This entire argument is bullshit. Meta needs to be an island from our perspective. Let them do their thing over there, we’ll do our thing over here. Their goal is to lure (probably former reddit or twitter) users to Threads and then cut off the greater Fediverse as a whole once their user base is established and much larger than ours. And they want to use our numbers to boost their for profit platform to make it appear more successful.

Separation from these kinds of corporate entities is exactly what the Fediverse is about. We can talk about “open” all we like but there is already a short list of bad actors we don’t allow here: Nazis and fascists, pedos and kiddie diddlers, etc. We can add Meta to that list as well.

We don’t want them interacting with us at all. Get out the hammer and ban them. Entirely.

I’ll add an edit to say this: I say that defederation is not extreme enough. They need to be blocked. Instances need to implement ToS and licensing that prohibits them from hoovering up and regurgitating our content. We need to start outright blocking Meta at the network level. Whatever the hell it takes. Line in the sand. No means no.

No Meta. Ever.

Think of this: In the past, we have never had any choice other than to roll over and accept whatever bullshit the major social media companies push on us. If you want to communicate, if you want to use any platform, if you want to be in, you had to deal with them and their system. Because they were big and you were little, and what are you going to do about it? You have no choice but to roll over.

Well, we don’t have to roll over anymore. We have this one – and believe me, only this one – opportunity to unequivocally tell them NO. We are not your product. You have no value to us. You aren’t a monopoly anymore. We do not need your corporate influence, we do not need your corporate bullshit. We are free of you, and we don’t need you.

Another edit: Oh, look. What do I find right at the top of my feed first thing this morning? Why, it’s yet another example of Meta being evil. And you still want them to have influence in the Fediverse?

just want to clarify something:

However, the way that activitypub works, the outgoing data is publicly available. Defederating with Meta doesn’t prevent that,

there is a technical solution to this in the form of authorized fetch: https://hub.sunny.garden/2023/06/28/what-does-authorized_fetch-actually-do/

mastodon implements it, pleroma/akkoma probably implements it, pixelfed implements it, firefish and iceshrimp implement it (sharkey has a PR implementing it opened just today), gotosocial not only implements it but enforces it, with no ability to turn it off

notably, none of the threadiverse software implement it, and no software other than the aforementioned gotosocial enable it by default.

I fully agree that it doesn’t matter for Lemmy right now. The issue is mostly Mastodon and Kbin, as both compete directly with Threads; and in a smaller scale Friendica, Matrix and PixelFed as they compete with FB/WhatsApp/IG.

The main reason why I support defederation is to not have users in Mastodon relying on contacts and content from Threads at all. Because, once Threads pulls off the plug (eventually they will want to), Mastodon won’t be some small but stable network; it’ll be a shrinking one, and that’s way worse.

I think we should encourage politicians, governments and public figures to either self host or use non-threads instances. That way, Threads cannot easily shut off AP support or screw around too badly or their own content will decline.

Right now, social.bbc is a thing. Hopefully when threads launches activitypub, they’d notice that having a presence on both threads and their own instance is pointless, and prefer their own instance

Im pretty sure meta give zero fucks about joining the fediverse beyond trying to destroy it. I imagine they only started threads to nullify it by either proving it doesnt work (threads looks pretty garbage) or they want to control the content where mainstream fediverse will never take off.

Im here because i liked reddit but hated being a product. Meta/facebook was zero percent of that initial switch calculation as i havent been on their stuff for nearly a decade. The api shutdown ay the alien site was the last straw. I dont want to interact or give data to facebook/meta. Just my two cents.

I want to throw this into the mix, but something that kept getting ignored early on during the reddit departure was the implications of defederation on how that effects networked systems.

It’s part of the math of social graphs, but bad faith instances and teolling, severely impacted Lemmy’s initial ability to catch on. By defederaring you massively reduced the total size of the network interactions that take place ( even if it’s very important to do so ).

This has the potential to allow meta controlled instances to rapidly out populate non meta controlled instances. From there it’s only a matter of time before they end up with a seat on the activity hub team. Then we’re back where we started.

Boomer yells at cloud, incoming. Skip it if you want. You have been warned.

I don’t want anything at all to do with Meta or their shitty soylent green, and I intend to block them for myself as a single user. I don’t want to tell anyone else what they need to do.

But anyone who is convinced that a company that thinks it’s cool to manipulate emotion and create depression in its users, whose users (plural) have even taken their own lives because of the deliberately unmoderated but manipulated engagement-boosting emotive filth that Meta panders as a matter of course – and I’m totally not even addressing how far they have gone to help undermine democracies and democratic processes – is a company to safely be involved with even casually, then all I can say is that I don’t think they’ve lived long enough.

We are all literally sitting around here hypothesizing about what Meta will and will not do on the Fediverse because all of us, down to the last Lemizen, already knows that Meta fucking lies and we can’t believe a fucking word out of their mouths, so we have to guess.

And we’re doing that without even blinking: notice how NO ONE, absofuckinglutely NO ONE here, no matter how pro-Meta-federation they are, has suggested we ask Meta.

It’s because they already know. WE ALL ALREADY KNOW.

Goddamn, with this Meta shit I feel like I’m back in an abusive relationship where I have to stay three steps ahead of my partner just to be able to sleep at night, knowing there’s some fuckery going on because there always is, because that’s what they do, but having no idea what it is, and not even bothering with wasting words on the fool because all I’ll get back is shit, and then on top of everything if I ask I’ll have to act like there’s even the tiniest bit of truth to be found in those words.

And on and on it goes.

Lol, no.

Meta isn’t looking at what the Fediverse will be at some future point and betting on margins; Meta is looking at what the Fediverse already IS and how it can be manipulated for fun and profit. It’s what they do.

And even the people here who don’t want to admit it in so many words already know that’s what Meta does, in the same way that the cutest cats are happy to kill birds and enjoy every second of the slaughter without the least remorse. It’s not a moral question. They do it because they’re cats.

Meta is in the business of processing and redistributing brain product, using that processed brain product to get more brain product, and also getting more data on those brains so as to force more brain product from them as well as display targeted advertising at those brains every waking moment, because that’s Meta. That is what Meta does.

We – the Fediverse, its users, our communities, our online relationships, our comments – are product. The only difference between us here and those on Threads is that WE did not choose THEM, they chose us. Why? Well, what is it they make over there? Oh, yeah. That. And we’re just more of it.

The morality of the shit Meta gets up to is only a question for people with morals, like those people and governments who have demanded that Meta answer for its actions and implement change, but morals are NOT what Meta does. Anyone thinking Meta et al will do anything but chew up and spit out whatever they find here, including the federation itself, is deluded.

We all know this too: notice how NO ONE here is demanding that Meta do anything differently. They won’t. The thought itself is laughable. But see how quickly and completely we have internalized it, to the point that no one has yet suggested that META change in order to be allowed to federate, or that pre-conditions be placed on their federation.

This post does at least address some of the false dichotomies involved, and that’s a start. There are always things a collective of users can do to throw wrenches into works; one thing we could do as a collective is restrict our copyrights differently than we do now. Will Meta honor that? No, of course not, but having a provable misdeed like that makes it easier to kick them out whenever their plans do become clear.

If I start putting “© ChunkMcHorkle 2023 - Not For Distribution by Meta Platforms, Inc./Threads.net” at the bottom of every one of my posts, skipping the whole ActivityPub federation protocol and instead specifically naming the for-profit corporate entity, and they distribute it anyway, that’s a tiny headache for them if I want it to be. What if all of us who don’t want Threads to republish our content do that? It’s a slightly bigger headache, but it’s something. Enough somethings and you’re too problematic to fuck with. Why aren’t we thinking about these options?

Another thing is that our devs have gotten us this far; if they ever give us the ability to block by instance this almost becomes a non-issue. And so on. There are a lot of really bright folks here; we can come up with some good shit if we stop thinking the way Meta wants us to, in boxes made of false dichotomies and assumptions wherein we have no power.

Let any instance that wants to federate do so, and any user that wants to get that highly processed and curated fecal matter in their feed consume as much of it as they want. For myself, I’ll stay here on lemmy.world – I’m already here and I do not have to sort out the merits of one instance over another, which will be another consideration when Meta finds a way to SEO its place on join-lemmy.org and fill the first several pages with its own instances – and I will simply put threads.net and associated domains in the hosts file, find a way to personally block Meta content from anywhere else, even walk away if I have to, and be done with it.

But anyone who thinks a wolf will suddenly behave differently in the 99th henhouse it sets eyes on hasn’t lived long enough. This is Meta, and this is what Meta does. Meta ALREADY has a plan for the Fediverse as it exists today, we don’t know what it is yet but it will be as morality-free as all the rest of their activities, and anyone who participates does so at their own risk.

I’m ok with instances defederating because it gives them time to wait and see how to handle the influx and what other unknowns might happen, but I agree that it’s just not a strategy to stop EEE. We need to do more and do it smartly.

To me it’s like a trade war, we have a couple strategies we can do. Isolationism is one of few options that I can think of that has only failed historically. I’m ok with protectionism even better when it’s just reusable user protections, like automating ad blocks, sponsored content blocks/labels, etc, but also maybe we do things like not federation communities from Threads, definitely blocking anything that isn’t in the open spec.

Evaluate things critically, okay let’s do that.

Pros: Meta doesn’t exist here.

Cons:

I like your take. Unfortunately, I don’t see a way forward where Meta isn’t at least partially successful in extinguishing the fediverse. We’ll probably be fine, because we’re here now and our shit works, but the most likely scenario I see is in the future the common perception of fediverse microblogging apps will be, “oh, that place where users can never see when I’m using ___ feature.” Then it will be harder to attract new users, just like it was so hard for Firefox to attract users when sites were broken because of IE’s EEE tactics.

Well written, well said.

AFAIK, Meta cannot modify algorithms in lemmy code / created in networks inside lemmy instances (if that’s s thing) unless meta starts running those instances themselves. No doubt, using meta’s instance and client will let meta do what it wants to do.

I think the harder problem here is meta isn’t a curated collection of 300+ instances we can block when we don’t like the instance (e.g., instances != facebook communities). Meta is just going to come online with a large instance with millions of users. It’s kind of hard to judge all of meta users at once, as an instance provider. So, I guess instances who don’t want meta, don’t get meta. Fair.

I agree with all the misconceptions you’ve cleared up, and you’ve also made a great case for why people would want to join a smaller private instance instead of facebook. I guess I just don’t see the present threat to the fediverse with meta (aside from instances being bombarded with trash that needs to be defederated from that instance). There’s absolutely an existential threat, but the beauty of open source is that as long as there are devs willing to work on it, it can still exist - meta cannot buy the current version of lemmy we are all using and prevent it from being run, for example.

I vote yes because I don’t want to see threads posts.

I’m mostly afraid of spam. I don’t mind if a company wants to advertise to their own user base, but I definitely don’t want to deal with spam from elsewhere. I hope the protocol addresses this in a way.

I’d like to see the fediverse embrace and extend, rather than meta.

Money is going to be involved at some point, better make the rules now before meta does.

image was just for the thumbnail, hope it doesn’t distract from the message