They began experimentally federating several of their staff accounts. I could read them directly on mastodon. I don’t THINK they could read any Mastodon data
I think the wording is a bit misleading, too. Those users didn’t actively commit to #FediPact. They just happen to use an instance where the admins decided to block Meta. Deliberate or not, it is indirect from the user’s perspective.
And my opinion is: The whole #FediPact is very unbalanced. While we do care, we also have to remind ourselves that Meta probably don’t care at all about -for example- the 40.000 users on Lemmy.
Some admin have already / will block Meta but don't see any point of signing the pact.
Some people choose to federate with Threads but are Meta hostile. They federate with the goal of promoting Fedi/FLOSS/privacy/leaving Meta on Threads 🤷
@maegul What'd be more interesting is not only how many of all Fediverse users are FediPact proponents, but also how many are opponents, how many don't care, and above all, how many have never even heard of it. You can't expect someone who has just come over from 𝕏 to mastodon.social to have an opinion on this.
Also, different projects, different opinions. I estimate 10% of all Mastodon users would even love to defederate from everything else in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon because it's so non-Mastodon, and it does freaky stuff that shouldn't exist on Mastodon. At the same time, a large percentage of Friendica users is probably in favour of federating with Threads because Friendica's concept and culture has been about connectivity with everything that moves and then some since 2010.
That FediDB stats page is confusing. It isn’t clear whether they only count instances that have joined Fedipact, or also include instances that have blocked Threads without joining Fedipact. A quick glance at the list suggests the latter. But in that case, there are a bunch of instances missing from the list.
As for admins versus users, here on sh.itjust.works we held a vote among our users. The result was overwhelming: 78% of users voted to preemptively block Threads. https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397
I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn’t care if you sign it. And it’s not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).
It’s still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance’s stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they’re more active in the discourse.
You’re right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren’t even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.
It’s hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.
That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don’t care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.
It’s interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.
We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.
I for one would be fine with just defederating from the entire microblogging world, Fediverse or otherwise. In fact, just cut them out of the internet completely. They are essentially the text equivalent of the sound bite and actively harm public discourse.
I’m not sure how much faith you can put in those stats. My two instances are both defederated from Meta platforms for example, but I haven’t signed the Fedipact. For me, it’s not about Meta itself, but because they house hate groups. If they stopped doing that, I’d federate with them
I don’t see them removing the hate groups any time soon, but as far as my defederation approach goes, that just makes them like any other hate platform on the fediverse. They get blocked and I move on.
Would it be a good idea to have a more accurate (and therefore higher) number on how many Threads defeds there are?
I’m not sure that it makes much of a difference to anything? It won’t change Meta’s approach to the fediverse, and the pact tracker will never have accurate numbers because of people like me and people that that defederate without even knowing the pact exists.
I signed the pact. Besides the fact that its meta, I would also not federate with one platform 10x bigger than the whole fedi. Thats not organic growth.
The 10x approach means that they now make the rules and your viewers (and your own) perception gets warped by the inflated interaction. 10x power consumption, 10x moderation, 10x storage (actually more than 10x depending on who your instance follows).
If you ever need to defederate, all users will see a barren wasteland. I dont think thats a sound strategy, but thats just my two cents.
There are studies that show that if you eat highly sweetened, salted or otherwise intensely seasoned food, it becomes harder and harder to return to normal food because A, your brain builds pathways for the things you do that make it easier and B, your receptors become weaker and weaker so that normal food will taste bland.
This is true for everything. You get used to all kinds of things. It is the reason a lot of people are addicted to social media. The constant dopamine rush of corpo social media is what keeps them going and many (me included) advicate to make these techniques illegal.
So, opening your instance to meta is like putting tons of seasoning in your food or mixing heroin to your saline infusion. Its not impossible to get off of it but if you ever read an addicts journal or watch a documentary about it (I have), you will see that it makes everything else a barren wasteland (that hasnt been previously).
And in case you want to take the next low hanging fruit of an argument: no, your users are not able to judge this for themselves. That is wrong. We tend to think of ourselves as less biased as we actually are. A strudy if you want to read about it psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-95006-117.
Sure, if this were their first exposure to centralised social media and if they weren’t members of a highly targeted minority that are ongoingly harassed on those platforms.
But this isn’t their first time. They’re here specifically because they chose to get away from the experience that mega instances offer gender diverse folk.
And ultimately if Meta removes the hate, we will then refederate because the hate is gone and if that means some members of our community head back to a mega instance that takes hate seriously, that’s an acceptable outcome to me.
And if they don’t remove the hate (which they won’t), we stay defederated and it’s all hypothetical.
It is hypothetical indeed. I‘m part of a targeted minority as well and ran away from general social media for multiple reasons, hate not being the biggest. So I won’t speak to your reasons because I‘m not in the same position.
My issue was power imbalance. The single entity could do whatever they wished. If I ever went to a place that federated with them, the power imbalance is back and I‘m back where I wanted to get away from.
To me, the difference is that the power isn’t in their hands now, even with federation. If they don’t act on something that should be acted on, we can still act on it, even if only for our own instance.
There was an interesting pair of polls last summer about reactions to Threads and Tumblr. 66% of the respondents were either opposed to or alarmed by Threads federating, and only 10% were supportive. By contrast, only 15% were opposed to or alarmed by Tumblr, and 39% were supportive. It’s just one data point but still interesting!
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