I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
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I’m hoping that ALL admins across the Fediverse will defederate from Meta. At least we get to have our own separate platform then.
They shouldn’t just defederate from Meta, they should defederate from any other instances that federate with Meta. Like a firewall against late stage capitalism
If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won’t see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don’t matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it’s like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.
I don’t see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn’t stay on shit they control.
And if you’re worried about their app collecting data: then don’t fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else’s phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.
For those who don’t know, the strategy is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The phase comes from Microsoft who used this to (try to) crush competing document editors, Java implementations, browsers, and operating systems. Other big tech companies employ similar strategies.
Facebook coming to the Fediverse is the Embrace phase of this process and that makes Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, and Akkoma the competitors.
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Fantastic read. Thanks for the link.
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
Maybe they want to use Activity Pub so that they can influence further development of it. I don’t know procedure how w3c is makeing decisions and updates to it, but I doubt someone that is not using it can have influence.
The content I want to have will never be on a meta server. And even if, I will not federate with them and not use them.
For the exact same reasons I also don’t use Facebook.
You won’t necessarily know if the person you are interacting with at say @guy@buddy.net is being hosted by threads.
We will have block list like with ads, if necessary.
Simple as that, of some instances federate with them I will not use them.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
Currently Reddit has significantly more users than Lemmy. Has that stopped people from signing up to Lemmy? Twitter has has significantly more users than Mastodon since forever. Has that stopped people from signing up for Mastodon? Has it killed Mastodon?
The common error I see in all the “Threads will kill the Fediverse” mania is that it assumes the same people who sign up for Threads would have otherwise signed up for Mastodon/Lemmy/Kdin/etc. 99.9% of them probably never would have. They want something that’s easy and just works; and they’re willing to let a company profit off their data to have it.
It’s about threads becoming the fediverse by virtue of their size and resources, and then making changes to the protocols which ultimately lock out the actual fediverse. It will be ‘fediverse, by Meta’ where everything is hosted and run by meta.
And how do you think defederating them will affect that at all?
They can just use their influence and say “here, W3C, add this and that to the protocol”.
How will a small mastodon server with a few thousand users stop that? Defederating them is useless.
Not totally sure, but I don’t think that negotiating with Threads on anything at any point is a winning strategy. They’ll win every time. Kind of a ‘give them an inch they take a mile’ situation in my head.
At least by staying separate the user base will have to make a conscious decision about where they want to spend time instead of letting Meta dictate that for them in the future.
It is harmful either way. Not a great situation for fediverse. I wouldn’t say defed is useless, it clearly does something. Effective? Not sure.
Not totally sure, but I don’t think that negotiating with Threads on anything at any point is a winning strategy. They’ll win every time. Kind of a ‘give them an inch they take a mile’ situation in my head.
Federating with them isn’t “negotiating” in any way.
Any fear of Threads controlling the protocol is out of our hands, because the protocol isn’t in the hands of the Mastodon devs, it’s in the hands of W3C. So no matter what Mastodon instances do, it won’t affect Threads and W3C.
At least by staying separate the user base will have to make a conscious decision about where they want to spend time instead of letting Meta dictate that for them in the future.
I think that by not federating with them, we’re TAKING AWAY the option for people to make a decision, and forcing the worst possible choice on them. Imagine I want to follow a guy that is really popular on Threads. If Mastodon federates with them, I can decide to make an account on Mastodon and follow the guy from the safety of a network that it not governed by algorithms that promote hate, or I can decide to make a Threads account and follow them there. It’s my choice.
But if Mastodon instances do NOT federate with Threads, the only way for me to follow that popular guy is by creating a Threads account and using the Threads app. By not federating, Mastodon removed my ability to choose and forced the worst possible option on me.
We should want MORE people using Mastodon, not fewer people. Let them follow Threads profiles from the safety of Mastodon.
Allowing their platform access to the fediverse is giving them something they want in exchange for access to a larger user base for us. It’s a form of trade or negotiation, however you want to look at it it’s a choice to exchange something of value.
You’re looking short term. The issue here is that Meta is going to be able to destroy the fediverse later, not right away.
People have been repeating these fearmongering ideas, but with nothing concrete.
How is Threads going to destroy the fediverse if we make it easier for people to choose to come to Mastodon?
And how do you think that pushing people towards Threads is going to save the Fediverse?
And, like I said, if the entire protocol that the fediverse runs on is independent of Mastodon, how can Mastodon even stop it?
Did you read the EEE article someone shared?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=EEE+threads+meta+fediverse+embrace+extend+extinguish
I rly don‘t see it that way. The main reason they went for ActivityPub was to fuck Twitter. They just want to bind users long term to Threads and the combination WordPress, thumbler and meta is a very strong argument. I don‘t think they care so much about the data of the small userbase. The care about potential ways to monetise NSFW content without alarming the advertisers. And they care about AP because that can make them even bigger then they are now.
I also think they don’t care about us, I doubt they even know we exist.
That doesn’t change that they would destroy us unintentionally. Like Vogons.
I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:
I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.
Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it “must”, in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn’t subscribe to in the first place, anyway).
I don’t see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse “centered” communities?
I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I’ve seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, …) in the last decade or so.
I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn
But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media
How would they ensure this latter thing?
In my current understanding, it’s readily possible today (on Lemmy and related software), what could Meta do to keep this from continuing to work?
By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.
Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”
They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative
Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back
Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south
Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it
And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.
They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.
We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible
Luckily, they can’t force federated access to be slow. Once you federate with them, their content is copied to your instance. It’s not necessary for every fediverse user to contact Threads, it’ll just be served from each user’s home instance
Yet
There’s no yet about it. The architecture of how federation works makes it impossible. They can potentially make images load slow, but for the rest of the content it is fundamentally impossible
Honestly, I still have more hope for Signal compared to Lemmy/fediverse. As much as I like it here, Signal is just so much more user-friendly and explainable. I am also slowly making people around me set it up.
Were you previously messaging everyone you know through reddit?