutz?
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.netto 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:
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.
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 fine with threads federating with mastodon as it means more content which means people won’t immediately dismiss mastodon because it’s too boring for them, but I don’t want Lemmy to federate with Lemmy any more than I want to read tweets on reddit. They’re different types of platforms for different things.
Users can still block instances though with Lemmy, yeah? So even if admins of instances don’t block Threads, I’d imagine users would be able to. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the capabilities of the software, however.
You can block communities at user level but not whole instances yet, it’s been requested as a feature I think, though.
Tl;dr - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is how google killed XMPP
XMPP is still alive, and is just what it was before Google used it. I don’t understand this argument.
OP is correct. We have very little to to gain and everything to lose.
Ban meta and its instance on a firewall level
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.
Good points. The musings of Lemmy/kbin/other users will be lost in the mass of karen posts, soccer moms, extremist views, god knows what else.
It’s pretty obvious that those who came here from Reddit or wherevee are looking for a place that is not dictated to by commercial interests, and if threads attaches onto these communities, I guess we’ll leave for somewhere else.
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.
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.
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.
Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads’ users on our discussions.
I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook’s terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.
There are under the hood data that is not displayed on the site which they can scrap. FB would be broke if they only rely on the FB posts alone without all the tracking everywhere. Even your movement on the screen or where you pause on the page are tracked.
So no they dont get all the data unless we federate them.
They can do that on Facebook because it’s their code and their platform. They can probably do that on their app and and instance too to some extent but I don’t think they can grab much more than the content of your messages and your likes if you’re on a different instance. Lemmy is open source; if there was a way to get that data we’d know about it.
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.
If mastodon.social is the biggest instance, threads have been laughing for their number since the first day it was released.
Meta do not need Mastodon users at all to take off. They dont even federate at the moment.
You’re 100% correct, but don’t think that’s enough for Meta. It’s inherent to the nature of corporations to sell to grow, ie increase market share. If Meta thinks it can increase it’s market share, even a little, by destroying mastodon.social it will.
Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.
I’m with you, already tired of this constant whining about Meta. I hope they don’t de federate until it makes sense, this is just scare mongering.
