Let's put it this way: Just because they live under an oppressive regime doesn't mean we should be mean to them and keep them isolated in their evil bubble.
Say, many would agree that Han people in China are oppressed. They have a ton of middle-class citizens who are free to leave the country, they just don't want to permanently due to not thinking it'd be better.
Same applies to Threads, though maybe a stronger case for leaving.
I’m not having a conversation that compares people signing up to their favourite social media channel with people who suffer systemic discrimination every day in their lives.
Like I linked in the OP post, the problem isn't their implementation of the protocol, but what FB is, and what it has done; and it probably would not stop doing it in the Fediverse. If Hannnibal Lecter moved in the neighbourhood I wouldn't answer his dinner invite, just to see what's on the menu.
whatever. i hate facebook, i dont use their crap. but im not going out of my way to block their AP protocol any more than i would their SMTP protocol.
when their activity in a specific context demonstrably, negatively affects my system, ill take action as i would any negative impact from any protocol on any of my services.
when i get a spammer, i block them. but again, im not going out of my way to spite some big asshole company, and potentially lose out on coordinating an offramp for those trapped in its walls.
everyone here as proven one thing: there is no technical reason to block threads. its entirely political/moral/spite and a lot of 'maybes'.
i hate facebook, i dont use their crap.
when their activity negatively affects my system, ill take action
You made it black and white. But don't mind me, dismiss what I say; just don't go crying the next time someone you know dies from covid cause they read on Threads that vaccines are bad.
I mean, you know they aren't going to have adequate content moderation because they ALREADY don't. Lack of moderation is the #1, #2, and #3 best reasons to defederate.
Wanting to see proof before taking positive action is valid and sensible. But you can't pretend it isn't something you can already make reasonable inferences about. This is not a new unknown and pretending it is is ridiculous.
Email servers do not automatically feed content into and pull content out of your system. They only send and deliver to specific people at specific addresses. Federation is a firehose. You can close the hydrant before or after it gets hooked up to city water, but at the end of the day only people that chose to do things the sensible way will have dry socks and no water damage.
this is just not true, sorry. instances only retrieve/pushed specified actions/actors. . pretending it is is ridiculous. this is now a new unknown, this is how the ap protocol works.
and your shit is already public, if they want to suck it all in there is literally nothing stopping them right now. federation or not.
I'm not at my computer, so please excuse any mobile issues. I'm in favor of the move, because it will help to simultaneously connect and decentralize communications across the platforms. Say what you will about Facebook (you're probably right), but if they're that bad, then it seems logical to me to connect to their federated service even more aggressively.
The more we push our content (and by extension the Fediverse content that kbin aggregates), the less impact their algorithm can have. The more we go out of the way to expose their content, the harder we make it them to curate/censor/suppress any voices. And if, when comparing two Fediverse instances or softwares, we find that what's been pushed to them is different, we the users can call it out to news organizations (or make it public ourselves).
And yes, I know I'm making the arguments for supporting private companies in adopting open-source. It's about being able to audit what companies we don't trust are doing.
In addition to that, I'm currently a Threads user. Anecdotally, there's a lot of wholesome content on there that I appreciate, and what limited advertising is there is nowhere near as obtrusive as Reddit or the main Facebook platform.
This post doesn’t address the main “pro-federation” point that I have seen. People who are support of federation aren’t saying that Facebook is a great company, they have great morales or that they aren’t supporting ActivityPub for their own gain. I think there is very little doubt that FB is a shit organization with no morales who thinks that this is a great move to get people back to their sites.
The most common reason that I see people supportive of Threads’ federation is that they believe it will help people move off of Facebook and other proprietary platforms onto more user-friendly ones. If all of your friends use Instagram it is very hard to move to Mastodon. If you want to stay in touch you will at least need two accounts. You can move your friends but it is hard because they each need to make that switch and it affects their interaction with others, or they need to manage multiple accounts until most of their friends have switched. If your friends use Threads (and it federates) then you can switch to Mastodon with very little friction, you can still interact with all of your existing friends in more or less the same way. Similarly each friend can easily move without managing multiple accounts during the transition. If all instances have blocked threads.net many people just won’t move, they will stay with FB.
To make a good argument you need to either refute this perceived advantage or argue that it isn’t worth the downsides. Making up a strawman doesn’t convince anyone.
I get what you're saying, I think most people fear that instead FB's septic tank will spill and spread in the Fediverse instead; I already had to deal with some "FREE SPEECH!" guy that wanted it to be a platform where people for example from Hamas and Israel could discuss and "agree to disagree".
I’ve seen an argument that defederation would just hurt the fediverse, and that even an exploitative giant like Meta should therefore be welcomed.
I think that’s like arguing that we should get rid of antitrust laws, which we have for good reason. We need to be able to stop bad actors and the damage they do. Especially large ones.
If a Mastodon instance was run by someone who allowed a genocide to be fuelled by their platform, and earn money from the advertising, I think we'd defederate in a heart beat. It just doesn't seem consistent to federate with them.
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