I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
Your intentions mean exactly nothing when you’re being paid by Zuckerberg.
It also doesn’t actually matter what you intend, because the problem isn’t just what the platform can do, it’s about Meta being in this space and trying to stake a claim in it. We came here to escape you. Go the fuck away.
Right? I don’t care what their intentions are, if they continue to house hate groups, their “intentions” count for exactly nothing
Their intentions don’t matter. Meta’s only intention is make line go up. They will either consume or extinguish the fediverse with the rest of the corps. I’ll be leaving lemmy.world the minute thread federates. I’m just gonna be a lazy ass until then.
I thought I understood lemmy.world’s position several months ago was to not federate with Threads. This was the vocal position of many instances. Has this changed?
I… Don’t think lemmy.world said it. I think they took more of a “wait and see” approach, in contrast to most other instances. Please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Agreed, my reaction will mainly be “oh no - creates account on another instance - well anyway…”
I already did. But what will happen to the fediverse will mirror what happened to email when corporations came in. So eventually you will have nowhere to run.
I’m not a fan of Meta and I don’t want to join Threads. But there may be some people over there I would like to follow. At least on Mastodon, we can block any instance we choose to manually. I hate when instances make the decision for me.
Defederation should be a last resort when there are so many options here for people to tailor their own feeds.
Maybe the engineering team has good intentions, but Zuck and his Fucks surely don’t.
I don’t believe for a second that any of them have good intentions.
How long before they spam us with their ads, pushing them as posts?
Defederate.
They can have a corporate silo. They can use an open standard. But they cannot do anything good for the fediverse. The best thing for the fediverse is to let them exist as a walled garden (and we can put up the wall).
There are about 10 million users on the free fediverse. That number has grown steadily and sustainably. There are 160 million threads users. They were instantaneously leveraged onto the platform by a billion dollar corporation (possibly in violation of antitrust laws).
If we federate, Threads won’t become a part of the fediverse; threads will become the fediverse.
EEE
I’m deleting my Lemmy account because it’s just
hey guys have you seen Candlejack he was right
True that. I will make a spam not that shall post meta decent
Fuck letting the Zuckin billionaire into this party! Build your own shit communities with your own shitty user base
I don’t mind the threads integration much actually.
The idea that they will destroy it by just… Being a bigger instance? Because they can influence development? Isn’t this shit developed by a tanky? A self-proclaimed stalinist? Why the hell would they capitulate to a megacorp? I’m more worried about the actual developers ruining this shit than Meta and Threads.
Even if you aren’t against federating with threads on principle part of the challenge is going to be able to keep up with moderating their entire user base en-masse and being able to afford the cost of federating content from so many users at once.
It’s a burden I doubt a lot of smaller instances can handle.
You make a very good point there. That’s probably the best reasoning to be against federating with them I’ve seen. It also brings up duplication of content. If they have so many users, would it be possible that a smaller instance getting content from them could literally fill up all their storage space, assuming it’s not a gigantic data center but something self-hosted? Text may not be problematic, but images from Instagram can be massive. I suppose if your instance was that small you’d already be picking and choosing what to federate with, though.
I mostly agree. The one thing I will say in favour of defederation is hate content. Meta has incredibly lax moderation. People can literally say “this person deserves to be killed”, or even “I would absolutely murder this person if I came across them” and Meta will be like “yeah we understand this may be disappointing to you, but we’re gonna allow that to stay” if you report it.
I saw that here, too. Thought about reporting when I saw the sidebar didn’t even have a rule against it (forgot which community though - my app doesn’t present that in an obvious way)
There’s definitely users who will do that here. There are on any platform open to sign-ups by the general public. But my experience has been that it’s very likely to get removed if mods or admins are made aware. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a positive response on Meta.
Yes, by being a bigger instance with piss poor moderation. We’d be overrun with trolls and spammers
they could develop new features but intentionally implement them in a way that they are not compatible with other services. they could put all the other instances they federate with on rolling blackouts so that it seems like they are down when in fact it’s just them cutting the connection. doing just these two things with purpose could make it look like Facebook has the most advanced and stable instance. in addition, as you mentioned, it would also have the biggest populace. there would be pressure to abandon other instances to join that instance to stay in touch.
The people making the most noise about it don’t seem like they’re pressured one bit. Also, walling it off through defederation won’t stop any of what you propose may happen, anyway.
Why would that happen anyway? A lot of people already came here from bigger sites, like reddit for example. If we don’t federate, then why would people who are already here be pushed by something that isn’t there?
- yes, by being a massively bigger instance their algorithm will have a huge impact on the feed algorithms on the fediverse side. If they show a post in their algorithm in threads, it will get massively more engagement due to just being shown to a larger user base
The only “solution” is granular federation - the fediverse side could treat them differently, say by having their posts and comments count less when building a feed… But that’s easier said than done. Do they build a “threads ranking” feature into the core, or do they they give admins the tools to build specific configurations for federation?
It’s definitely not present in Lemmy, and I don’t believe Mastodon has it either. And on that topic…
- they have granular control over their own federation. They’re a monolith where the fediverse isn’t - if they want to sprinkle in fediverse content, it’s much easier for them. If they want to publish only their most controversial content to the fediverse, they can. They can do it at any time telling no one
For example, there was a post claiming they’re blocking toots referencing pixel fed. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they easily could. And in doing so, they effectively derank those posts in the fediverse (see point 1)
- they could EEE conventionally, by extending the activity pub standard to serve their needs, or by making the fediverse reliant on their content then pulling away
There’s a lot of ways they can leverage their size as a weapon. They’re not another instance, they’re a private monolith running their own code… And they have a terrible track record
Yeah I don’t understand the issue.
People want the fediverse to grow, so FB entering it is a good thing no? Otherwise realistically the fediverse will likely stagnate and always just take up a tiny bit of space.
The more people involved the better. Sometimes I feel this group just wants to shoot themselves in the foot.
I was kind of hoping the hysteria would be over by now. Walled gardens are a bad thing, I’m pleased when holes are poked in them.
“Hysteria”, that’s one way to belittle people.
Genuinely surprised to see this comment so high up, with so many more upvotes than downvotes. I personally have no problem with Threads, and some of the higher-profile celebrities, comics and artists I want to follow are already there. That I can add other fediverse accounts to my feed, or add Threads accounts into my Mastadon/Lemmy apps, it’s a win.
I’m not oblivious to why folks don’t like it and want no part of Zuckerberg’s companies. I still prefer open platforms to closed ones, and Zuck seems to understand that too. I personally don’t buy the EEE fears. This ain’t Microsoft.
<sigh> I’ll miss my cozy little Lemmy…
The upsides are apparent for the platform, but there’s no denying that change will be inevitable for all of us, whether some instances choose to defederate or not.
With about a thousand new daily sign ups to mastodon it feels like it is going back to its rapid degrowth that it has been on before the Twitter debacle.
Fuck Zuckerberg!!
Doesn’t Lemmy let users block instances? So no issue here.
The problem seems to be with Mastodon (and possibly others like Pixelfed, Bookwyrm, etc), which I think is controlled at instance level. Fortunately, the admin of the Mastodon instance I’m on has defederated Threads.
