My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
For example someone might not follow a gardening account on instagram/Facebook but they might join a gardening community. That’s valuable data.
They can also boast about the new technology. Maybe they hope it will revive the meta verse lol
My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
You’re absolutely right! Just take a look at the privacy of the Threads app. Even if you don’t have Threads app installed, they can figure out anyone from another fediverse server. That’s the reason fediverse servers should not federate with Meta servers.
That’s a very good point. There’s always an agenda when it comes to these massive companies. The more data they have, the more predictions they can make, and the more accurate they’ll be. Understanding how people move through these communities is massive for Meta. The more you understand something, the better you know how to exploit it.
They can already access the data, it's all federated and it's all publically available effectively by definition, they don't need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don't think that's really why they chose to federate.
But...
What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.
Facebook & Instagram's primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don't tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren't joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.
If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren't necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there's already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there's already content to consume and people to interact with.
True! Defederation is great sometimes, if you have a niche community and there is some other instance directly opposing your values or if content there is illegal in your jurisdiction etc.
Nagging about every single instance with a few bad actors on the other hand is problematic in my opinion
Nagging about every single instance with a few bad actors…
Yup. Tells the admins to do their jobs and get rid of bad actors.
Too many of y’all are perfectly fine with hate seeping in through the seams. It needs to be stamped out like a smoldering ember before it grows to an uncontrollable wildfire. They aren’t here to engage in constructive conversations. They want to do two things: spread their bullshit, and recruit edgy teenagers. Neither of these things can happen when admins do their duty and smite the hate. And if a federation isn’t doing their duty, cut em off. They can come back when they straighten their shit out.
I'm a bit dubious about this stat; it feels similar to the User's stat being over run by bots.
Lemmy has about 50,000 users, similar to Kbin, but it's users are commenting 120 times and also posting 16 times each a day on average? That seems unrealistic.
For comparison, Kbin (which actually has a slightly larger active user base) is produced about 100,000 comments a day, which is about 2 comments a day and about 0.6 posts per user per day. Interestingly Kbin's total users and active users are almost identical.
The threadiverse is certainly doing well, but I think the Lemmy stats continue to be skewed away from reality. I'm wondering if this is not actually all to do with bots, but some fundamental error in the counting/collection? Are the same comments and posts and maybe even the total user count in Lemmy being counted multiple times in the data fed back by the different servers?
Lemmy has about 50,000 users, similar to Kbin, but it’s users are commenting 120 times and also posting 16 times each a day on average? That seems unrealistic.
I think there might some confusion in your comment. The post's data is for all lemmy instances, which is larger than just lemmy.world.
As of this moment, lemmy.world has about 51k users, followed by lemmy.ml's 39k and beehaw.org's 11k. If you take the top 10 non-bot lemmy instances, they add up to roughly 136k users. And that's just 10 out of 1000 instances. Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
But the important metric as far as comments is the number of active Lemmy users, not the number of registered users. There are 51k lemmy.world users, but according to your link, only 14437 are active (posting or commenting). The total number of active Lemmy users (edit: across all instances) is about 50k, and I believe that's what Trifle is referring to, so the comments are still being divided by those ~50k active users.
@MicroWave I had never heard of the Fediverse or kbin before the protests on Reddit. I’m really hoping this all takes off. I’ve been enjoying my time here so far.
Same. I knew about mastodon but couldn't imagine a viable reddit alternative taking off so soon. And now, we've got lemmy and kbin users seamlessly talking to each other. It's amazing.
and I'll be the first one to say it because either people don't want to talk about it or they just don't think about it
SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE .... SUPPORT YOUR OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
It doesn't matter who you are on ... lemmy, kbin, mastodon or anyone else ... find your instance owner and see if they are looking for donations or subscriptions and sign up for them
Sure the only way we can protect this new system is by keeping it federated, open and decentralized ... but it all only works if small groups of people pay for the basic hardware services and rental services and any other services out there to keep it all running ... yes the costs are minimal for small instances but those costs only add up as their instance becomes more popular.
Supporting your instance means it will stay protected ... if you burn out your instance owners or they run into financial trouble .. then your instance will start more risks including being shut down or sold to someone else
And it doesn't take much to support these guys ... if we all just gave a dollar a month, it would be more than enough to support them.
I subscribed to Ruud's Patreon, and it had a note that part of the benefits at the $8/month tier is you now get a checkmark next to your name (* if you go and edit your name to have a check mark next to it). I obeyed, partly because that's funny to me and partly in the hopes that more people subscribe. I've seen a couple other people with it as well.
Just reading through this it seems crazy to me that lemmy.world is being scaled vertically, is there something about how it works that prevents horizontal scaling (like, load balancing across a number of servers all using the same db)?
As far as I can tell, the software just wasn’t built with that in mind, so I would expect some kind of bugs or weird behavior like race conditions, etc. Nothing is stopping anyone from trying it to see what happens though I guess.
I am trying to start a project with a fairly ambitious goal, trying to take load off the central instance to reduce hosting costs (whether that comes in the form of a single powerful server or multiples pointed at the same DB). It's still in early form, but the core (trying to make it so running a Lemmy node is not too punishing on the main instance server) is an attempt to do the engineering to help accomplish exactly this.
From what I understand, Lemmy is just using a PostgreSQL database, and there’s many ways to load balance and horizontally scale it. You could use something like HAProxy for load balancing, and for horizontal scaling, you could add multiple PostgreSQL slave nodes and if you want to manage the scaling automatically, you could use a tool like ClusterControl or w/e. There’s plenty of doco on the web around this and it’s not specific to Lemmy.
You can scale app servers surprisingly far before you need to shard a decently sized single master postgres cluster. Like, probably 20-50+ times the current write traffic it seems this instance has. It was probably due to the websockets thing, thinking about it. With 0.18, that goes away and requests can be stateless, cached, and you can throw a load balancer and n app servers at it.
Ya, no kidding. This piqued my interest, but I did not click expecting to see an actual cost basis! I have been looking at potentially setting up my own node, but at the same time... Perhaps contributing here, financially as well, could be the best option.
Still fun to play around with my own stuff though :) Thanks guys!
I have a small, private Lemmy site, a personal Calckey site, and some blogs that I run off of a VPS that I pay like $13/month for. The server is overkill by an order of magnitude for what I'm using it for. Based on current usage, I could support a few hundred active users without ever taking a dime from anyone, though I'm sure media expenses don't scale well. That said, there are collective media projects like Jortage out there that have the potentially to significantly reduce media hosting costs for small sites.
This time is probably unrelated to @ernest's supposed inactivity. Actually, his another /kbin server, https://karab.in has been brought back on 15 of February.
This entire argument is bullshit. Meta needs to be an island from our perspective. Let them do their thing over there, we’ll do our thing over here. Their goal is to lure (probably former reddit or twitter) users to Threads and then cut off the greater Fediverse as a whole once their user base is established and much larger than ours. And they want to use our numbers to boost their for profit platform to make it appear more successful.
Separation from these kinds of corporate entities is exactly what the Fediverse is about. We can talk about “open” all we like but there is already a short list of bad actors we don’t allow here: Nazis and fascists, pedos and kiddie diddlers, etc. We can add Meta to that list as well.
We don’t want them interacting with us at all. Get out the hammer and ban them. Entirely.
I’ll add an edit to say this: I say that defederation is not extreme enough. They need to be blocked. Instances need to implement ToS and licensing that prohibits them from hoovering up and regurgitating our content. We need to start outright blocking Meta at the network level. Whatever the hell it takes. Line in the sand. No means no.
No Meta. Ever.
Think of this: In the past, we have never had any choice other than to roll over and accept whatever bullshit the major social media companies push on us. If you want to communicate, if you want to use any platform, if you want to be in, you had to deal with them and their system. Because they were big and you were little, and what are you going to do about it? You have no choice but to roll over.
Well, we don’t have to roll over anymore. We have this one – and believe me, only this one – opportunity to unequivocally tell them NO. We are not your product. You have no value to us. You aren’t a monopoly anymore. We do not need your corporate influence, we do not need your corporate bullshit. We are free of you, and we don’t need you.
Another edit: Oh, look. What do I find right at the top of my feed first thing this morning? Why, it’s yet another example of Meta being evil. And you still want them to have influence in the Fediverse?
Bingo. They offer nothing to us except "growth," which for some reason people just inherently think is great. I sure don't. I just want there to be enough people for semi-regular conversation and posts. I don't need 1 billion people posting 10 billion memes a day. I don't need to be doom scrolling like I'm back on reddit again (obligatory "fuck reddit").
If I had the technical know-how and felt secure with my home network I would LOVE to stand up an instance and pull up the drawbridge once I feel like it's got enough people. We don't need to open the flood gates, and that's all meta et al. are offering.
I just want there to be enough people for semi-regular conversation and posts.
This is true for me on Lemmy. Aside from a few niche communities (which I can make another account for somewhat harmlessly, be it Reddit or a widely federated instance), I’ve grown to enjoy the smaller federated communities.
I think it’s different for the microblogging format. With that, you follow key users, organizations and services. If the friend you want to see or the alert service you want to follow is elsewhere and an instance is defederated, you might make that account elsewhere
I’ve said in other reply in other post, but many people believes Meta doesn’t harm to fediverse or they can’t analyze our posts, comments, upvotes/downvotes when accounts from Threads interact with us. 🤷
They can analyze our posts, comments, and upvotes/downvotes without there being any Threads integration at all. This is an open protocol and we're posting in public.
As an instance owner I have defederated preemptively from threads. I take the same logic as ‘dont do a deal with the devil’ or ‘dont negotiate with terrorists’. Sure maybe you get lucky and win some but the odds are stacked against you. Instead I am more interested in cultivating slowly what lemmy is as a platform without some companies influence. We are doing ok right now. Ae are slowly growing right now. The only reason they are interested in us is because they see the potential. We dont need them to foster that potential. Lets focus on doing this on our own. For better or worse, at least we can say we did it our way for what we ultimately believed in if we stand on our own and do it.
And as an aside. I dont need a seconder to agree with me or tell me this is the right decision. I have done enough and seen enough in my life to make this call on my own and stand by that decision. Its not relevant to me if anyone agrees with it.
The ToS part sounds good, and I was looking into something like that a while back.
As for the rest, could you share which parts of the argument is unfounded, or why it’s “entirely BS”?
Not to be hostile, but this is the kind of comment I’m talking about above.
I absolutely despise Meta too, I’m trying to figure out the best way to limit their effects on the Fediverse and keep growing the good thing we have. As much as I want to do the big symbolic action, it feels performative and ineffective at best.
It’s not really former Reddit users they’re after but rather Twitter. Lemmy is still separated and it doesn’t matter for us either way (for now)
Your entire argument seem to beg the question of having to interact with Meta.
You claim (and I don't believe) to hate Meta and want its downfall, but your arguments seem to all be "we need to include Meta at the table, so we can tell people how bad it is to have Meta at the table."
Getting real "I took a job at Goldman Sachs to 'change things from the inside' " vibes.
Just cut off Meta and grow something that doesn't involve them.
The notion that anyone should interact with Meta at all is enough. You lost me right after that part. Anything after that is just meaningless apologetic noise for the sake of appearing nuanced. That’s the bullshit.
No means no. Never means never. No Meta. The extremism, the “big symbolic action,” it’s all warranted. Block them. Block them forever.
P.s. You’re allowed to use cuss words on the internet. Tell your friends!
The notion that anyone should interact with Meta at all is enough. You lost me right after that part.
Maybe keep reading the rest because there IS nuance to this. I hate Facebook and think that sticking our heads in the sand will help them win. If those other platforms that died to EEE just blocked and ignored the incoming threat, they’d have died even faster.
P.s. You’re allowed to use cuss words on the internet. Tell your friends!
I didn’t write out ‘bullshit’ because I’m on mobile now and it was a fewer letters
No, there isn’t. This is the clearest case of black vs. white you’re going to experience all week. Blocking Meta is not “sticking our heads in the sand.” There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms. But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. So answer me this, what do we actually stand to gain?
Bots? Misinformation? Having our content redisplayed on Threads for profit? Ads? Corporate accounts spamming us incessantly? Corporate moderators, corporate instances, corporate communities where all the messaging is controlled? Having our content used to train AI’s? This is all the crap we escaped when moving here, rather than using the existing social media network products. What, is Mark Zuckerberg going to cut instance operators a check to help with their overhead expenses for all the content he’ll steal? Don’t make me laugh. You can see posts that were made on Threads? If anyone actually wanted that, they’d just use Threads to begin with.
The argument is that Meta integration will allow the Fediverse to become “mainstream.” Well, Lemmy and Mastadon are already doing just fine without Meta. They will continue to do just as fine without them in the future, barring any catastrophic reddit style administrative fuckups on any major instance(s). Meanwhile, there is enormous risk in allowing Meta to have their way with us, our platform, and our content. None of the other hot air matters one bit no matter how it’s phrased. It will be much healthier as a whole for Fediverse platforms to grow organically without corporate (and frankly, evil) influence. And if that means they remain smaller communities now or even forever that’s okay.
The openness of the “open web” stops precisely before bad actors are allowed to co-opt it for evil purposes. Companies like Meta always have as their end goal a closed walled garden for their users remain trapped in to have profit extracted from them. Well, let them have it – on their own, without us. We need to set the precedent that those of us who give enough of a shit to use Fediverse platforms in the first place cannot be bought or sold. They’ll talk about “openness” now but I guarantee you the design is for that to be a one way street.
There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms
Source?
But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them.
Again, source? "If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. " is a bit weird, when the reason is so painfully obvious and relates to EU regulation and wanting to pre-empt any issues by showing interoperability and an open protocol. If you know of profit-based use cases beyond that, do share the sources please.
Of providing sources? Generally that whatever argument you’re making cannot be trivially discarded because it is based on unproven assumptions and hypothesis. That doesn’t mean the argument is making a wrong point, rather that the argument is invalid as an argument.
That is to say, defederation might be the right conclusion, but as OP hints at, not for the reasons commonly stated around Lemmy or Mastodon because those make assumptions about what Meta is doing, why they are doing it, and more importantly, how being defederated affects them.
This is a dangerous type of question as it implies we need a reason to add federation. Instead of being federated being the default state, hence the question would be about benefits of defederation.
And like I said above, it’s not like there isn’t potential benefits to that. But it’s important to keep in mind that not only might we be misinterpreting why Meta is adding federation (I’ll stick to my explanation, it’s not about the actual federation it’s about pre-empting regulation) we might end up making their use-case stronger (“we tried to add interoperability, no one else was interested, so that’s why we aren’t doing it” might be a valid excuse to lawmakers).
On a bigger-than-just-meta picture, it’s also important to keep in mind that should the concept of federation take off, Meta will not be the only commercial company pushing into federated applications, especially if lawmakers start pushing into that direction in the EU. In other words, defederating Meta would merely delay the inevitable, and it might be less of a waste of time to focus on how to ensure the protocol itself works against bad faith actors gaining too much power - which, might I add, can also exist on a smaller scale. If you only got 100 users, a 90 user instance controls 90% of the federated space, and can just as well exert pressure onto the protocol itself, we just trust instance owners to not do that right now, in particular the really big ones.
Again, note that I do not list benefits. Like I said, that’s the wrong direction to inquire in.
and it might be less of a waste of time to focus on how to ensure the protocol itself works against bad faith actors gaining too much power
Meta is one of the worst, if not the worst, bad actors on the internet. That would be like inviting serial killers into your home so you’ll know how to handle a loud neighbor next time they’re loud.
And like I said above, it’s not like there isn’t potential benefits to that.
Okay, name one besides an influx of too many users and no content.
Their goal is to lure (probably former reddit or twitter) users to Threads
Their goal is to take users from Twitter, and by doing that they are opening the opportunity to get users from Twitter to the Fediverse.
There has to be at least one major news org who is looking at this and thinking “well, if Threads does bring a few hundred million people to the Fediverse, we’ll be able to drop Twitter and integrate our CMS with the Fediverse like Wordpress.”
and then cut off the greater Fediverse as a whole once their user base is established and much larger than ours.
I have bad news for you, then. Or good news, or whatever. Threads already has 160 million users. I thought one of the talking points was that Threads was going to overwhelm the Fediverse when it connected?
We don’t want them interacting with us at all.
Don't speak for everyone. The whole point of the Fediverse is that everyone can have different opinions and nobody can unilaterally cut someone else out of it.
If you don't want to interact with Threads, there are plenty of instances that have already defederated and lots of clients allow users to block by instance. You don't have to. But if someone else does want to engage with Threads users, you shouldn't try to stop that.
But any way you want to compare Threads activity/uses to Lemmy’s… It’s pretty obvious that Threads is already way bigger which was the main point I’d imagine.
I agree to an extent, but that won’t stay the case if other good people making high quality content choose the other platform because it’s not closed off.
I guess because they’d be with us here on this platform anyways, unless I misunderstood the question
If it comes down to the creator picking which audience to create for, and they couldn’t create for both at the same time, they would probably pick the bigger one (or just make accounts on both, which would also work out for us :) )
And that’s part of the point, as well: There are tons of people on here putting forth the effort to post content on a deliberately non-corporate platform, to make lemmy.world a great place – as well as other instances.
Meta is a for profit company. Everything they do is to turn a dollar. Rest assured, they would not have any intention of attempting to integrate with the Fediverse if they did not have some plan to make money off of it. And I for one do not consent to Meta and/or their advertisers profiting off of the work and content I have posted outside of their platform.
A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
yea the reason to want more users is for niche communities, I don’t need a billion people just for memes or news, but when you subdivide your users down to niche communities suddenly you’ll want more
I wish there were more people on Lemmy talking about Deus Ex, The 7th Guest, DOS games, Randomizers, or specific TV shows that I’m currently watching (Reddit always had a pretty active sub for each and every show)
Fuck Meta and all but this isn’t news. Meta litterally said straight up that they would be doing this before threads ever launched. If you have an instagram account then that is also your threads account. This isn’t some conspiracy it’s exactly what they told everyone they were doing. It’s no diferent than linked accounts for google services.
It’s a conspiracy just in the sense that they are seemingly counting these towards their growth numbers. If they’re saying they have 20 million accounts, but they created 3/4 of them as placeholders, then no…they have 5 million accounts.
Presumably they would have created ~2 Billion Threads accounts since there are ~2B Instagram users. Even if it was just the US there are approximately ~115M Instagram account.
So no, the 70M user number would just be the number to actually try Threads.
I think the difference is that the Threads user count keeps getting thrown around as an indicator of its success and viability, but it’s not a great KPI.
I do think people are using this “realization” of accounts being automatically created as a conspiratorial gotcha, but it’s still important to remind people of this scenario as they evaluate their prospects.
No because they’re only doing this for Instagram users who are located in the United States. It hasn’t launched anywhere else yet.
Probably because it will be quite illegal in Europe so they probably are not going to do it for European users but it hasn’t launched there yet anyway so we don’t know.
Yeah this Threads issue is getting into the tin foil delusional territory now. Just as you said. They literally say “well use your Instagram acccount” of you bother to read their disclaimers they literally tell you that they are literally using your Instagram account. It’s “Threads by Instagram”. When you first log in it ll import all your Instagram contacts and you cna “follow” them. And if they don’t have it yet it’ll say “you’ll follow as soon as they join threads” there is no “Shadow Threads account, because they are using the Instagram account.”.
You can definitely be against threads and Meta. I Personally am not super thrilled about it. But there is way more than enough to hate a out meta and threads without making stuff up.
Not saying meta isn’t evil…. but the whole point of the fediverse is that anyone can start a server. Meta isn’t going to be able to track you any better just thru federation, anyone can already scrape the data. People are too quick to defederate everything
you are replying to the wrong thread, try reading my post. See how I don’t care about your arguments(I care about your comments, just not the arguments themselves) and only care they they will control the narrative.
No meant to post here… I see you didn’t call it out but privacy is a big reason people are worried about threads. Just posting my opinion. Feeds and algorithms can be adjusted if threads is drowning others out. I don’t know how good or bad threads will be for the fediverse but I don’t think you do either. I’m fine with servers taking a wait and see approach and with servers banning. I’m worried about people being very reactionary and servers banning other servers that take a wait and see approach. That is the thing imo that could really kill the fediverse
Privacy is fully violated regardless of what happens here, but I can understand people worrying about it. You will find that threads still leaks in and dominates us, remember they are a very large group compared to us. We will lose our soul in this exchange, although I agree that neither of us know how bad it is. Unfortunately I’ve been watching service after service get compromised so this isn’t new to me. I think they should all preemptively defederate with threads except for oddball servers which can if they want to, I think after we know how bad it is we should defederate with instances federated with threads.
“You should always stay on lemmy.world. To join the “music” community from lemmy.ml, you click the search icon in the top right corner on lemmy.world (not the “Communities” link) and search for !music including the exclamation mark (!) at the start. You should see the community pop up in the list after clicking Search. In general, the search term is “![community-name]@[instance-name]”.”
A few times I was looking for communities using the search bar, and got confused that I found more than one community for the same thing (e. g. music) and they seemed to be on different Lemmy instances. I did not know if I can even subscribe to them or not, if they are even visible for me with my lemmy.world account or not, etc. Now I understand that part a bit better. Thanks again! :-)
I think it is dangerous to tell everyone to go to lemmy.world. That buildup of lots of people on a single server goes against the intended use and risks introducing similar problems as Reddit has, when a single instance gets too much power. We regrettably have that problem with email servers today, where a few bad powerful actors (Gmail, Yahoo etc) with a business incentive control who is allowed to send mail or not.
It would be much healthier if they encouraged everyone to find a Lemmy instance that is either geographically close or has a local community that with common values and interests. We need to spread people out to promote democracy.
I think they were saying ‘if you are an existing happy lemmy.world user and you want to join a community on another instance, do that through Lemmy.world
It’s reasonable generic advice. I’m subscribed and commenting from kbin.social
I was about to post the same. Joining the biggest instance is a bad Idea. I remember when joining Mastodon, there was a quiz that helped me find a fitting instance. Maybe there is a way to have something similar for lemmy instances? Maybe it already exists and I don’t know about it? The concept of a decentralized social network seems to be hard to grasp for people.
While you’re not wrong per se, having a massive instance like .world has enabled some much needed stress testing of the Lemmy backend in a way that really hasn’t been possible before, which will help the Devs find optimizations and improvements that will facilitate future growth overall on all instances. The recent memory leak that was discovered is a great example of it.
Really testing the limits of scalability is important for the overall future of Lemmy. Doing it on a server whose admin already runs a large mastodon server and has proven to be trustworthy and reliable is not a bad thing so long as donations can keep up with server costs.
Finally, gathering on .world makes it easy for Reddit refugees to transition, which is actually valuable in reaching critical mass on Lemmy, though maybe that first big wave of people has passed already.
I did not realize that lemmy.world is but a single instance - it’s all starting to come together in my head :-)
The FAQ linked earlier in the thread suggested making an account on lemmy.world, that same thing was what I meant in my post as well. And I see the comments about it being beneficial to “stress test” the Lemmy backend, so… should I edit my original post?
My main beef is with the FAQ, not your comment which just repeats what the FAQ says. But I’m concerned that bad advice from documents like that will spread through word of mouth, and become pervasive in a way that becomes difficult to retract later.
I see now, thanks! Note: If that’s the case, we need an updated FAQ later down the line, when Ruud says Lemmy.world will have been properly stress-tested :-)
One advantage lemmy.world has which led to many people recommending it early on is that Ruud is an experienced Fediverse admin (here is a summary of all his servers: lemmy.world/post/6441). This meant it was easy to suggest to early Reddit refugees since he’s proven competent and reliable so it soothed fears of instances having poor uptime or getting abandoned and helped ease the transition.
It’s kind of a double-edged sword, though. Sure the better advice would be to join a smaller instance, or spin up your own. Most people can’t spin up their own instance. As for smaller instances, who’s to say that smaller instance ris still going to be here 1, 2, 5 years from now? The 2 largest are more likely to stick around. Not saying you’re wrong, just that there are lots of unknowns.
Personally, I don’t think Lemmy folks should be working to get people to leave Reddit. Most people I see on Lemmy love the fact that it’s a small community like Reddit used to be. Why work to destroy that? If people want to leave Reddit, Lemmy will be here, and they’re probably going to add to the community. To me the barrier to entry of understanding how lemmy/Fediverse works is kind of helping to keep the community from growing to Reddit sizes with all the annoyances that entails.
The two potential roads seem somewhat equivalent to me:
Threads federation is blocked by the main Mastodon instances. A huge user base of non-techies starts using Threads and it dwarfs the rest of the fediverse acting as a singular centralised platform. The fediverse continues to be a techie/ideological anti-corporate community as it is now with a relatively small community in the grand scheme of things.
Threads federated with some of the big Mastodon instances. Fediverse instances outside of Threads get a large amount of growth as people see the extra content available in this larger federated environment. Growth of Threads still outpaces all other fediverse instances combined. Meta then carries out some form of EEE tactics and some large chunk of the userbase of the non-Threads instances switch to Threads. The techie/anti-corporate community continues to use fediverse instances without any interaction with Threads.
Both scenarios end in a large centralised platform run by Meta and a small community that want to avoid a corporate platform.
I think it’s also wise to separate the effect of large corporate instances in the fediverse between effects on Mastodon (where users follow users) vs Lemmy/Kbin (where users follow communities). In the case of Mastodon, the effects of EEE tactics will be strong due to a more powerful network effect because it’s important that a particular person is on the same platform as you (i.e. this is a similar situation to XMPP and gchat). In contrast, you just need some people to participate in a Lemmy/Kbin community to make it worth joining, but it doesn’t matter exactly who, meaning that membership can be small and sparse but the community still has a meaningful existence (i.e like niche forums).
To counter the ‘rounding error’ argument, I would argue that Meta is making the decision to federate because it makes business sense. Either they see that Mastedon is valuable today, or they see that it might become valuable in that future. Either way they are acting now to move that value to their company.
As someone who is cautiously optimistic about Meta’s ActivityPub adventure, my main disagreement with the author is over
The goal [of the Fediverse] is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer
I’d like to see ActivityPub and the Fediverse at large succeed, that is actually gain significant adoption among the average user, people that don’t care about freedom, decentralization etc. I disagree with a very common take on the Fediverse which seems to be “we don’t want to succeed, we want to make our happy little garden, it doesn’t matter if the overwhelming majority of people stay on centralized social media” because I think widespread adoption of federation (for social media, but also for code forges etc.) and open, interoperable protocols (matrix!) is important for society: less reliance on American tech giants, more resilience (services just shutting down as they run out of VC money impacts less content/users) and so on.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale. The risk of EEE is very real though, but Meta making an ActivityPub move will hopefully be a signal for others to follow, and the best way of ensuring Meta doesn’t subvert ActivityPub development is by having other stakeholders that are just as important to counterbalance its influence, not by having 5k-10k-users instances de-federate from Threads because their admin (rightfully!) doesn’t like Meta.
I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we're happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.
The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that's cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.
I am also not sure how EEE is supposed to work with decentralized platforms. In the end, everyone can say “that it’s all too much for me and I’ll build my own network with like-minded people, just like at the beginning of the fediverse.”
I see some merit in Ploum’s argument that the same way the Google monolith slowed down XMPP development, Meta could slow down ActivityPub development or steer it in a certain direction by forcing others to implement their extensions if they want to keep interoperability, before finally dumping it. But yes the “extinguish” situation would then be a return to the current status-quo, Fediverse as a tiny niche of like-minded people doing their own thing.
Sure, you can always go back to having a federation of a 1000 users in the same way that you can still host teamspeak servers or IRC and maybe get someone to join them. Some of us want a more widespread adoption though so we actually have people to follow and talk to - in that case meta coming here, taking over the users and then gimping or maybe even ditching the rest of the fediverse is not a good outcome.
Then most of the people just switch over to the corpo app because the alternatives are worse
The corpo leaves the fediverse with the userbase
I’m not saying it’s impossible, but in my opinion it’s very unlikely. The fediverse, unlike XMPP, does not consist of a single service but of a multitude of platforms. To shut down the fediverse, you would have to destroy all of these platforms and create your own platform that can do all of this and also flexibly integrate new services, as is currently happening with git hosting sites. I don’t think even the biggest companies will be able to break this power of the community.
It's really not what I'm saying. They won't "destroy every single instance in the fediverse", I'm saying they won't care about the 1% of old fashioned techies that remain here after they establish a monopoly on users and content elsewhere.
Besides, XMPP didn't consist of a single service either, it was just a protocol. It still exists and can be used today. Good luck establishing a community with it though.
It was a protocol used mainly for text communication. The fediverse is far more than that already. It’s not the instances that matter but the services that the fediverse offers. It is a unique tool on the internet to connect different platforms. I don’t know of any alternative that can do it that way.
Also I wouldn’t say that XMPP is dead it’s just that less people want to use it anymore. but that depends on us users and no one else. I, for example, still offer to switch to XMPP for my communities and recommend it to others.
The article linked above describes how Google killed a federated service by EEE. If you are interested how it can work I’d recommend it.
After EEE is done the fediverse would be irrelevant and lack users. But course it doesn’t stop people from making their own servers and federating into small communities. But the vast majority of users would use the meta version which was eventually made incompatible with the fediverse. That made 99% of users go there. And I if you ask someone to join your fediverse groups they’ll wonder why you are not on the meta thing instead.
As I stated in another comment it is not impossible that they may leech the fediverse to death but I think its highly unlikely. The fediverse is much more than just a decentralised platform. It is an amalgamation of many platforms with different userbases and different goals. In order for the fediverse to collapse, everything would have to be replaced together as well as the flexibility to continuously integrate new services, as is the case here now.
In the case of XMPP, the community became a passive spectator of google’s advance and was eventually replaced by it. But as long as the community does not become dependent on the big corpos in any way and regards their contributions more as a nice bonus, something like this will not happen. It is this self-sufficiency that allows the freedom to go one’s own way and to keep the power decentralised in the community. I have to admit, however, that this can be a big challenge, but one that is nevertheless manageable.
Im on the other end of this. As a recent reddit refugee and general anti capitalist i am strongly opposed to association or integration of tech giants with this fledgling infant of a democratic social network. Time and again corporations have shown that they will inevitably ruin a good thing for their profits. It happens all the time, your food gets more expensive while quality and quantity only decline. Everyday goods are now subscriptions, everything becomes a commodity. Buying a home is a fever dream for the average citizen because commercial entities buy anything and everything even over market rate just to corner the market. And to use some more recent tech examples, look at streaming services. Piracy was a thing, then Netflix came and made it obsolete through convenience and a fair price. Now greed has not only ruined Netflix but also spawned a dozen subpar clones because everyone makes their content exclusive out of greed, devaluing each other. And just these last weeks we can watch what short sighted bullshit happens to social media when billionaires (or spez) feel their fortune is in danger.
Fuck right off with yet another corporation quasi monopolizing internet communities. Any instance that associates with corporations is an immediate quit and block for me.
I have been working hard to delete all my corporate social media accounts. Reddit and Twitter is gone. This next week is FaceBook. I just can’t take they way corporations ruin things just to make billionaires more money. I don’t want to add to that.
I only see widespread adoption happening through commercial entities setting up instances, the model of donation-supported admins simply doesn’t scale.
Why do you think donation based doesn’t scale? If x percent of users donate and the server cost per user scales linearly it does. Also as large User numbers are reached you will find some power users which free to play games call whales. I don’t see how it doesn’t scale financially.
It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don’t think we are in a hurry here. I’m not on the building a little garden side of things. It’d be great if eventually all social would be open source and decentralized. It’s a must to keep our societies and democracies intact even. You can’t enormously powerful tools of mass communication and mass manipulation in the hands of companies and closed source algorithms nobody knows what they do.
I do like your counterbalance argument. If multiple tech companies come in competition might reduce the risk of EEE. And I do hope decentralization reduces the risk of them putting their own sorting algorithm on things and then killing other apps by not adhering to certain standards or something.
I think my belief that donation-supported instances won’t scale comes from the assumption that the users donating today are those that do so for ideological reasons, they want to see the Fediverse succeed, they are anti-capitalists etc. Most of these type of users are already on the Fediverse, as you move towards “the average user” that propensity to donating gets rarer and rarer, because they just want a social media platform that works and are perfectly fine with ad-supported models of alternatives, so I assume that percentage of users willing to donate does not stay steady with growth.
But a good example of a project that has managed to get even the average person to donate is Wikipedia, so maybe with enough nag-bars and the appropriate messaging Fedi instances will manage to do so as well. I certainly hope so! I also hope to see other non-commercial entities like not-for-profit institutions and government bodies on the Fediverse but again I believe these tend to move slowly and only adopt things that have sufficient momentum, momentum that might come from the Meta move.
It will take longer if no big company very involved but I don’t think we are in a hurry here.
In my opinion there is some hurry, we’ve already seen Mastodon user count slumping before the latest Twitter fiasco and alternatives like Bluesky and Threads are coming online, whether they federate or not. Social media relies on network effects, and the current collapse of Twitter is a golden opportunity for the Fediverse to get that critical mass necessary for widespread adoption. Slow steady growth might not be possible, as people don’t tend to stick around if most of their (para-)social circle is consolidating on another platform.
Wikipedia was the example I had in mind as well for donation based large scale funding that works. Especially if you consider how over funded the project is as they divert money into tons of side projects while still having enough money in the bank to keep up the site for decades. It makes me hopeful this can work.
I see a danger in too explosive growth. It could lead to an unhealthy rapid change of the user base. This is why I would prefer a somewhat steady growth. But you are absolutely right in that there are big opportunity costs to not making use of the collapse of other platforms. Which with the continued enshittification of social media will likely continue.
Lastly I just want to say how happy I am that healthy discussion like this one are possible around here.
Google killed XMPP by being the vast majority of the network and then defederating from the rest. Most of the gmail users didn’t even notice anything had happened.
I see a couple of differences here. One is that it should be obvious to even the most casual of users that other instances exist. And the second is that other mega-corps have said they’ll build instances too. With multiple very large instances, they may end up holding each other hostage, for fear of losing users to each other when so many people have multiple logins just because they have an account with one of the mega-corps.
One thing is for sure. Insta has 1.6bn users and it doesn’t need to federate with anyone at all; the fediverse is a rounding error to them. Some people will want the massiveness of the network, others will want better moderation than the mega-corps are likely to offer, and some will prefer smaller networks anyway. There will be as many reactions as there are instances to react. And that will have to be fine.
A lot of smaller Masto/Pleroma/other "microblog" side of the verse admins signed FediPact. It's mostly smaller instances, but there's still a good amount of them and it's enough that Meta will at least face some struggles in wide federation.
My opposition to Facebook joining the Fediverse, through threads, is that everything that Facebook touches, becomes garbage. Instagram was a fantastic photo sharing app, until Facebook bought it, destroyed the community, and then changed the app from photo sharing to video sharing. Most of the people my age were part of Facebook, when it was young, vibrant, and a network of friends of friends.
We chose to leave Facebook for a reason. We chose to leave Instagram for a reason. For the leeches to then come, and invade yet another space is frustrating. We made a conscious choice to break from our Facebook friends, and Instagram friends, and now Meta wants to invade the Fediverse.
For me, it's not about protocols. It's about their habit of invading and destroying communities. Twitter was invaded and destroyed. With Twitter's demise, I considered dumping social media, altogether. Reddit reacted so strongly to their own changes, because we have seen how badly Twitter is being treated today. Reddit doesn't want to allow that to happen to them. For clarity when I say Reddit, I mean the Reddit community, not the Reddit owners and shareholders.
Kbin has only existed publicly for a little over two months.
Lemmy has been around for four years.
It’s rather significant imo that Kbin is on par functionally with Lemmy, and Kbin.social has higher active user counts then all but a few Lemmy instances. Kbin seems to solve issues faster as well in the several weeks I’ve been here anyway.
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