cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7477620
Transitive defederation – defederating from instances that federate with Threads as well as defederating from Threads – isn’t likely to be an all-or-nothing thing in the free fediverses. Tradeoffs are different for different people and instances. This is one of the strengths of the fediverse, so however much transitive defederation there winds up being, I see it as overall as a positive thing – although also messy and complicated.
The recommendation here is for instances to consider #TransitiveDefederation: discuss, and decide what to do. I’ve also got some thoughts on how to have the discussion – and the strategic aspects.
(Part 7 of Strategies for the free fediverses )
I don’t know. Calling Meta a nonexistent problem sounds naive to me. Sure, something “hasn’t happened (yet)”. Except, it’s Meta … plenty has happened already. How many times are we going to allow selves to be fooled?
im not going to get into this, again, as im sick of asking the same thing and no one ever having a valid response so ill just state it.
theres no technical reason to think meta can overtake the ap protocol and substantially alter it in any appreciable way. that they have a federating server in threads is not some crazy threat unless your own shit becomes dependent on that federation. if it does, its on the instance owner not threads.
as it is, there is zero reason to not federate with threads other than substantial resource use (flooding) and righteous indignation.
i run a public instance, and as soon as threads interferes with it, i will nip that shit in the bud. until then, i plan on providing an offramp for those trapped in metas walled garden.
I don’t federate with any instance that openly houses hate groups. Threads houses hate groups.
There’s a reason for you.
It may not be enough of a reason for you, but that’s a whole different thing to there being “zero reason not to federate”
you got the righteous indignation part down pat.
its work to block instances. im not going to operate like that. im treating AP like email. i dont block facebooks SMTP, i dont block Nestle email… im not going to block their AP.
i am providing assistance to humans wanting to leave the walled garden. you are not capable of that, apparently.
but you do you. thats what its all about.
edit: btw none of this is technical in nature. its just political. i stand by the fact there is no technical reason to not federate.
The fact that you equate vulnerable communities blocking instances that house hate movements that target them with righteous indignation is genuinely scary…
I’m not sure I understand your issue with the term here. “Righteous indignation” word for word means “indignation that’s justified”, so I don’t want to jump to conclusions, and I’m thinking I may be having yet another of my English second language speaker moments.
Indignation implies that it’s about being offended or upset.
The specific term you used usually carries an implication of pettiness, and of making a big deal out of nothing. The “righteous” part is normally meant in an ironic or sarcastic way.
I’m not the same person you were initially talking to. I’m not sure calling it indignation is necessarily dismissive - indignation can perfectly be justified. I’m really surprised it carries this subtext. I can’t seem to find any reference or definifion supporting neither this nor the expression itself though, but I may be looking in the wrong place…
I think it’s another one of those things where words and phrases change meaning over time.
Righteous is equal to justifiable. Indignant is equal to showing anger.
Logically, it should mean justifiably angry. Often times, people will just ignore and skip over the first word and will only properly read “indignant”.
I think it’s similar to when people say words like “irregardless”. They use it to mean “regardless”. If you break the word down, the double negative makes it a positive. It looks like it should read as being the same as “regarding”, but people had other ideas lol
Another fun one: “eggcorn” has been added to some dictionaries as a synonym for “acorn”.
This is minimising a problem you’d rather not think about or address “too much”. For many it’s a real problem, both morally or in the abstract, and practically.
Here’s a good article outlining an “anti-threads” position (https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads) that may answer both the “righteous indignation” point and some of your “technical” points too.
All of which gets to arguing that, yes, as my initial reply to you stated, there are “existent” problems and preemptively acting can make sense.
You want to be an off-ramp, and have your finger on the defed button … that’s cool (genuinely)! But dismissing urgency as illogical or something is, I think, out of line.
Your arguments strike me as either dismissive (“zero reason … righteous indignation”), straw man (“resource use”, “overtake the ap protocol”) or excuses, frankly (“It’s work to block instances” … threads is like one instance).
With ActivityPub, Meta is playing on our turf. They don’t have home field advantage here. ActivityPub isn’t a protocol that they control.
I mean, for now.
Mastodon, through its dominance is already shaping what the protocol is and isn’t. For instance, the Server to Client API that mastodon runs is of its own making and design and just about every microblogging app relies on it such that any other platform tries to mimic it. It’s become a de facto standard. Should mastodon change their API, many other platforms will feel compelled to follow suit. There are now voices calling for it to be standardised. BUT … talk to people working on the actual protocol and they’ll say they hate this because the protocol already has a standard for this and it should be used instead … and app developers will basically say “well, everyone is using the mastodon API already … why would I use this thing no one knows about”.
Threads/Meta can do exactly the same thing over time. And once they have control over how some parts of the fediverse operate, which they will have by having “the standard” and the dominance of users to force people to comply … then they can influence what is and isn’t in the standard to suit their purposes (think surveillance and ads) and even add things that only work on Threads, which of course will presumably attract more users (as Threads is already huge).
More abstractly … “our turf” here isn’t the protocol. The protocol is over-emphasised as some magic element that makes everything here work. It’s just a tool. The stuff that actually makes the fediverse work are all of the software platforms, such as Lemmy and Mastodon, that provide the actual social media we use. And they just use the protocol. It’s the quality and design choices of these platforms that are “our turf”, and these depend very much on the developers and the users and their motivations/desires. Threads is big enough that it can distort the network of motivations. An example … There’s a mastodon mobile app (Mammoth) that is the only one to implement a recommendation/algorithmic feed. One of their key motivations (they’ve stated so publicly) is to be ready for when Threads joins the fediverse so that their app can attract Threads users. They also run their own mastodon instance, which I can only presume they’d be happy to modify with their own features.
Another way they can exert influence is through altering the way moderation affects the fediverse. Moderating what comes through from Threads is likely to be onerous. It alone will be a reason for some instances defederating. But some instances will want to stay connected to the large userbase of Threads, and will tolerate some of the garbage coming through. The net effect will be to splinter the fediverse between those that can’t and those that can tolerate a lower average quality of user/content. Such a hard splintering wouldn’t occur if all of those users were spread out amongst more instances instead of coming from a single source/instance whose size alone attracts disproportionate interest and gravity (to the point that this discussion happens again and again).
So importantly, what’s the reason they would do any of this? Curb competition? Don’t make me laugh. User-wise the entire fediverse is so tiny compared to meta none of their metrics would even be able to show us due to rounding.
Is it really so difficult to assert that their only valid motivation could be to preempt EU legislation by talking about how they’re embracing open tech? And how completely blocking them would actually play into their narrative by allowing them to argue how useless trying to force big tech to be open is, clearly no one wants that’s they tried?
It’s a symbolic piece for them. If we can use that to lure users away from Meta all the better, but even there be real, the total amount lured might be relevant for AP but unnoticeable to Meta.