Maybe infinite growth doesn’t need to be the goal.
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The core idea of the fediverse is the same as democracy - that nobody should control the whole. Both are similar enough to allow comparisons.
Threads in the Fediverse is like a powerful dictatorship trying to "deepen its bonds" with a small but democratic government. The dictatorship will eventually exploit the power asymmetry to control the democracy, direct or indirectly, effectively erasing it. In that situation, the best approach is to simply not play along the dictatorship. (Defederate Threads.)
Another threat to democracy is internal: the centralisation of control over the whole into a few hands. In the case of the Fediverse, this is the reliance on central systems (front-end software, back-end software, instances, discovery systems, etc.). I see what the author proposes as a "Universal Declaration on Fediverse Rights" as, potentially, a new mechanism enabling those central systems - who gets to decide what goes in that declaration?
So yes, I think that instances should defederate Threads and encourage other instances to do so. However, they should not do it too hard, to the point that you're effectively dictating what others should be doing.
An important detail is that the author falls into the fallacy of conflating epistemic and moral matters. This is specially explicit here:
Because without believing in the existence of a objective truth (which they don’t, because they attribute themselves to moral relativism),
That fallacy has a deep impact across the text because the author believes that people can eventually agree on moral grounds based on reason. Often they don't - because it depends on the moral premises that each adopt, and moral premises are not true/false matters to begin with.
the actual problem is that the Fediverse is internally shattered and cannot agree on anything, including basic moral rules and principles.
That is not a problem. That's a feature.
It might have been fake, but weren’t there already reports of Meta blocking links/tags in relation to pixelfed?
If it’s true, they’ve already proven to be a bad faith actor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.
At the end of the day, one side will be right. My moneys on the anti-threads side.
I don't like the "they haven't done anything bad yet" argument for staying federated, since there are much better reasons for not doing so. They either have already, and we aren't talking about it yet (ex. downranking fediverse content, those closed door meetings with admins), or they are going to once they need to extract a profit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.
I would be surprised if they aren't already, and they're likely scraping data from the defederated instances as well.
I think microblog instances should stay federated because that's the best way to fight against threads. (longer discussion here: https://lemmy.ca/post/11771031)
but weren’t there already reports of Meta blocking links/tags in relation to pixelfed?
Much more likely a result of Meta's notoriously shitty auto moderation algorithms than anything nefarious. I promise Meta is not risking the bad press and potential legal litigation to censor a service with 22k MAU.
they’ve already proven to be a bad faith actor.
They've done this for decades.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already scraping data from every other instance that federates with them.
I don't know why people keep spreading this nonsense. If your instance is publicly visible (which it is) then Meta is likely already scraping it. They do not need federation to do that.
I don't know why people keep spreading this nonsense. If your instance is publicly visible (which it is) then Meta is likely already scraping it. They do not need federation to do that.
They do it because they want to make the "Meta is already scraping anyway, so we should just all agree to their terms of service and start federating with them and become one big happy family". It's just good old anti-defederation rhetoric.
I don’t think it can but hear me out for a second. How about we just don’t grow? We’re not beholden to stock owners needing to see growth year over year. Can we just be happy with what we have?
100% agree with you. Growth must not be the goal, maybe a byproduct. Focusing on growth will eventually compromise the quality of our experience.
Absolutely agree with you as well. Natural growth as a byproduct would mean that those that wish to stay in the fediverse like what the see and stay with the community.
We will absolutely grow. But „organically“ as every other community that stays healthy does. Most people are just used to the inflated expectations that start ups have.
But yes, I dont see a reason to force growth, especially not with meta.
I don't think it needs to be our goal, but I think if the fediverse gets popular, we should let it grow. I see this place as an infinite green space for people to come and feel free to discuss their interests. Lemmy's communities ensure that it scales, because you only join ones that interest you. Then the community can enforce whatever spirit of discussion it wants to maintain and people can create another community if they want to try something different.
My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.
Yes. The argument that we need to grow is a capitalistic one imo. This isn’t a capitalistic platform afaik. Small communities are naturally better, I think.
Plenty of non-capitalist organizations also seek to grow.
Yes, but organic growth has its limits unlike capitalistic growth. We can’t grow infinitely and if we grow fast, that growth might be gone as quickly as it arrived.
Now we are trying to make a less obvious headlines to push pro meta propaganda, right?
We, the signees of the fedipact are not in fear. We know that meta has a horiffic track record of both human rights violations and data security violations.
Its actually the core reason why I decided to make a new community at [email protected]. Those who think that corporate greed and shareholder primacy are cancer in our society are very welcome.
The typo in the title is really jarring for me. It's losing, with a single o 🥹
It's nice to let your soul loose once in a while...
Yeah same. I know what they mean but it’s not what’s there and it’s hard to take it seriously 🙈
Meta’s moral shortcomings are even more reasons to federate with them and try to win over users and pressure Meta to implement better digital rights as well.
"The terrorists moral shortcomings are even more reasons to negotiate with them and try to win them over."
Don't negotiate with terrorists.
Also the article sets up defederation from Meta as if it doesn't do anything. I don't think that's true though.
It can't. But that was never the intention. Soul was never the intention. The intention was reducing reliance on proprietary and cancerous platforms.
I mean there are a shitload of reasons to not federate with Threads, but I feel like “it will federate ads to your server” is kinda the only one I should need to mention.
We need some basic rules,
- No single direction federation
- Users own their content and can licence it as they feel fit
With these 2 it would be hard to fuck up
Users "owning" their content in that way would be the instant death of the Fediverse. If anyone can put whatever nonsense license terms they want on each individual comment or post, how could that chaos possibly be federated?
A better approach would be to recognize that if you're posting your words up on a giant billboard you're not going to be able to control who sees them.
Users "owning" their content in that way would be the instant death of the Fediverse. If anyone can put whatever nonsense license terms they want on each individual comment or post, how could that chaos possibly be federated?
A better approach would be to recognize that if you're posting your words up on a giant billboard you're not going to be able to control who sees them.
Would quotes fall under fair use or copyright infringement?
Is there single direction federation right now? I don't think there is?
Also it would probably be more realistic for instances to put a default license on content. Users don't want to bother choosing a license and most users wouldn't even know what that means.
how can the Fediverse grow without loosing its soul in the process?
It can't? Rather obvious that the "soul" of a community is defined by it's members and the bigger the community the more mainstream this soul will become. Maybe the federation mechanic offers some solutions here, but that remains to be seen.
Many people like simplistic garbage. You can't convince them to like something better, as that creates demands on them to grow as a person, when they likely have other priorities in their lives that demand their attention more forcefully.
This is why McDonalds is the worlds most successful restaurant. Not because it is good, but because it is undemanding.
So, when people think we can pull users from the McDonalds crowd with superior quality, it just makes me laugh.
Are you sure you don't mean a Universal Declaration of Fediverse Independence from Reddit, Threads, and Twitter/X?