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!)
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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)
It’s strange how Mastodon is so willingly letting them in. Fishy… Fishy and hairy. Like a fish with some nice bangs. Maybe a mullet. A little mustache too, recently brushed with a little mustache brush.
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’m right there with you. I can already foresee that their apps will be prioritizing monetized users like content creators and everything in there will be a transaction of some sort. Who cares, you just have to block their instances and go about your merry way.
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?
It’s a pretty well established anecdote that most of the time a McDonalds tells you the ice cream machine is broken, it’s because they’ve already cleaned it for the night and if they use it again they’ll need to reclean it. It’s easier to say it’s broken rather than make one dessert and then have to reclean it all over again.
Bullshit. I know everybody loves a good “lazy employees” story, but American machines are designed to break down constantly so Taylor gets repair revenue from McDonald’s franchise owners.
I used to work at McDonald’s and got tired of the constant accusations from customers. Johnny Harris made an excellent video on this topic.
I know a good number of McDonald’s employees are lazy, but that damn machine was the bane of my existence when I was a manager. It would just randomly decide not to work for the day and we had to call Taylor.
To be fair, I did say “well established anecdote” and not “well established fact”.
I was a manager at a McDonald’s In the UK for five years. Can honestly say our shake/I’ve cream machine never once broke down.
We never took it off early for the nightly clean though, that only took a matter of minutes.
But the regular deap clean, we took it off for that, usually a Monday or Tuesday night as they were quiet, and we were straight up with customers and said it was being cleaned
Most McDonald’s in the UK are corporate owned, not franchised, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they ordered more reliable machines there. The corporate owned locations here in the States always seem to have ice cream as well.
I worked for a privately-owned location and that damn machine would randomly say “FREEZER LOCK” and refuse to work until Taylor could come to reset it, and of course the owner didn’t want us to rack up the repair bills. Johnny Harris and Louis Rossmann covered this on their channels, which I appreciate because it did feel like the machines were intended to break down all the time.
That’s not why at all. Watch the video @danielton posted below.
You’re not getting the real McDonalds experience
The company that maintains the machines has a contractually enforced monopoly over the franchisee’s. This means it’s impossible to get parts or fix the machines outside of them doing it.
There’s heaps of vids on yt about the MacDonald’s ice cream machine racket.
Whats wrong with steam?
It’s a giant drm manager. Popular, useful, sure, but the day it dies all your content will go poof.
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
I think under gay space communism we’re gonna have every game from history totally cracked. Imagine the low latency you could get in a space station cluster 1/100th the diameter of earth.
We’ll just have super AIs refactor whatever so we can run 50,000 vs 50,000 games in Battlefield 4 on enormous AI-generated maps. And even if we don’t have ansibles we’ll get that zero latency from gaming in the space cluster.
Like, if you feel like it. You don’t have to live in the gaming cluster you can go skydiving on Jupiter or whatever if you’re into that physical crap.
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.
Right now we’re losing tons of information after snapchat bought and deleted the gyffcaf website.
Now imagine losing all games when Gabe dies and the new patron loses the company to a newfound addiction to whatever
Agree.
But isn’t half life alyx basically hl3?
Nah, that’s a prequel. What everyone wants is a conclusion to the cliffhanger that the current Half-Life story ended on. Good game though!
We need Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and then Half-Life 3.
This
At this point I’m half-expecting Half-Life 4 to shadow-drop some day before 3 ever does.
VR will remain a gimmick until it isn’t a whole-ass lifestyle.
But…it doesn’t have to be a whole-ass lifestyle, even right now with the current state of VR. Even with an Oculus Quest 2, you just put on the headset, play an hour or so, and then put the headset down like a normal person.
The marketing teams at Meta and Apple want to market it as a lifestyle because that’s the only way they know how to promote it without going into the nerdy weeds of VR game design, etc., but from a consumer perspective, it’s only a lifestyle if you choose to make it your lifestyle.
“Vr is a gimmick” -people who haven’t owned a proper vr headset
I do games research for a living and have access to pretty much every relevant VR headset made since the first Oculus.
VR is very much a gimmick. There is no killer app or feature, and the closest thing we get to one are exergames like Beat Saber. Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars. Similarly, virtual desktops are neat but really don’t offer any tangible benefits compared to a large monitor to make up for the added discomfort of having to wear a VR headset. The Snow Crash-style metaverse is and always has been absolute bullshit. It’s just a less convenient version of the metaverse we already have.
VR has some potential to create cool embodied experiences, but the benefits so far are so slight that the technology is looking a lot like 3D TV and HD-DVD: technically impressive, no meaningful improvement in the holistic user experience. Hence, it remains a gimmick.
There are multiple games that wouldn’t be the same without VR. A Township Tale, Gorilla Tag, Echo VR. None of these would be nearly as fun without VR. The biggest issue with VR is probably the lack of some more linear story driven AAA games that many people are used to. And you don’t need to invest several thousand dollars for VR. Stand-alone VR with the quest has been a thing for years
You’re kind of making my point for me here. The games that exist for VR don’t really add anything that didn’t already exist but with less convenient controls. A Township Tale is fundamentally just an MMO in VR, and we have already have dozens of MMOs that are easier to play. Similarly, we have a ton of story-based games on other platforms that work perfectly well. VR as a medium doesn’t really do anything for the gaming experience in those cases.
Games that make use of the inherently different interaction modalities of VR, like Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag, show some promise in terms of new ways of playing games. That kind of interaction is really interesting and brings something new to the table. Unfortunately, they’re also effortful to play and as such are generally difficult to play for extended periods of time. To some extent they all become exergames. Since they also need a fair amount of space to play there’s a certain barrier to entry for playing them.
I think the the standalone headsets are the future of VR, mostly due to the lower instep to get started. I even own a Quest 2 that I play sometimes (admittedly mostly Beat Saber and Ragnarock). However, the standalone VR headsets are also kind of limited in terms of computational power, so there’s some competition from the casual and mobile market. The mobile (and console, and PC) platforms also don’t have the added baggage of physical excersion that comes with VR, which makes them more accessible than VR.
Again, there really isn’t much of a case for VR beyond exergames. Games being VR can be a selling point for the true believers in VR, but for most people it’s kind of a fun experience that isn’t very meaningful.
A township tale is fun because of the fact that you use your hands for everything. Putting tools together, hammering nails in, fighting monsters, that’s what differentiates it from other MMOs. I don’t see a problem with VR games being physically exerting, less people sitting in a chair playing games is a good thing. In fact the physical nature of it is what makes it fun. I don’t see VR as the future of gaming or anything, I see it as another way to play. Just like I prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters and controller for platformers. The games I play in VR are games I wouldn’t like in a traditional format. The interactivity and immersion of VR is impossible to replicate in a normal game. That doesn’t mean normal games don’t have their place, they obviously do and I don’t think VR should replace them.
Yeah I really wish PCVR was still alive and well instead of the stagnant industry that it currently is. I bought both a Rift S and a Quest 2 thinking that full-length story driven games were going to become a thing, but then the hardware limitations of standalone kinda killed that. Now I don’t really have any interest in buying a Quest 3 or a Vision Pro because I don’t have any faith that there’s going to be developers making those kinds of experiences anymore.
I don’t get why games can optimize for mobile hardware but can’t just give lower graphics settings on PC for some reason. Maybe stand-alone wouldn’t have been such a big thing if they had done that
Games like HL: Alyx don’t really offer enough novelty to make people invest several thousand dollars.
I have to disagree with this statement. Having played through that game multiple times, it just provides a level of immersion that no other VR game has touched yet. Heck, from an immersion perspective, it pretty much beats every game I’ve ever played in my life.
The problem with the VR industry is that so few games approach HL: Alyx’s level of immersion. Of course, it’d be hard to justify the $300-$400 asking price. VR devs are all content on making these simple arcade style games with simple graphics that can run on the Quest 2.
Removed by mod
Not for owners, for sure - but for prospective ones? The catalogue of possible games/uses is a bit thin for a 1k+ piece of kit… I think it would be incredible to own a HOTAS warthog but I’m not playing flying games very often right now, you know?
If I did, I probably would because at that point I want to enjoy the kit I have. Imo, that means right now, a flight sim controller set up due my use case is a bit of a gimmick - but if I already owned it I’d seek out things to utilise it, reducing its gimmicky position in ‘the roster’.
Gimmicky is kind of a subjective term in that way, it’s all about the individual utility offered.
But yeah - that comment was a bit snarky, I get that too.
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?
I believe the only instances that should be defederated are corporate, self-harm, profanely illegal, and political extremist instances.
Anything further than that and the whole network is going to devolve into a series of micro echo chambers.
Or maybe it won’t, maybe the vast and free instances will flourish while the restrictive instances die out.
Either way, trying to control a community based on wishy washy ideology is not a good look.
I think in these early days we’ll see a lot of power drunk admins who are too eager to push the button, just because they can.
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
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.
Just require users to be logged in to view posts, and then limit them to seeing a few hundred every day. That should stop them from stealing the content.
no, defederation does not “just” do those things
defederation refuses to give them an in to slowly make changes to the platform that will eventually give way to a centralized power dynamic over the whole fediverse
see also: the chrome/chromium monopoly and its effect on the modern web
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.
While yes, there are ways around defederation to still get to our content, that does not mean it is not better than simply giving it to them.
Regarding their content, facebook is fucking garbage content. You actually want that? Why are you here then?
I’m not advocating for either or. Just stating the facts. Defederation in no way makes it harder for them to take content from other instances. When you post into the fediverse it’s for everyone to see. You can only control what’s coming back at you.
Yeah, if they wanted to vacuum it up wholesale, sure. But that is not how it is usually transfered and consumed. It is generally done by users subscribing to individual communities. This is seldom done with defederated communities though, as no interaction is possible, removing the whole “social” part of social media.
So while you are technically correct, the end result will be closer to what I describe. Unless they just copy/paste it with something not too far off from repost bots, for their own local consumption.
If they do that, we may have to think of something else to help secure ourselves.
Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.
aa
Is there a good list of admins/instances that have committed to defederating with Threads? Im totally down to bail on Lemmy.world if they don’t defederate.
Warning: very bright
Eyes have to adjust after looking at that site
Everything looks wrong for a minute or two afterwards
I can only hope that in some senior Meta management meeting they pulled this website up as an issue/concern, and a bunch of overpaid middle managers had to stare at the pinkness for hours upon end in a depressing corporate boardroom.
Is lemmy.world admin on there? Wefwef acts like it will let me search the page on my iOS device but then it does nothing.
aa
The fact they’ve been silent makes me think they are going to let them in and they don’t want the blowback from users like us
aa
The fact they’ve been silent makes me think they are going to let them in and they don’t want the blowback from users like us
Considering the hate and threats that the admin of Universeodon got for just doing due diligence in meeting with Meta might explain that.
They’re going to have to let us know eventually
I just got here after I recently dereddited but I defacebooked a long time ago.
If lemmy.world federates with meta I will delemmy.world.
If all Lemmy instances federate with meta I will delemmy.
Its pretty simple.
I don’t think there’s much risk to Lemmy. Moreso Mastodon.
aa
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.
Did you read any of my arguments?
I don’t know if the person is an ex-redditor but if they are, their comment is appallingly short sighted and is reminiscent of German appeasement in the lead up to WWII. “They took Poland, you all are just scare mongering that they will come for France.”Lemmy is growing because corporate fucks fucked reddit. Now corporate fucks are trying to fuck lemmy and mastodon, and their best take is “y’all are fear mongering” despite mountains of evidence that corporate fucks will fuck anything they are allowed to fuck.
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Couldn’t agree more. I want nothing to with Meta because their end goal is to either have control of the Fediverse or end the parts they don’t.
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This is an amazing use of the word fuck.
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100% agree. I’ve been shocked at what seems like extreme naivety or willful ignorance in some of the discussions on federating with corps. Corps only want profit. People are the product at meta. They just want more product.
There’s either a streak of loud and stupid that started up when the NDAs came to light or some of these “Facebook would never do anything bad” people are suspicious af.
If the Lemmy admins sides with people like zuck, which they shouldn’t because they’re literal communists I’m going to laugh so hard, internet would pretty much be fucked lol
aa
the big difference is Lemmy and other sites got popular now as a result of people finally realizing “wow the modernized internet is pretty much complete dogshit”
the only thing that’s been basically different is people trying and rather unsuccessfully to create an alternative to the bigger sites. 9/10 most of them have failed, but with Lemmy considering how much and how dedicated the userbase has been so far.
My point was mostly “if Lemmy can be bought out” (which I really doubt) “then the internet is just blatantly fucked and there’s not anywhere to go period.”
Lemmy, which I’m currently using through liftoff seems like the best solution and has a rather dedicated userbase in general. I’m excited to be here but there’s always the worry something could go wrong with it
From my perspective there was nowhere to go besides disparate discord communities, until I learned Lemmy existed and it got an IV injection of life from spez screwing with reddit
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.
My voices say that de-fed is best and I worry that not everyone will perceive the terrible consequences of not doing so. and yay for star trek :-)
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.
Seal the doors! Mark/Meta’s obsession over user base and data control has to be put in check. They’re like a social culture vulture. Riding the next wave but the attempt ends up being stale, killing the mood for everyone that just wanted to enjoy something to themselves.
Bravo. This goes straight to the main goal of Meta: they want us exposed to their manipulation, their astroturfed content and their psychological traps. They want our attention to their content, and the best defense we can have is negating them from having any of it.
Federating with a mega corp is such a terrible idea. They aren’t here to make friends. They’re here to make money off of all the hard work this community did. All YOUR hard work. They aren’t going to settle for a slice of the pie. Some way or another, they WILL try to take over.
People have left twitter/reddit because of corporate bullshit, and now lemmy and the fediverse are going to just welcome them back with a big hug? Might as well delete your account and head back to those two platforms, since the fediverse will just because another corporate controlled entity.
Facebook is a company you should never interact with. They are plain evil.
Even if all evidence showed that they have good intentions, I wouldn’t trust them - just based on what they have done in the past.
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.
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.
I anticipate that lemmy.world intends to federate with meta.
Due to this I wish to close my lemmy.world account and migrate to another instance.
Can anyone hemp with this? I am a new user and I do not know how to move all of the communities I have subscribed to.
Is it even possible, is there a guide anywhere ?
As far as I know there is currently no way to migrate accounts, what I did was just scrolled through sub.rehab and signed up to all the ones I liked from there
https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
For now, this is the best I’ve found. I think there’s work on implementing this in actual lemmy, but this python script is the best option I know of ^.^ - you basically put your user account name and password for each account in a config file and run the script - though I’d make sure to delete the config file after you’ve done it, preferrably with some kind of secure-delete tool like
shredon linux.However, we don’t know yet if
lemmy.worldwill defederate from Meta/FB, until the admins make some kind of statement on it nya. So I wouldn’t leave yet. Though making an account on a smaller instance might be a good idea anyway for simple performance reasons :)Thank you this is extremely helpful!
It’s guaranteed that they’ll use their instance to datamine and further build profiles on people in other federated instances as well.
I don’t trust them at all with their handling of data besides their ability to track people who aren’t even on their platforms. Also it’s almost impossible to reach out to them unless you buy their shitty VR headset, as you will find out if someone ever fraudulently takes your account to buy ads with your money and gets your FB account banned.
Fuck the Zuck.
Meta can Zuck it.
I’m still getting used to this platform, so this might be a stupid question. Are we able to see their content/can they see ours?
If we defederate, they can technically pull our content because it’s public, but it’s difficult, and their users won’t be able to interact with it.
We would not be able to see theirs unless you manually went to their site.
Right now, they still haven’t turned federation on, so we can’t do that. If we do federate, we will be able to (easily) see and interact with their content, and they will be able to (easily) see and interact with our content. If we defederate, we can technically see each other’s content by visiting their site (or them visiting ours), but we wouldn’t be able to usefully interact with them and vice-versa without making an account on their site (or vice-versa) ^.^
Why wouldn’t they be able to interact with it, at least within their own ecosystem? The way I understand, if I defederate with them on my instance they can still see my content but I can’t see theirs. There’s nothing stopping Metta from taking that public data anyways and allow only their users to interact with it in their own sealed space. With how many users they have, it’s possible it wouldn’t even be noticed by the average threads user
Why wouldn’t they be able to interact with it. The way I understand, if I defederate with them on my instance they can still see my content but I can’t see theirs. There’s nothing stopping Metta from taking that public data anyways and allow only their users to interact with it in their own sealed space. With how many users they have, it’s possible it wouldn’t even be noticed by the average threads user
Well, theoretically we could do the same. Host shadow-Threads content. That’s essentially what’s going on with reddit repost-bots, after all. But if you look at those they usually have no comments and for Facebook in particular, I would argue that enabling their ability to spread their content to the Fediverse is dangerous even if we don’t interact with it.
And the same is true for Threads - they could actually do that kind of re-posting, in theory, but then it’s pretty much just them reposting a link to some post on the Fediverse with their own silo. We wouldn’t see any of them at that point. I’m arguing for defederating on the basis that it protects us from Meta/Facebook, not on the basis that it would stop Threads users from seeing some parts of Fediverse content (essentially posted as links) ^.^.
But theyve got the numbers to support their own echo chambers. I’m not saying what meta is doing isn’t a threat, but isn’t it better to be in the same room as their users to have a conversation with them than have them exist in their own echo chamber thinking the fediverse is only what meta wants them to think it is?
I don’t think the average threads user would even notice if it’s a repost. They’d see the content, and have the interaction. From what I know, if I defederate with threads, a user subed to one of my communities would still have the meta server pull in content from mine. I’m fairly certain their engineers can make it look more organic and allow seamless interaction between the 30 million threads users.
It still seems to me because of this, we would be doing ourselves more harm by defederating. At least right now. Even in light of embrace, extend, extinguish.
But theyve got the numbers to support their own echo chambers. I’m not saying what meta is doing isn’t a threat, but isn’t it better to be in the same room as their users to have a conversation with them than have them exist in their own echo chamber thinking the fediverse is only what meta wants them to think it is?
In a room where Facebook/Meta controls the entire algorithm, who gets to see what, and any astroturfing efforts they make? And where the fraction of people who will ever see your post is so tiny as to be insignificant? No. Facebook have over a decade of brazen, malicious psychological manipulation experience - as well as lots of money - that they have used to attempt to agglomerate more and more control over the way people communicate and engage in horrific behaviour (like the stuff listed in my Original Post).
Trying to play the game on their field is a losing proposition in every case, when it’s with a company that has much more than a decade of information warfare and manipulation capabilities and hundreds of times more users (plus probably 100s of thousands of times the financial resources). The Fediverse is far too small to compete with that at the moment.
If you really need to sell the idea of the Fediverse to Threads users, you can still make a Threads account, or spin up an instance for yourself to do that. Exposing the Fediverse as a whole to the metastatic organism known as Facebook/Meta is a losing proposition.
In a room where Facebook/Meta controls the entire algorithm, who gets to see what, and any astroturfing efforts they make? And where the fraction of people who will ever see your post is so tiny as to be insignificant
If it’s either that or Im not in the space at all I’m going to take the option to try and expose the unwashed masses to the light of the fediverse.
By nature the fediverse is open. While I may not agree with exchanging my personal data to be sold to advertisersers in exchange for a fast browsing experience, if that’s how people want to engage with the fediverse how is that bad? Would it be the same if a large pay for access instance arose that required members pay a fee but gave a browsing experience similar to what a large company like meta could provide?
It seems to me, unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding the concept, that defederation is a tool of last resort. It does more harm to the individual instance by nature unless the instance is proven to be disruptful or full or bad actors. I get the company meta itself meets that category, but I’m not convinced it’s users or communities do. Defederation to spite an instance admin is only harmful to the instance doing the defederation.
If you really need to sell the idea of the Fediverse to Threads users, you can still make a Threads account, or spin up an instance for yourself to do that.
Idk if you noticed but I am on a private instance. There is no way in hell I’d create an account on a meta server. I’d prefer to interact with them from mine and that’s what I’ll do. It’s what makes the fediverse so great. And it’s why unless there’s a unified defederation camp again making it’s reasons and statements known, individual instances defederating with meta will have little effect. Basically we need to unionize and I don’t see that realistically happening at this stage, for better or worse.
I would argue that enabling their ability to spread their content to the Fediverse is dangerous even if we don’t interact with it
How is it dangerous?
Meta/Facebook has 100s of times the number of users, many more times the amount of resources, the constant desire to consume other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp (or destroy the a-la Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), and well over a decade of experience in engaging in manipulation and essentially, information warfare, to get what they want and commit hienous behaviour.
Even just the quantity of users on a single, difficult to exit instance is a risk, but the continuous and long history of Facebook engaging in largescale psychological manipulation makes them many times more dangerous ^.^
In particular, you looking at their algorithmically curated posts enables them to manipulate you with their decades of refined, algorithmic experience in doing so, as they have repeatedly done in the past.
So basically their content is dangerous. Even if it’s user-generated, it can be machine-curated for psychological manipulation. What seems like a natural flow of conversation could be a signal used to hack our minds.
I’m not trying to make it sound crazy by wording it that way. There are people in my life I just had to cut out because their speech was toxic to my mental health in a way I couldn’t rationally object to. I just had to stop listening to them.
they can technically pull our content because it’s public, but it’s difficult
Is that because federation involves actively pushing content, versus “pulling” meaning polling/scraping? How much of a barrier is it?
and their users won’t be able to interact with it
This makes sense to me: it’s just they’re unauthorized to POST/PUT/PATCH data right?
Yep! ^.^
It’s not super difficult to pull content, but you ofc can’t push back content.
