I’m not normally a huge fan of defederation but in this case I very much support it. Fuck Meta and its services. They are one of the most actively malicious companies towards the health of the internet and its users that exists today. This was seen immediately with Threads’ privacy policy the moment it was made available.
I imagine they see a world where ActivityPub is meant for federation between services from the likes of Twitter, Meta, Google, and other big players with maybe a large open source project that gets defanged.
I don’t think they’re necessarily against federation with others, now that I think about it more. We’re just content for them, to promote the endless scroll for their own users to get trapped in.
Sure, that’s the embrace part of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Get their users to use their platform with all of the pre-existing networks and content, so that it’s a viable alternative to Twitter, and they bring such a big community that the major established players want to interact with it.
Step two, declare that they’ve got some great ideas on how the space can be improved, but activitypub doesn’t support them, and they don’t want to wait around for the standard to update; we need to bring these improvements to our users now! So they unofficially “extend” the standard, so everyone on Threads is getting the new gee-whiz feature, but they can still talk to everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone else’s experience is a little bit worse. And while we’re at it, maybe we add something that feels bad for both sides when a non-Threads user interacts with a Threads user. So gosh, I mean, why not go ahead and migrate your account over to Threads? You don’t lose anything; you still get to interact with your existing networks, nothing bad happens, just that now you also get the cool features.
Step three (and this one happens much later), the overwhelming majority of users are using Threads, because it does all the cool stuff that Mastodon can’t do. So now we’ve got another great idea, but unfortunately, this one just isn’t compatible with activitypub. So, we’re gonna give you guys some heads up in advance, if you want to stay connected, you gotta switch over to Threads, and if you don’t it’s just gonna be a wasteland because all of those users aren’t visible to you anymore, and your grandma is gonna be sad that she can’t talk to you because you won’t take the simple step of signing up for a free account.
This isn’t idle speculation. Google did this exact thing with XMPP a decade ago.
Obviously, they have the same problem that other instances that have been defedded suffer from, they don’t screen their users and they can’t handle moderation. They won’t invest in the necessary amount personnel to moderate and they won’t moderate at a level that keeps out annoying trolls, scammers, and other nonsense.
doing some housekeeping this afternoon and yes we have already decided to do this. (if it hasn’t been done yet it will shortly, but someone besides me is going to be doing it)
It’s my understanding that we already decided not to federate with them?
That being said, I’m ethically opposed to supporting the corporate invasion of both FOSS and anti-corporate spaces.
With Meta, specifically, their MO with literally every tech space they’ve ever entered has been to EEE, and I think the “wait and see” approach to give them the benefit of the doubt that they won’t do the same thing here is naivete at best and willful ignorance at worst.
Exactly. “Wait and see” if they implement EEE in the Fediverse is naive because by the time we detect their actions, it will be too late to protect the Fediverse from its effects.
I’d prefer Facebook at least just be killed off entirely, not letting some equally shitty company run it. The world would probably be a better place without it.
I am so opposed to being on an instance that is federated with Meta that I’d probably delete my account if that happened. Thankfully I understand that Beehaw has already made the decision not to federate with them.
Even if it weren’t for the privacy concerns, and Facebook’s history, Threads has whitelisted LibsOfTiktok, so any reports against them are auto-rejected in a couple of minutes, which should mean instant defederation even for instances that were on the fence.
Mixed feelings, federation has the potential to prevent a total walled garden around Threads. But also the sheer volume will overwhelm any small community
I think walled gardens are inevitable, and desirable, and the walls have doors. I think we’ll end up with a big mainstream garden/island of federation of U.S. pop culture w/ Threads and CNN and my mom. Other gardens/islands for things like child safe content, adult only content, servers that refuse to federate with for-profit servers (where I’ll be), etc.
Also, I suspect it will (or already is) be common for people to have multiple accounts on different servers for different purposes. I find myself blocking all porn, not because I’m anti porn but it’s just not what I’m looking for when I log in with this account. When I want porn, I’ll make an account on the nsfw server just for that.
No, it should not. IMO, defederation is toxic for the fediverse. One of the major advantages of the fediverse is that you don’t have a walled garden. Don’t try to make one.
Defederation is not toxic, it’s an essential tool. The ability to choose what kind of contents and account you can see is one of the best part of decentralised social networks.
There are limits to defederation at a user level. Hard defederation can only be done at a server level.
And server owners have the responsibility to keep their place safe from bad actors
How do they do that? By defederating servers that contain and promote that type of people and content.
A place like Beehaw that calls itself a safe space for marginalised groups cannot federate with anything owned by Meta, which openly allows racist, ableist and anti queer rhetoric on their platforms.
They already block a long list of alt-right servers, why would threads (that has already whitelisted alt-right propaganda groups like libsoftiktok) be any different?
When I choose this server I did because I knew they would defederate from any server promoting alt-right/“free speech” rhetoric
One of the major advantages of user controlled communities is that your community can decide on what is allowed, like having rules about not tolerating intolerance. How is that toxic?
Also its pretty easy to join multiple instances and have a few accounts if you want.
you’ve made a few comments on this post now, but none of them are addressing the point of contention. you’re getting caught up in these hyper-specific details. this is just one tiny component of a larger issue.
would you say that drowning isn’t possible, because you don’t drown when you shower? you’re missing the rest of the information.
there are several comments here, including mine somewhere in reply to this thread, that address why this is life-threatening to the infrastructure of the fediverse. please understand those points and understand that this is a cumulative pressure. hyper-focusing on these details (which could be debated, but it’s unnecessary as it’s not relevant) will only make you miss the bigger picture.
i think you’ve been mislead somewhere along the line. the fediverse is not infallible-- no decentralised network is immune to any attack vectors. this has happened in the past with XMPP. google took a leaf from Microsoft’s book and implemented the “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy. some more details on that and specifically how it relates to the fediverse can be found at the link below.
but aside from XMPP and the fediverse, even major decentralised networks like email have succumbed to this. you would be surprised how infected email has become. small independent mail servers often struggle to even get mail into the inboxes of people on major domains like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc… some more details on that can be seen from the link below, but this issue on an email level is far more expansive than just this.
Meta is no stranger to anti-consumer practices and is definitely no stranger to devouring smaller projects in order to expand its’ own influence and userbase. all for the purpose of squeezing every bit of data they can from its’ userbase to sell to advertisers. i encourage you to learn some more about the weaknesses of decentralised networks, and about Meta’s history of disgusting business practices.
i don’t know why you joined the fediverse, but for me, this is directly against the ethos of what this platform is for.
One of the major features is defederation. While you don’t have to have a walled garden, your instance gets to choose who it joins to. And I’d rather not join to threads as we’ve seen what Mets does with open protocols.
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