this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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The beauty of the fediverse is precisely that it is not monolithic. Each instance can be different, have different policies and decide who it wants to federate with. Some instances will federate with anyone, some with most, some with a few, some with none.
The claim that that the fediverse needs to be a monolithic whole, where all instances walk in lock-step with each other is entirely at odds with the fediverse philosophy.
this argument makes sense only if you're talking about defederating instances. It doesn't make sense here. The problem is not whether we want the users of meta's instances. The problem is whether we want a huge corp be part of the fediverse. And why are we talking about it? Because people are trying not being naive and believing that meta is here because they liked the ideas of a federated network and want to participate. Meta will cause more harm than good as it has already happened in the past in different technologies/projects.
This conversation has been going on Mastodon for a while now. The problem kind of boils down to the following: there are people who think Meta is a bad actor and having the literal entire rest of the fediverse defederating is the best way of dealing with that. And there are people who also agree that Meta is a bad actor, and think that partial defederation is the best way of dealing with it.
Its really hard to come (read: impossible) to come to a consensus on this, because part of the argument about what is a better tactical approach depends on knowing how Threads implements things like account portability, and this is currently unknown. Most people even assumed that Threads would not implement this at all, but Adam Mosseri just announced that this is an important feature, so who even knows.
It's an unpopular opinion here, but I truly think Meta joining is being a little blown out of proportion.
The fediverse is simply not valuable enough to EEE. We're a tiny niche of nerds who all have ublock installed. Meta wants a low effort solution to eat Twitters lunch, and saw bluesky do well.
We could even see this as an opportunity to grow. You can join mastodon AND find famous people to follow. Thread users themselves may realize the moderation sucks and go elsewhere.
Defedrating at best makes Threads roll back their activitypub use...and their millions of users are in a walled garden again. We did it fedi!
The only thing naiive is the people in here thinking that defederating from Meta accomplishes anything whatsoever.
Oh boo hoo, meta's instance is shinier than ours, doesn't that mean users will leave? Yeah, look around, they already will and are leaving for Meta's platforms, they have more users on Threads in 24hrs than the Fediverse has had in it's entire life.
Nothing about defederating changes that.
the defederation has nothing to do with "reducing meta's number". The reason to defederate is so you're not playing their game with their own rules. Fediverse will gain absolutely nothing by playing meta's game.
Everyone keeps talking in analogies like "playing their game" because if you said "we gain nothing by getting a ton of free content from Threads users" it would sound ridiculous.
I mean, I'll give you a non-analogy argument. That "ton of free content from Threads users" is not desireable. In fact, if early reports are anything to go by, Threads is already largely populated by brands and thoughtfluencers, all in a race to the bottom to capitalize on mindshare in a new, unexplored space.
IMO, neither that content nor those users would be beneficial for the fediverse in the long run.
i'm not here for the ton of content that meta will produce. If I wanted this content I would had been there in the first place. It looks like somebody else is in the wrong place and is dreaming of a fediverse full of brands trying to promote their products and the influencers pretending they are real life advertisements.
its funny that you measure value by that metric.
No, I'm just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn't great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.
Here's the thing. No matter what the Supreme Court says, a corporation is NOT a person.
Facebook/Meta can't be welcomed, it is a construct without feeling. It is a massive profit-driven engine with no sense of fairness or ethics.
Anyone who uses Facebook can be welcomed, provided they make accounts and instances. But to allow a profit-driven engine like Meta to run an instance? That's not a good idea.
sure. But reddit was very far from what FB and instagram are. The culture that FB and/or instagram bring with them, is something that if I liked, I would had been there already
Flip it around and you got it. "Why would we want to provide free content to threads users?"
Kbin, ~57,000 users in a few months
Threads, ~10,000,000 users in a day
I don't think you understand the scale of the dynamics at play. Quantity != quality, but even if Kbin were to take all of Reddit's market share, there would still be orders of magnitude less content than Meta/Twitter.
I’m neither in favor nor against defederation, I’m fine letting the community make that decision. But if you think this is the argument being made you haven’t been paying any attention at all.
If this were just some problematic instance (or a group of them, even) I'd entirely agree with you, but this is Facebook, the damage that they're almost certainly planning and are entirely capable of requires (at least in my opinion), a different solution.
Please note that I'm suggesting this as an entirely unusual solution to a very unusual problem. Not as some sort of standard practice.
You haven't articulated a problem, let alone described how this particular solution solves it. Meta building a better version of your platform that siphons away users is a problem regardless of whether or not you federate with them / regardless of whether their platform is even built to support activitypub. Federation has no bearing on that one way or another.
I don't want content stemming from a place that's controlled by advertisers and other large companies. If we're federated with Meta then that means your decentralized independent instance would still have advertiser driven, heavily capitalist and consumer manipulative content domineering and running through its veins.
That's a specific thing that I've read many people enjoy getting away from when it comes to joining the Fediverse.