I have been writing up an essay on my thoughts. Facebook still seems a long way out from implementing federation so I hope I can have a polling feature into the codebase before they do and we can vote on it.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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I am no fan of Facebook.
I don’t see the point in defederating, yet.
Same.
We can defederate at any point, and I think it's too early to say federating would definitely cause harm to our community. I'd prefer to see how things go, keeping our hands close to big red "defederate" button.
We can defederate at any point
Could we re-federate at any point as well? Perhaps after ActivityPup establishes some form of protocol ossification, like email or sms, curbing the potential for it to be effectively owned by a majority platform? Would that take too long, and thus dissuade corporate adoption?
If we held off on supporting Facebook first, and federated with smaller governmental agencies, news outlets, academic institutions, encouraging them to host their own ActivityPup servers instead of solely relying on Twitter or Facebook for public communication, just as they already do for website and email domains, could that help speed up the ossification process?
By essentially giving FOSS platforms and protocols a longer runway before federating with Facebook, it could give ActivityPup greater time to cement more diverse stakeholders, calming the Fediverse's historic fears of repeated "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" antics, particularly when dealing with the largest FANG conglomerates on earth.
So what's the tipping point?
Not during "Embrace", obviously. This is the phase where their sheep's clothing is pretty intact, they're adding code and investment to the public repos and keeping theirs "mostly" in sync with some minor interop problems but "only because Lemmy isn't Meta and those issues aren't important".
Not during the first part of "Extend", either. "These are features that only Meta users could use anyway".
The second phase of Extend is a lot more insidious. The stitching between the fleece parts is starting to wear. The minor incompatibilities are starting to look a bit less minor. "You wouldn't defederate for those would you? Look at all this other amazing stuff we've given you. We totally promise pinky swear no our fingers aren't crossed behind our backs to fix them" and yet despite their vast dev resources they never somehow quite manage to resolve them "satisfactorily" and "we're still working on them".
Then while we're still being all hopeful and reassured it's all OK, the third E switch is thrown. The fleeces drop off revealing the slavering wolf. The ads now clutter Lemmy and overwhelm the content like they do on Facebook. The previously optional subscriptions now paywall off everything but the most basic features. Zuck phones Slarti and buys a new planet. Now do we defederate? Oh we can't. Everything breaks. Dammit we should have listened to VaxHacker and given them the boot at the start.
The reason we give them the boot now is because we know their plan. Zuck is here because he wants money. He's not interested in fede-wotsit. Lemmy? Isn't he that Motorhead guy? EEE has begun. The sooner we kill it the easier it'll be. "We can give it up at any time" - yeah, like those druggies and alcoholics that somehow never quite manage to. The best way to get off drugs is to not get on them in the first place.
Related discussions and relevant news:
- Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
- Second largest Lemmy instance preemptively un-friends Facebook
- Lemmy.World Admins: "Watching Like A hawk, with our fingers on the block button"
- Does Lemm.ee plan to de-federate from instagram threads?
Related articles and opinion pieces:
- https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
- counter argument
- https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/john-gruber-no-understand/
- rebuttals to counter
- https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- historic precedent and prevailing trends with open protocols
- https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html
- argument for local communities and against universal social networks
Question: does anyone here expect a giant billion(s) dollar company to not embrace, extend, extinguish regarding this protocol which these federated services are built upon?
It still blows my mind how this is still a question and not a default yes
It still blows my mind how this is still a question and not a default "no."
If you're here on Lemmy, odds are you don't like walled gardens, and would rather roam free on the vast open plains.
If Threads federates, Meta's basically giving its users a path out of its walled garden, into the free world.
If we, as the natives of that free world, say "Everybody defederate with Threads," we're just building our own wall around Meta in response to the walled garden opening its gates.
If we want people to roam wild and free in the fediverse, and we don't like walled gardens, how does it make any sense for us to respond to one of the world's walled gardens letting its people out by building our own wall to keep them in?
Meta is not letting people out of it's walled garden. Meta will use our free world as a safari, selling tickets to their users so they can watch and interact with us, monetizing our content, while still being guided (since they can decide what content they see, and how do they see it) and watched by Meta (because they know every move of their users at any other instance) at every step they take outside of it's walls - because they are still from their instance. It will use those safari rides as an excuse to collect as much data about what we do here, unknowing to the people they sent here. In addition to that, you will get 3 billion of people who will just leave trash everywhere they go on our vast open plains, and Meta will eventually just use that as an example of how we can't handle cleaning our space, and use it as a reason why people should go live within their walls - because the walls will still be there, and every step you take within them, even if you're only visiting from outside, will be heavily monitored.
And Meta is doing this because of what? Zuck's kindness?
I look towards the experts to try and form my opinion here, as I am not one.
Our stance: We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
I see that full blog as a "threads is good for the fediverse". I only look at and interact with local on this instance, but am generically against jumping to defederation because "no like".
It should be pointed out that the author of this article had a private meeting with Meta regarding Threads and signed a NDA. He is also the head of a company that receives funding based on the popularity of the Mastodon software. There may or may not be deals we don't know about, but he is certainly not an unbiased party.
Meta's business is monitoring and using online social networks to manipulate human behavior. Their massive userbase will cause Threads content and users to dominate instances that federate with them. It's more than just "no like".
I did not know this, thank you for sharing. I am going to leave the comment because it has generated some good discourse (and hopefully maybe more) and in my reality, I don't think I would even notice if this instance chooses defederation.
I am completely in favor of defederating from Threads. My personal bias against Zuck and his monsters aside, there's the very real chance that he'll use ActivityPub as free content for his own product's growth, slowly adding changes to the protocol until the "best experience" is only via threads
There is precedent in the form of Google and XMPP. In another thread, someone argued in favor of Meta and replied to that what happened was simply "Google outcompeted XMPP by offering a better user experience", not realizing that his argument was actually evidence against Meta. Google beat the competition. Thinking Meta will work to beat the competition (ActivityPub) is plausible.
Remember when Facebook wanted to buy Snapchat, but Snap refused? Facebook then added the stories feature to FB, Insta and Whatsapp (the latter 2 apps bought in order to further consolidate its power), in order to bleed Snapchat's userbase.
We can't predict the future, but Facebook Meta's past actions all point to a very likely chain of actions (Embrace, extend and extinguish).
Does it matter at all? They haven't implemented federation yet, and when they do, it'll be with Mastodon, not lemmy.
no it will use activity pub for federation so it will be federated with lemmy aswell
I agree. Also, there is a ton of really great programming and AI/ML content on Twitter. I hope much of it migrates to Mastodon and Lemmy, and I'm starting to see some of it appear on Threads as well. Instead of knee-jerk reactions to defederate from Threads to avoid the the embrace-extend-extinguish that happened to XMPP, we should build technical safeguards to keep things open.
Although Meta's social media and privacy woes are well-known, Meta is one of the largest contributors to open-source and AI/ML. We should be encouraging companies to federate and building safeguards into ActivityPub to discourage "embrace-extend-extinguish". We're already seeing fracturing in the Fedverse between Pleroma and Akkoma, Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, and most Lemmy mobile clients not supporting Kbin. I want the fediverse to succeed, but this is driving users away—what's the point if this ends as a ghost town? Do we want to go the way of Identi.ca and previous attempts
This is called prevention. You know, how it's usually easier to prevent something bad from happening, rather than waiting for the bad to happen and then taking some action.
Will threads federate in the future? Maybe, we don't know. Will Meta leave it at that and not go after other ActivityPub systems, like Lemmy and Peertube? We don't know.
One issue I'm thinking might happen if meta federates is that they will set up a sort of FOMO(fear of missing out) and make it possible for users of threads to talk in fediverse instances, but fediverse instances not able to talk to threads. I'm not sure if this is technically possible as per the activitypub protocol but just a thought I had.
It is possible and there is a currently live example of that: Akkoma and Mastodon. Akkoma can see and follow and interact with Mastodon users and toots, but Mastodon might not be able to see Akkoma posts, even if they're following its users. And this is happening as an unintended bug, not an intentional feature, as we can expect from zuck
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