this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you'll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.
Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.
Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.
I don't want to interact with anyone on Threads. It is new and it is Facebook.
Was about to say just that. I'll love to reject people that only follows big corpos.
It isn't the people. It's just if I already decided not to use Facebook or twitter. Why would I get back into bed with the devil on an experimental product?
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
You're acting like there's only two situations: The entire Fediverse defederates with them, or the entire Fediverse federates with them. That's not the case.
I, personally, do not want to interact with anyone using Threads, because Meta has a proven history of poor moderation and of manipulating the narrative for political gain on Facebook and I see no reason to think they won't do the same here. I am not the only one who holds this opinion. Those of us who feel this way can use instances that defederate with them, and have our way.
If you want to interact with them, you can maintain an account on an instance that does federate with them. You do not need to have a Threads account, nor does anyone else.
Strongly disagree here, better to cast them down now while the chance is there. No mercy or quarter provided to Meta considering their track record.
If anyone is foolish enough to go there, let them, but do not drag us towards them.
Meta joining the fediverse is like Raytheon joining anti-war protests. They are not there for sincere participation.
The idea is that at first threads.net will seem "normal", like all the other fediverses
Then they start adding features that either break against other servers, or straight up aren't supported, making threads.net seem more enticing just because all the neat features aren't on the other sites.
Think how Internet Explorer killed Netscape with all the Page Load errors caused by ActiveX, yet everyone wanted ActiveX sites.
Once they've walked through the path of least resistance and grabbed the bulk of the traffic, they just defederate from everyone.
Yep - best option is to defederate them well before they gain traction & start creating problem by not contributing back to the protocol in a way that benefits everyone.
I think after the community got burned by Microsoft & then google we’re finally learning.
Couldn’t any instance or app do this already? Like #peertube does videos in a way that isn’t necessarily fully federated with #mastodon. We get partial functionality everywhere and some places will have some extra things. If it is popular enough, then add it to the standard and let everyone who wants it add the functionality.
Some instances will federate and some will block them. It doesn't have to be all one or the other.
People are concerned about Facebook/Meta trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ActivityPub - if I've understood correctly.
People keep saying EEE as if that's a point in and of itself without really explaining how in this instance
If they become so ubiquitous that all you see are Threads messages, all they have to do is start adding their own extensions to ActivityPub and degrade the experience of everyone who is not using their app.
What kinds of extensions should the typical activitypub user be worried about? I don't care if Meta adds payments or virtual avatars or whatever--if the core functionality of the Threads app is simple microblogging, it should be perfectly interoperable with that side of the fediverse.
The more likely effect IMO (if Meta holds to their word on enabling federation on their side) is that other large social media companies (e.g. reddit, twitter) will feel pressured to federate and that will make the fediverse better, not worse.
My account is on kbin.social but I'm working on getting kbin self hosted. When I do, I'll absolutely be federating with Threads whether or not kbin.social does.
A cool post pops up in your feed. You click it. You are met with an overlay that says "Sorry, this post isn't compatible with your browser. Please log in to Threads."
Over half your feed are Threads posts.
Speculative example.
I agree with you.
Instances can defederate from meta at any point they choose, should it become necessary in the future. Until then, it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the "normies" are, as well as giving more visibility to non-meta instances and giving said normies a road to the less data-hungry parts of the network.
Reading material: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
honestly, i think only half-accepting them would be beneficial. it gives meta users a taste of the fediverse but locks them out of a whole bunch of cool stuff that they could have, if they just make an account on one of the instances that they already know because it's in the half that does federate. we just need to ensure we never repeat xmpp's mistake: meta users should never be a majority.
i'll have to discuss this with our admin team, but my initial plan is to defederate meta if usage by them hits 25%. if a critical mass of the fediverse does that, in the worst case we'll split off from them before taking damage, and in the best case we'll actively siphon away their user base. (and if any other tech giant enters the fray, we'll just have to include them in the 25% quota as well.)
update: we discussed the topic and went for an immediate defederation