Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn’t the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn’t the only thing you’re accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you’re just making yourselves invisible to a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?
Personal take - I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the meta will operate in good faith. I don’t have confidence that they will moderate their users, and I believe their only interest will be in slurping up 3rd party data to make their platform more appealing and decrease the chance a user will go elsewhere to find things. They don’t want you going anywhere else for that juicy ad revenue.
Yeah I’m assuming they’re operating is as-bad of faith as possible myself.
As far as moderating their users, I’m don’t necessarily know to what extent you mean. But I would assume that since they’re a publicly traded company who wants to foster their relationships with ad providers, that they wouldn’t let it devolve into something newsworthy; that’s bad for business.
Sorry if I’m repeating myself too much (I mentioned this in another comment below), but if the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. If we tested the waters and decided it wasn’t for us after some interaction, I imagine the non-corporate federation could grow immensely by that point. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
For moderating users, I mean all the bullshit conspiracy theories. My dad lives on Facebook and has gone completely off the deep end, we need to start actively fighting against this instead of being tolerant.
If you spend any amount of time in the comment sections on Facebook or Instagram these days it’s pretty clear that meta doesn’t have the capacity or will to actually moderate. You can report things to them only to get a response a few weeks later that they didn’t look into it but also didn’t remove the content.
I’m aware of that concept, but I’m having a hard time understanding how that applies to the Fediverse. It seems like we have an inherent protection from that tactic, even if we disregard defederation as an option.
You know how Apple has extended SMS with iMessage? Like that.
In other words, they take something open and established like activitypub, and then build all sorts of cool features on top of it, but those features impose lock-in.
Eg. Maybe they make it so there’s some way of attaching media directly to posts, but only if the post is both posted and viewed from a Meta instance. And then, in a few years once they’ve become dominant due to everyone switching over to their platform out of fomo of those features, they break compatibility with activitypub and ruin the underlying structure of the fediverse.
That actually doesn’t seem to give any context of HOW it could work for the Fediverse. All I see is “we are certain to lose”, but doesn’t go into what sort of mechanisms or tactics could be implemented to do a takeover.
What I would do if I were Zuck is the following: First I’d federate and leech a little bit off the pre-existing community. Then, I’d start buffing out my version. I could outpace the open source team easily if I wanted, adding things like video hosting, that are too resource-intensive for smaller Instances. I’d basically compete in features and polish, which are very important to less tech savvy consumers.
In the meantime, I’d be tinkering with my own Instance, seeing how much more data can be squeezed out of the Fediverse. I’d probably buy some of the largest Instances and assimilate them, just to keep the rest of the space feeling small compared to mine. Let brand loyalty do the rest.
Any time they come up with a new feature I like, I take it. I don’t share mine though, I don’t share anything I’m not forced to. The goal is to cap their growth, basically squashing awareness of them by making sure that when average people think Fediverse, they think Meta. The rest of it is just weird tech hobby junk for nerds.
Which is irrational. Threads already has five times more users than the fediverse. There’s literally no reason for them to waste time trying to harm ActivityPub. Personally, I won’t be surprised if they shelf and ultimately cancel their plans to implement ActivityPub because there’s literally no reason for them to waste their time, especially when everyone in the community is throwing shade at them.
Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don’t know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yes, I’ve started looking for instances that I think represent the “natural home” for communities I’m interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don’t like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn’t the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn’t the only thing you’re accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you’re just making yourselves invisible to a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?
We’re all still protected, no?
Personal take - I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the meta will operate in good faith. I don’t have confidence that they will moderate their users, and I believe their only interest will be in slurping up 3rd party data to make their platform more appealing and decrease the chance a user will go elsewhere to find things. They don’t want you going anywhere else for that juicy ad revenue.
Yeah I’m assuming they’re operating is as-bad of faith as possible myself.
As far as moderating their users, I’m don’t necessarily know to what extent you mean. But I would assume that since they’re a publicly traded company who wants to foster their relationships with ad providers, that they wouldn’t let it devolve into something newsworthy; that’s bad for business.
Sorry if I’m repeating myself too much (I mentioned this in another comment below), but if the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. If we tested the waters and decided it wasn’t for us after some interaction, I imagine the non-corporate federation could grow immensely by that point. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
For moderating users, I mean all the bullshit conspiracy theories. My dad lives on Facebook and has gone completely off the deep end, we need to start actively fighting against this instead of being tolerant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Same with mine and probably many others.
Yeah I noticed that FB is already linking out a lot of articles taken from Reddit shit etc as it is
If you spend any amount of time in the comment sections on Facebook or Instagram these days it’s pretty clear that meta doesn’t have the capacity or will to actually moderate. You can report things to them only to get a response a few weeks later that they didn’t look into it but also didn’t remove the content.
We don’t want to make the same mistake that was made with XMPP and Google.
They want to avoid Meta from repeating history:
Embrace, Extend and Extinguish
I’m aware of that concept, but I’m having a hard time understanding how that applies to the Fediverse. It seems like we have an inherent protection from that tactic, even if we disregard defederation as an option.
You know how Apple has extended SMS with iMessage? Like that.
In other words, they take something open and established like activitypub, and then build all sorts of cool features on top of it, but those features impose lock-in.
Eg. Maybe they make it so there’s some way of attaching media directly to posts, but only if the post is both posted and viewed from a Meta instance. And then, in a few years once they’ve become dominant due to everyone switching over to their platform out of fomo of those features, they break compatibility with activitypub and ruin the underlying structure of the fediverse.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Here’s an article that explains how it can still happen with decentralized platforms
That actually doesn’t seem to give any context of HOW it could work for the Fediverse. All I see is “we are certain to lose”, but doesn’t go into what sort of mechanisms or tactics could be implemented to do a takeover.
Am I missing something?
What I would do if I were Zuck is the following: First I’d federate and leech a little bit off the pre-existing community. Then, I’d start buffing out my version. I could outpace the open source team easily if I wanted, adding things like video hosting, that are too resource-intensive for smaller Instances. I’d basically compete in features and polish, which are very important to less tech savvy consumers.
In the meantime, I’d be tinkering with my own Instance, seeing how much more data can be squeezed out of the Fediverse. I’d probably buy some of the largest Instances and assimilate them, just to keep the rest of the space feeling small compared to mine. Let brand loyalty do the rest.
Any time they come up with a new feature I like, I take it. I don’t share mine though, I don’t share anything I’m not forced to. The goal is to cap their growth, basically squashing awareness of them by making sure that when average people think Fediverse, they think Meta. The rest of it is just weird tech hobby junk for nerds.
Which is irrational. Threads already has five times more users than the fediverse. There’s literally no reason for them to waste time trying to harm ActivityPub. Personally, I won’t be surprised if they shelf and ultimately cancel their plans to implement ActivityPub because there’s literally no reason for them to waste their time, especially when everyone in the community is throwing shade at them.
Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don’t know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yeah, I’m already a little offput by how lemmy.world seems so dominant.
Yes, I’ve started looking for instances that I think represent the “natural home” for communities I’m interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don’t like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
I guess browser extension would be well suited to add account-switching/aggregating. Likewise mobile apps.
The mobile client I’m using, Liftoff, does an excellent job of both account and instance switching.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.