Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
From what I have read, I think it’s all of the above.
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a space is wanted free from corps, ads, data perversion
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people are fearful that 30 million people joining threads has automatically made it the largest instance. Once it integrates with ActivityPub and can federate, it will dominate the space and produce the majority of the content. People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content and content production with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
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many believe meta will not act in good faith and is doing this to appease European courts and laws
Because of all of this people likely believe keeping threads quarantined right off the bat is the best solution to mitigate the amount of damage they can do to what’s already been established.
Edit: I am adding to this post as I just stumbled across a post from the host of the lemm.ee instance (which I am a big fan of). He has also listed some great cons of Facebook stepping into the fediverse:
-there is nothing stopping facebook from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores which would ensure they end up on the front page of “all” for federated servers
-threads already has more users than all of Lemmy’s instances… therefore, they can completely control what the front page looks like by dictating what their users see and vote on
-moderation does not seem like a priority for threads which would increase workload for smaller instances
-REVENUE FOCUSEDI paraphrased a lot of this but as this is getting some traction I wanted to provide additional visibility to the cons of federating with the Facebook.
Just to play devil’s advocate:
There could be some downsides to defederating it too:-
threads could be a gateway to bring more people into the rest of the fediverse in a user friendly way.
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It might cause the rest of the fediverse outside of threads to be more fragmented if some defedarate it and some don’t.
Absolutely agree. The optimist in me wants to be excited for what this means and how this could impact the future of, well, the Internet.
But then I remember this is Meta we’re taking about. They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta. As someone who doesn’t use meta products, this brings concern.
This is such a blatantly obvious truth that I’m starting to suspect some users here are astroturfing, peddling this bullshit feigned naivety about the rampant unethical practices of FB/Meta. There’s enough history that we don’t need to question it or give Meta a chance.
I’ve been working on building the [email protected] community, but I may look into moving it to another instance if lemmy.world doesn’t change their mind on federating with Threads.
Edit: I guess they’ve only stated their plan for Mastodon, which is wait and see.
Agreed, feels like bots are here pushing for federation with Facebook.
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Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use, and eventually removing support for the open standard entirely, forcing other users to enter their walled garden because that’s where all the people are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO’s actions. The last thing we’re interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
As far as privacy and tracking go, can you unpack that a little more? Isn’t everything you post on the fediverse totally public to begin with- isn’t even already likely that they have spun up servers to test ActivityPub integration with, that have already pulled your fediverse posts? This just seems like a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Yes, my posts can be scraped easily, but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation. All they can do is scrape me saying things like:
“Targeted or general advertising for any product indicates to me that the company paying for the ad makes a low quality product that is over priced to pay for spam marketing. I will always seek out the better priced or better quality alternatives that do not fund advertising like this. I have never click or followed direct marketed advertising, except when it interrupts me in an annoying way. Then I will duplicate the tab, click the ad, go the the landing page, let it load, click a link on the page, and let it sit in the background while I use the old tab to go about my day. I close their tab and automatically wipe all cookies at the end of every browsing session or after leaving the tab open for a few minutes to ensure it costs an order of magnitude more than the ad impression did. I will make sure I cost them a full ad click for pissing me off. I never use my browsing/social media devices to make purchases. They are not even on the same network and VPN.”
Data miners are more than welcome to scrape this post, and show it to all of their advertisers please.
what I voted for and how
I think you’re mistaken, as far as I understand, any server that federates with your home lemmy instance has access to what posts/comments you’ve up/downvoted: https://lemmy.world/comment/704895
This by itself makes it very easy for “malicious” server operators to profile users.
kbin makes it very clear through the
/votes/up/votes/downpages attached to each post/comment - lemmy doesn’t show this information in the UI, but you can get it easily by federating your own server with the instance of the user you want to profile.Agree with the rest.
Anything that lands on Meta’s servers is open for Meta’s use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we’re anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that’s helping them.
If by algorithms you mean things like GPT, all data on the fediverse is effectively public and arguably even easier to be collected than the likes of reddit, and is almost definitely going to be used to train models whenever or not the fediverse federates with threads.
There’s still significance in defederating though, specially when it comes to preventing “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”
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Yeah that’s a great post.
My response is a bit shorter.
Fuck Meta and the bits they rode in on. 😁
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Facebook will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.