Admins are in agreement that we don't want federation with Meta.
I don't see us currently federating with them - https://lemmy.ca/instances
We'll make sure it stays that way! I've added threads.net to our blocklist.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Great to have an official answer. Thank you!
I decided to sign on here because of this stance. Also I missed the company of my fellow Canucks ;)
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Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn't the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn't the only thing you're accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you're just making yourselves invisible to a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?
We're all still protected, no?
Personal take - I don't think it's reasonable to assume the meta will operate in good faith. I don't have confidence that they will moderate their users, and I believe their only interest will be in slurping up 3rd party data to make their platform more appealing and decrease the chance a user will go elsewhere to find things. They don't want you going anywhere else for that juicy ad revenue.
Yeah I'm assuming they're operating is as-bad of faith as possible myself.
As far as moderating their users, I'm don't necessarily know to what extent you mean. But I would assume that since they're a publicly traded company who wants to foster their relationships with ad providers, that they wouldn't let it devolve into something newsworthy; that's bad for business.
Sorry if I'm repeating myself too much (I mentioned this in another comment below), but if the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. If we tested the waters and decided it wasn't for us after some interaction, I imagine the non-corporate federation could grow immensely by that point. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
For moderating users, I mean all the bullshit conspiracy theories. My dad lives on Facebook and has gone completely off the deep end, we need to start actively fighting against this instead of being tolerant.
Same with mine and probably many others.
Yeah I noticed that FB is already linking out a lot of articles taken from Reddit shit etc as it is
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Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don't know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yeah, I'm already a little offput by how lemmy.world seems so dominant.
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It's also about the content threads will bring
Think about all the dimwits, grifters, and douchebags on Instagram. Think about how shitty front page reddit posts were. Do you want that here?
EXACTLY. Quality over Quantity. I mean even Reddit pre-exodus, like there was great intelligent conversations and threads… but sooooo much garbage in between. The signal to noise ratio sucked. I’m loving the small but high quality posts and conversations im seeing on Lemmy in comparison.
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Thank you!!
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I vote to block them as well. Don't let Meta get its claws on lemmy.ca content or user info.
You're absolutely right!
Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
How is defederating going to help here? I'm genuinely asking. Doesn't that just stop their content from showing on our feeds? It shouldn't affect the amount of user data they can collect which isn't much anyways because we're not using their proprietary software.
My understanding is that people on exploding heads for example can still read these comments too. They just can't reply. Or they can but we don't see their replies. Only the people that federate with them do.
Am I getting something wrong here?
I also dont underetand the tactic.
Couldnt anyone just start a single user instance and gain access that way?
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I don't know if we are but I think we should. No interest in interacting with facebook in any capacity.
I'm new to federation as a concept, but isn't the only thing you accomplish from defederating Threads is that this community will miss the opportunity to grow its userbase? Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that anyone can be anywhere and access anything from anywhere else?
If so, the only people who come out behind are the people signing up on Threads specifically, who are granting every piece of personal data to Meta. But people signed up on other instances are protected.
As far as I understand, the existing fediverse is not at risk of anything, correct?
I guess people are worried about Meta pulling some moves out of Embrace, Expand, Extinguish playbook.
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It is at risk. Meta/Facebook have done this before. They embrace, extend and then extinguish. Eventually they say the only way to be safe as to use their products, force people to switch over as all the content is generated on threads and there goes the fediverse. It's better to get ahead of them and just not allow them to link up. Facebook is a hostile actor in this space and needs to be treated as such.
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A lot of us just left a site because it was ruined by corporate greed. I don't think corporations belong in the fediverse. If there's a vote, I vote for defedding with Threads.
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I think we definitely should.
I, for one, vote in support of defederation from Threads. No reason to allow Meta to use our content to boost engagement on their for-profit platform. And pull users away from places like Lemmy at that.
+1 for defederating
The ideals that led to the Fediverse are antithetical to companies like Meta
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I'm confused. Is threads even federated to lemmy? I thought it was more of a mastadon/microblogging thing?
Federation is independent from content type so technically yeah, but seeing as you wouldn't really want to see microblog type content in a link aggregator style display... It doesn't really matter. Not to mention that afaik threads ain't even federated yet...
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Mastodon, kbin, lemmy and all the other fediverse apps all use the same api, activitypub. This means we can all interact with each other even with very different ui and content goals. Mastodon doesn't interact with lemmy much right now because the uis don't really mesh very well, but it's possible. If you see a post that has @<community name> in it that's a good sign it probably came from mastodon or similar.
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Any service which makes use of ActivityPub should be able to federate with other services using the same. Hence why you can see posts from people using kbin. You can usually tell when a mastodon user comments because their reply will start with an @replyingto @originalposter
Federation with Meta would significantly increase network traffic and storage costs?
Then Meta would help everyone cope with the extra workload ... then help some more with a few changes .... then offer some new features ... then help with increased usage ... then offer more features ... then push out the smaller instances and take over everything ... then wall off ActivityPub ... then start charging people and advertisers .. then make billions ... then watch users rebel and start a new system and repeat it all again in 10 or 20 years.
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What are the objectives of defederating?
To protect our data? They can create stealth instances and get the same data. I think we have to accept and be mindful that the things we share on the fediverse can be exploited by people we don't like.
To exclude their users? I understand they have partnered with Namecheap to offer users customized instances with their own domain. Is it even a technical possibility to exclude all their users' instances?
To make a statement? Okay, but then we need to do more than just defederate.
This article has been circulating around the fediverse and I think it greatly illustrates why it's so important to defederate from large corporations before they can get a foothold. It's about so much more than just them getting our data.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
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I don't think it's even on ActivityPub yet, so as far as I know you can't really defederate from something that doesn't even exist yet. But I think it's probably for the best that all instances do defederate just to tell Meta and Zuckerberg to fuck off.
Please do.
I don't see anyone here arguing that this instance should remain federated with Threads. So far it's unanimous that we should defederate from them. I agree. We should keep this separate.
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