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!)
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.
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.
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:
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.
I’ve never had any problems at McDonald’s with their ice cream / milkshake machines in Europe. Maybe the US simply gets the faulty machines?
You’re not getting the real McDonalds experience
I dont think mastodon would, but i think lemmy kbin would. The target audience is different, one is twitter and the other is reddit like. I dont think twitter user hate fb as much as we do.
They always did strike me as idiots
No Gabe, go make half life 3.
This make me chuckle.
I mean, they aren’t fucking wrong. Half life 3 has a federated communication system built into multiplayer? Go do it Gabe.
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?
Whats wrong with steam?
It’s a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
Isnt that based on the assumption that Valves public comment about removing the drm in the case they go under is a lie. It becomes a trust issue then, and to the public view, many put trust in them.
They have no reason to honor that, and are a corporation. I don’t consider that binding or realistic.
There are many things that happen for “no reason”. Its fully a trust issue if you dont think it would happen.
OK. You’re welcome to trust in anything you like. I believe contracts, not promises.
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
Should Note that if a game isn’t on that list, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t DRM free. For example “Rain world” is not on that list and it is not required to launch it through Steam. So this list is by no means exhaustive.
I like itch, but it’s no steam killer. We need a way to somehow own our digital games in a way that is not centralized to one marketplace.
What benefits could give to the user and the producer the descentralization?
Disintermediation would be nice; More of my money going directly into the hands of game developers instead of executives. Also, people who own games should be able to resell them. Can’t do that with centralized platforms. A benefit of decentralized game ownership would be that the developer could be cut into the resale of their games, which shifts the incentive to a more long-term view. A game could be something that is supported by the “used” market, and therefore has a reason to invest in long-term value. No more drive to keep on reinventing the wheel and releasing new games every year, just keep on making the existing game better.
Oh, nice response, I want to be optimistic and see in the future more and more descentralization
i think nothing beats literally getting the zip file with all the contents of the game with no middleware like GOG employs. to decentralize the store further requires the devs to at least manage their own website hosting, domains, ownership status accounts for updates. the only step available beyond that is the payment methods, and i don’t think there’s any viable solution to be done in that case besides having more companies like Stripe and Paypal.
in that sense, Itch is handling things pretty good for devs so far,
The main thing I’m for is improved ownership rights, and currently GOG is the best of them. The only downside with it is that you can’t sell it on when you’re done, like old games in physical media. When digital media has none of digital media’s drawbacks, then I’ll leave off about the potential of NFTs.
problem there is that anti-drm and ownership of a license to download and run software don’t combine while financially viable to the stores. aside from the additional problem of having to manage inventories, trades and everything that happens to break those systems, “owning” the license and allowing to sell to someone else doesn’t do much if you don’t employ a DRM to enforce the make-believe of you pretending you’re monetarily compensating a physical larbor of transferring a given copy of a media, people will share things with each other before you can blink and not care where it comes from so long as it runs and it’s clean, specially in places where people won’t pay for games instead of food. only reason CSGO skins works on Steam as the original NFT system is because there’s servers to enforce what people get to see you holding and what you don’t own. and allowing for transferring games between accounts without a DRM is not something you’ll ever see any big company doing under the liability of being accused of promoting “piracy”.
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.
Yes, reputation is very important. The cluster of people known as Meta has proven it is nefarious at best.
It’s good to consider the case-by-case basis instead of just making general rules.
Like if Lowes wanted to make an instance I wouldn’t worry much about its corporate influence. But Meta is actually an evil organization.
(Though their React docs are some of the best docs I’ve ever read)
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
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.
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.
The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta.
You’re surprised Zuck has bots?
He’s basically one himself.
They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.
What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.
Ultimately this is the thing to worry about. Threads will get the largest communities and as a result the main amount of attention and when/if Meta decides to defederate, it will ruin things. Also, people will generally give zero shits about federation because 99.9% of content will be on meta’s instance.
Ironically, the main thing keeping fediverse from being more popular (the decentralized approach and “multiple places the same community can exist”) are going to be the thing that kills it if Meta gets involved and becomes the big boy.
Idunno what is arguably worse. The fediverse being restricted to more “technical” folks who give a shit, and thus a far more limited audience than a central platform, or being suddenly disconnected from the hivemind after taking all the content.
(Fwiw, I absolutely think that the Threads fediverse plan is to totally absorb all the content and become the main place for it then possibly pull the plug but honestly at that point they won’t even need to the usage stats will basically do the same thing for them.)
My gut tells me we should defed all corporate instances as a matter of policy. Our uniqueness is at jeopardy , think of threads like the borg.
Obligatory upvote for Star Trek reference That’s the beauty of individual servers, isn’t it? If you’re on an instance that doesn’t defend those corporate instances, but want to, them just move to one that does. The voices will speak.
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.
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.
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.
This is what I’ve been thinking lately. There’s no way to unring that bell after an influx of several million people “join” Mastodon through Threads.
Plus threads has an entire team of engineers who can be abused to get out better looking apps, sys admins who ensure the threads servers are running at minimal load - ensuring a top tier Fediverse experience. Already we’ve seen a burst of indie developers for Lemmy and Mastodon, but what if I’m not concerned that my microblog app needs to know health biometric data - threads is up when my niche instance goes down.
That’s how they get you. Come to threads for a “better user experience”! You can still follow the weird Bean memes, but with a better UI/UX! Don’t worry, we at Facebook won’t defederate with everyone else once we hit critical mass!
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.
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.
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.
