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!)
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.
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.
Meta might be the worst possible company to darken our doorstep; at least Elon would fail.
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)
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.
Defederation is the only way. Freedom. Fediverse. Only forward!
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
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
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.
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”.
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 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?
We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.
However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.
He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.
Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.
Another option is to make migration of everything from one instance easy and let them buy whichever instances they want but let the users go somewhere else. Turn their weaponized capitalism into free money for instance admins until they wisen up and stop throwing money at it.
Or set up the terms and services to give the instances responsibilities that must be honoured even after they get purchased by another entity such that buying them becomes unattractive. Like mandate a certain portion of the topmost parent company’s profits (along with clauses to prevent Hollywood accounting from dodging that, maybe say revenue instead of profit and all related companies instead of just the topmost) must be invested back into the fediverse and that changing the TOS to remove that requires a certain number of users to agree. Set it up so that it is designed to only work if the whole point of the entity is to host a community rather than extract profit from hosted communities.
Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads’ users on our discussions.
I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook’s terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.
There are under the hood data that is not displayed on the site which they can scrap. FB would be broke if they only rely on the FB posts alone without all the tracking everywhere. Even your movement on the screen or where you pause on the page are tracked.
So no they dont get all the data unless we federate them.
They can do that on Facebook because it’s their code and their platform. They can probably do that on their app and and instance too to some extent but I don’t think they can grab much more than the content of your messages and your likes if you’re on a different instance. Lemmy is open source; if there was a way to get that data we’d know about it.
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.
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.)
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.
The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:
Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups
I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume
The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.
Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.
They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.
Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.
In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.
Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation
One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.
They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<
This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @[email protected]) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.
We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)
For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):
- Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on
@threads.<whatever their url> - Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
- Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
- Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
- Meta’s algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-“paid”/“verified” Threads users.
- It’s already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.
Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta
Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.
I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.
Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.
I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).
Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!
Note on This Post
I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p
- Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on
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.
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.
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 still baffled that some people can argue “why are you so worried?” about this. We have twenty years of history of shit hitting the fan, how much more do you need to not trust Facebook/Meta?
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.
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.
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.
Not related to the topic, but if I can give one piece of feedback, it would be to stop using
^.^and.<.And if I can give one piece of feedback for your reply, it would be to stop telling people how to behave. One of the things that really bothered me about Reddit was this expectation that everyone needs to write the exact same way. We can do without that here. It doesn’t hurt anyone to use emoticons, emojis, and anything else that might make a post more fun, so what’s the problem?
I can’t take someone’s writing seriously if they put a fucking cat emoji in the message. Sure, write how you want - not hating on people - do whatever you want. But if you want people to take you seriously then write in a serious manner.
He is merely helping the guy be more readable and impactful. Especially since it wasn’t a “fun” post. Posts educating people are in fact best served by removing the clutter. Chill.
OP is correct. We have very little to to gain and everything to lose.
Ban meta and its instance on a firewall level
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.
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.
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.
