As you’ve probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook’s parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it’s a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads’ first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people’s reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
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Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don’t trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse
I’m skeptical anything good will come out of it, but I’m glad if I’m wrong. Meta is about making money. The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse. I think they want to dominate the fediverse. But that’s just me.
The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse.
Right and this is really all that even needs to be said. There is nothing meta can do or say that will make this not true and there is no possibility that overtime meta won’t make decisions according to this power relation.
The future fediverse we all day dream about when we are in an optimistic mood is literally a catastrophic fail state for a corporate social media company like meta. We see the plot of a happy uplifting family action movie, meta sees a horrific slasher movie.
Threat.
Whatever the stated reasons for joining the fediverse might be, the actual reason is to enhance data scrping capabilities.
It’s silly to think they can’t scrape data from where they are though.
What’s to stop them from starting a tiny instance, getting all the data, and just keeping quiet about it?
The threads people are already happy to have given up that data, and if meta becomes a problem, defederate from it, or find an instance that isn’t federated with meta threads.
Which of the above sentences is supposed to make me think that it is impossible for Meta to scrape more privacy destroying data, if they go all in on the fediverse?
Any data they can get from federating, they can get much easier by just scraping it. If your goal is data harvesting, implementing ActivityPub is a huge waste of money
They’re going to get more useful data from users they know everything about (threads users) interacting with us, than just scraping with an instance.
They already have those users. Giving them access to the tiny pool of users in the fediverse isn’t going to give them an appreciable increase in data.
I still feel strongly against it.
I’ll possibly end up leaving the Fediverse and finding a nice forum where I know corpos will never ruin.
No need to leave the fediverse, just join instances which plan to block threads
Nah won’t work.
Threads will kill content from non-Threads users.
was no
still is no
I don’t like meta as a company.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta. It’s not like the server is a community dedicated to hurting people or promoting hate speech or something, and I don’t want to punish people just because they’re not savvy enough to understand the problems with meta. Let them federate and just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them.
Defederating isn’t going to benefit us or hurt meta, it’s just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta.
I do.
You make the fediverse a worse place, if your default is to arbitrarily exclude and gatekeep against people unlike you, as it seems to be.
The people on Tumblr are entirely unlike me … but I have no issues federating with Tumblr.
You might want to consider why this is the case.
I’d say you may want to consider why this is the case. If you’re OK federating tumblr (which I agree with), but not ok federating threads, even if defederating threads won’t impact Meta at all and only negatively affects thread users - that seems pretty hypocritical and unnecessarily spiteful towards normies.
It’s not normies I’m spiteful toward. It’s MOTHERFUCKING META. The fact that the normies are going and supporting a known abuser with almost two decades’ worth of fucking everything up is a “them” problem, not a “me” problem.
And once again I repeat: Defederating won’t hurt meta. They can likely already harvest all the user data they would get from federation.
So you’re senselessly taking your take against meta out on normies.
Dude, go to fucking Meta if you want to talk to fucking Meta’s ragebait monkeys. The “normies” as you put it are welcome in the fediverse as far as I’m concerned, just not fucking META. Nothing but sloth is preventing the “normies” from getting into the fediverse.
Now go fuck off and troll elsewhere.
Defederating isn’t going to benefit us or hurt meta, it’s just gonna hurt the people who use threads.
…Good. they should move their happy asses to a mastodon server, if it pains them so.
Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be “hurt” by not having access to Lemmy’s memes about Linux and similar stuff.
just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them
Except that theoretically my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.
Your response isn’t self consistent.
they’d only have to make a profile on a different, normal server my “All” feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta’s services
If they make a profile on a normal server then your feed will be full of that same content you don’t want. You’re trying to exclude users, not meta itself.
Besides, you keep taking as though they’re federating with Lemmy. They’re not, they’re federating with mastodon. Having mastodon posts show up automatically in your Lemmy feeds is unusual. Kbin, maybe.
For me personally there are two main forces at play here:
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I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
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Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.
I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…
So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.
I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).
From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.
From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.
I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
Let’s not forget war crimes and genocide.
I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:
The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]
Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don’t you agree?
So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?
As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.
There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.
So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?
Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.
I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.
As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.
The issue with Facebook and the Rohingya isn’t just that they “didn’t moderate properly”. It’s that they knew for a long time that it was a problem and chose to ignore it. Note those last four words: chose to ignore it. In that other thing I posted I linked to someone who brought the receipts. The higher-ups at Facebook at the time knew this was happening and chose to put their corporate goals over literally tens of thousands of lives. This is inexcusable.
The simple solution is to keep Meta contained. To shun those who support it with their labour, their money, or their personal information (indirectly money). I don’t want to interact with quislings and I won’t. Nor should anybody else repelled at their complete and utter apathy in the face of mass murder and genocide.
(Note: Twitter was no better. Fucking Jack “Dipshit” Dorsey was in Myanmar meditating with the very same Buddhist fucks that were behind the Rohingya genocide, singing out their praises all while this was going on.)
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I hope they federate
why do you hope that?
I hate Reddit and Twitter both so I want the Fediverse to take off
Facebook/Threads will not be a good federation partner, same cesspool as Twitter.
I mostly just hate Spez and Elon, so Threads would be cool joining the Fediverse imo. Facebook should stay off tho, there’s nothing worthwhile there
Threads is by Facebook/Instagram though?
Yeah, but they’re separate, so I think they could federate Threads without federating Facebook
is by same people
do you hate facebook
Their goal is pretty standard affair.
- Claim to be simply making yourself part of the group for the benefit of everyone. We’re all gonna be friends, this is good for you, you’ll see.
- Use your position and resources to make yourself the defacto way to use the tech. Bonus points of you can make the average person see you and said tech as being one in the same.
- Once you have gathered a high enough percentage of the users, simply make changes or take other actions that will cut yourself off from everywhere else, effectively cutting off those users from anywhere that is not you. Since most of them are already “your” users, barely any of them will even notice anything change, let alone care.
- Repeat previous steps for any new competing service that covers along to threaten you.
isn’t threads already several times larger than the whole of the “fediverse”?
Meta are war criminals. Period.
If you support Meta attaching to the fediverse, you are welcoming war criminals and their quislings to becoming part of the fediverse.
I sincerely hope most of us in the fediverse are better than that or I’m going to have to search for a new social media home.
Meta has been a willing tool for enabling war crimes, genocide, political manipulation/propaganda, and brutal authoritarianism all across the globe.
I don’t see how it’s a threat. They can’t take over the whole federation.
Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.
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It’s not so much that they’d take it over, it’s that they’d extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it’s basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum’s got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html and there are a lot of parallels.
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Having read that article earlier in another thread, it sounds much more like the devs working on XMPP killed it themselves by cowtowing to whatever the fuck Google was doing instead of continuing their own forks because they didn’t want to lose the users gained through Google Talk by simply not caring about it. Greed killed it, but the greed wasn’t Google’s alone.
So devs targeting Google users is greed.
Instances targeting Meta users is smart?
Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.
I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It’s not inherently bad per se.
I don’t care either way, but I hope they’d be welcome as long as they kept their instance cleaned of the kind of things other instances have been defederated for.
If meta wants all the data there are plenty of other ways to get it, pretending the fediverse is an impenetrable shield is silly. And maybe more people will learn about the fediverse in this way.
It can be both a “good” opportunity and bad but given the way Meta had to change its name to Meta after getting into trouble with running its platform to encourage fascism in national election outcomes … I think it’s safe to say the good that could possibly come of the federation does not outweigh the probable bad. I don’t agree with anything Zuckerfuck touches being anything close to reasonable to work with. Meta/Facebook’s track record isn’t something to ignore.
The fediverse isnt a competition and nor we we should try to replace gaint companies(even tho that it would be great) rather stay as a free alternative to those platforms.
