Are we going to block Meta’s Threads.net? I get it if people want to keep things open. However, Meta is a proven bad actor. They claim they didn’t put in ActivityPub because it was too complicated to get it done at launch, and they can’t get EU approval of their service because of the rampant and invasive data they gather. IMHO, they are going to attempt to muscle the fediverse out of the equation.
i said this in a reply, but think it’s important enough so I’ll put it on its own too.
to me, this is very reminiscent of the paradox of tolerance. just because we want an open platform doesn’t mean we need to, or should, support those who do not have that same thing in mind. and allowing it is at the risk of allowing them to operate unencumbered and most likely take advantage of open stance.
Openness, like tolerance, is a mutual contract. If one party breaches a contract or fully intends to, the other cannot be held at fault for not fulfilling their end of the bargain. Tolerance cannot extend to people who intend to violate others.
We know that given the opportunity, Meta would control the fediverse to its own ends. Failing that, Meta will try to destroy it and replace it with something they can control. Whether or not you think these are possible, this is sufficient grounds to block them. It boggles my mind that anyone would think otherwise.
@aberrate_junior_beatnik @niartenyaw how do you know that? Isn’t it entirely possible that they just decided to build a Twitter knock off and realized that building off ActivityPub gave them a headstart and some good PR? Meta is a giant compared to the fediverse and it’s trying to compete with other giants, not ants. Declaring we won’t eat crumbs dropped from the giant’s table isn’t going to even be noticed by the giant. We get more out of federation than they do by a mile.
I think we should federate at first unless there are actions Facebook is currently taking that could harm our instance. My home mastodon instance fosstodon is taking a measured approach that I think should be mirrored.
imo you are giving benefit of the doubt to a company that clearly doesn’t deserve it
I just don’t see the point of defederating from them. If they want to steal users they can do that without federating. All we are doing is sharing content.
Facebook will build a good service no matter what. If we want any chance of the fediverse to extend to every social media user I’m of the belief we should federate.
To be clear I think it’s totally fine for a server to defederate. I’ll be staying on an instance that does federate as I want to be able to see my local community and also interact with friends and family from threads
If we want any chance of the fediverse to extend to every social media user I’m of the belief we should federate.
that’s fair, but i think this is an unreasonable goal at the moment. right now, i think the fediverse needs to focus on surviving in the face of being infiltrated by the social media incumbents. they have already wrung their own social medias for as much money and data as possible at the expense of their users. they may say or pretend to be ok just being a player in the fediverse for now, but make no mistake they will certainly be positioning themselves to try to take it over for their own benefit (and yet again at our expense). if major communities are hosted by the incumbents, you can bet they will eventually turn to manipulating them for money, including cutting them off of the fediverse if that will benefit them (see xmpp).
to counteract this, i think we need to focus on sustainability, including cultivating a diverse set of communities across a diverse set of instances, among other things. anything owned by the incumbents will eventually be tainted, so do we really want to wait until that happens? we know it’s going to happen, so why wait until things get bad? they will be posturing to monopolize and monetize. by the time they take actions that would cause other instances to defederate, they will have already ensured that it is too late for that to matter. they are smart, don’t underestimate their drive for control and money.
I think this is a good point, but I think the fedi community is established enough to bring people in when threads starts federating. If people show others tools like mastodon groups, following hashtags, etc it could encourage users to interact enough with outside instances to keep the federation necessary.
That’s the big question I think, can we convince new threads user to want to be apart of the fediverse? The door is going to get opened between the two communities and we need a substantial amount of cross-instance participation to justify Facebook not being able to defederate or make breaking changes without angering their user base and jumping ship to a non-threads instance.
we need a substantial amount of cross-instance participation to justify Facebook not being able to defederate or make breaking changes without angering their user base and jumping ship to a non-threads instance
yes! this is a great point and i think this will probably be the key to the fediverse surviving. now we just need to hope that naturally happens? not sure what exactly we can do to foster it lol
I’m hoping corporations start their own instances (like nytimes makes an instance for its main account and its journalists) and institutions like universities make their own instances as well (there’s so many .edu emails, there should be .edu fedi accounts). This prevents their posts being governed by a big entity like Facebook and prevents a Twitter style enshitification.
From a normal user standpoint, follow your friends on threads, talk to them about how they don’t need to be on the threads app, and encourage posting/replying between instances with those around you.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Something that has been used by large companies in the past to push out the smaller, more open systems many times.
That said, I agree with @Dsaf@midwest.social that blocking by default would be against the open platform that we claim we want. Users can choose to block accounts themselves or not interact with Threads. So long as these instances are publicly available, there’s nothing stopping big companies from hovering up the data passing through them whether or not they are attached as a peer.
Those are the two main points that I’ve seen as possible concerns with allow federation with Meta or any other commercial property and neither is really that severe.
The good side is that, for folks who are only ever going to go with a big company’s site, it still allows us more privacy-minded folks the chance to interact with them. Something that is just flat out impossible today without compromising our own principles.
That said, I agree with @Dsaf@midwest.social that blocking by default would be against the open platform that we claim we want.
to me, this is very reminiscent of the paradox of tolerance. just because we want an open platform doesn’t mean we need to, or should, support those who do not have that same thing in mind.
@MrFrobozz this a good take. Do people want the web to be more open generally or just have an ideologically pure corner of it? For the time being, the only reason to defederate with Threads is because you want to gatekeep open standards, but to me open standards are supposed to be agnostic. I think it’s totally possible that very legitimate reasons to defederate show up- but just wanting to defederate because of the company that created it isn’t something I agree with.
Personally I think it’s a test to see if the fediverse has the legs to stand on. I dont think we will see an internet in the future that exists without corporation run social media and blocking them before they even launch is against what the fediverse is for
Now if they have rampant content moderation problems and degrade the site then sure block them but I think they should be treated the same as any other fediverse site
My problem isn’t with corporate run instances, but Meta. They are a proven bad actor. They are the leopard that will try to eat our faces.
