this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Meta (lemm.ee)

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Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it's not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it's likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.


Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

  • As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.
  • Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
  • Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
  • In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

By the way, we're not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

  • Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
  • Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
  • We don't really know what to defederate from - it's completely possible that "threads.net" will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.


Update:

By now, it's clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

  • lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
  • Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it's still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

  • The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
  • Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
  • We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

  • There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
  • Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
  • There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won't please everybody, but I really believe it's the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I agree with this approach, defederate first then federate later if the good outweighs the bad. I'm glad to be on this instance for sure.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

D-Federation X.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

One of the biggest problems with Facebook has been it's monopolistic control over social media.

People can't migrate away from it because of the effective monopoly. I've tried to move social platforms dozens of times and the thing that makes me come back is the fact that there are certain people that are on Facebook that refuse to migrate. They are happy with the status quo over there. And the only way for me to communicate with them is for me to maintain my Facebook account.

Federation allows me to move off of Facebook and still keep in contact with those who refuse to move off of Facebook. I've always wanted Facebook to support federation for this big reason.

All of this translates to threads, there are some people who just aren't nerds, people who aren't like us and aren't willing to deal with the growing pains of something like lemme or mastodon or other federated platforms.

There really is no benefit to de-federating with them that outweighs that as far as I can tell.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Begging for upvotes

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Federate with threads. More exposure and more people

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I don't want to block them over the bad stuff they are probably going to do. Why not just wait and see what they do then block if needed? Defederation now is clearly taking a curation stance on what we all see.

I'm actually hoping it takes off. There is content on Facebook I would like to read but I cannot agree to their TOS. If they let it federate out that's great. I would never be willing to make an account on there.

I don't see any sensitive content they get from us that's not publicly posted anyway.

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