Fediverse

I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they've done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.

Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.

Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they're trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it's how capitalism works.

I'm hoping that ALL admins across the Fediverse will defederate from Meta. At least we get to have our own separate platform then.

Is there a list of instances that have defederated (or announced they will) from Threads?

Luckily, they can't force federated access to be slow. Once you federate with them, their content is copied to your instance. It's not necessary for every fediverse user to contact Threads, it'll just be served from each user's home instance

Meta or any other corporation with interest in social media sphere (to be read: wanting to make profit on the back of the users) will, sooner or later, kill the fediverse if allowed to enter.

Why?

Simple because the reason for a corporation to exist is to make profit and that profit has to grow each year - so there is all the incentive in the world to milk everything from the user until they can then move on to the next "thing".

I think meta will dominate the space that federates with it. Hopefully none of my instances will do that... And I will be unaffected.

The content I want to have will never be on a meta server. And even if, I will not federate with them and not use them.

For the exact same reasons I also don't use Facebook.

Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.

Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". Hence the fediverse.

From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.

TL;DR below:

Please: Everyone read this piece about how "Embrace, extend and destroy" can destroy a federated network. It happened before and they certainly will try to do it with the fediverse.

Big corpos don't want to take it over, they want it gone.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Could Threads essentially cause a kinda DDOS attack onto other instances or bloating other instances with data?

I'm more concerned of them integrating new features and bullying everyone else into following to integrate them or else.

I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users... Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can't afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn't change the economics at all, it doesn't change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don't like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.

If I wanted to see content from my racist Trumper uncle, I would just create a Facebook account. Keep Threads far away from the rest of the Fediverse. We don't need to compete with them. Who cares if they're way bigger with way more content if 99% of that content is garbage?

I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don’t think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.

Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.

If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.

I don't exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:

Point 1: "Meta will unethically defederate from instances..." I'm assuming that means they'll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don't really see the problem with that. This won't affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn't have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn't for meta. Its a win basically since they'll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.

Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.

For those who don't know, the strategy is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The phase comes from Microsoft who used this to (try to) crush competing document editors, Java implementations, browsers, and operating systems. Other big tech companies employ similar strategies.

Facebook coming to the Fediverse is the Embrace phase of this process and that makes Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, and Akkoma the competitors.

One thing I don't understand is why would meta even federate with anyone outside of their own instances anyway?

Makes no sense to ever open up to allow any other instances in. Not like they are crying for users.

The fediverse just makes sense in their own bubble. Turn Facebook, Instagram, and their other apps into the fediverse and federate them all together.

I don't expect them to ever open up to the actual fediverse. Same with BlueSky. I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.

If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won't see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don't matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it's like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.

I don't see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn't stay on shit they control.

And if you're worried about their app collecting data: then don't fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else's phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.

But... what kind of Camel milk do you like?

1. I mean, we can all defederate. You're TELLING us to defederate. What makes ours ethical and their unethical??

2. They cannot make our instances slower. Your browser / the server doesn't make any requests to threads when you load a page on your instance. They could send notifications less frequently, but so what.