What would be the problem if Threads federated with Lemmy&co in the future?

I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta’s control?

I presume I’m missing something, as you can probably tell I don’t fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.

Cevilia, (edited )
@Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).

First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.

Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).

Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…

Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.

Swictor,

Sound to me like the worst case scenario is that some of the users gained in the debacle is also lost afterwards. Why would the users that joined the fediverse with a purpose leave for threads in the breakup?

NotAPenguin,

leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends.

digehode,

The EEE strategy would lead to the big corporate entity being the way most people interact. New users would go there instead of other platforms to engage. In time, a lot of the users and content would be on the corporate platform because it’s the one that has the most reach, marketing, etc. so defederation would be a big hit.

GunnarRunnar, (edited )

There's also users that potentially could join other instances but because of some exclusive feature Threads has, they choose it. So basically rest of the instances are bleeding users to Threads.

IronDonkey, (edited )

I can’t speak for anyone but myself.

I am not attached to the fediverse. The federated aspect is, to me, interesting from a technical standpoint, but irrelevant to my decision to be here. I’m also not particularly attached to foss principles.

I came here because I got annoyed at reddit. I’ll continue to poke around here exactly as long as it’s entertaining/informative. That purpose is not contradicted by leaving here for threads (it’d have to be a reddit clone instead of a Twitter clone to pique my interest at all, but leaving that aside).

So if, over the next few years, more and more of the content that I was interacting with was coming from threads, then threads split off, it’s reasonably likely that I’d want to continue interacting with threads. And if the majority of the stuff I was interested in was on threads, I probably wouldn’t bother coming back here.

A reasonable reaction to that is “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, and that’s fine. But what could conceivably happen is that something like threads uses what has been built here to gain ground, then starts leeching away communities. They start moving to Facebook servers because Facebook has butt tons of money so the servers are stable, and besides, everyone else can still get there from other instances. Then Facebook starts adding incompatible features, which motivates more migration to their instances, and so on and so on, then there’s a split.

Now Facebook’s threads has devoured your communities, taken your users, and so taken your content, mostly just to jumpstart it’s own growth. To get what they are familiar with, people like myself stay on/move to Facebook, leaving the fediverse to rebuild the communities that it built in the first place, out of the people who care more about foss principles. While appearing to external observers like an inferior clone off the Facebook threads thing, to add insult to injury.

So the issue is that you wouldn’t lose just the new stuff from Facebook, but a fair bit of the preexisting stuff that sided with Facebook after the split out of convenience. What you’d keep are the people who stick it out out of loyalty to foss or federated or some other principle - and that may not be enough to carry on the level of content that’s desired, even with the fediverse’s “size isn’t everything” philosophy.

Of course, it’s possible that either a) none of that would happen even if there were federation with Facebook and everything would be fine forever, or b) all of that would happen even without federation with Facebook, just without the intermediate stage where there’s interaction. But the above seems to be the concern, and it’s not without merit (both because of past examples and, well, because I know I personally wouldn’t stay if the content were more appealing somewhere else and I don’t think I’m unique).

Personally, I think that with Twitter reeling at the moment, all the Facebook version has to do is be similar enough to be familiar, have good performance, and be easy to use to have a shot at that nabbing that part of the market (including users from the fediverse) - interoperability with mastodon or not. But predicting the future is rather difficult, so it’s hard to say.

qeqpep, (edited )
@qeqpep@lemmy.world avatar

The less innovation (avatars!), the harder it seems to justify the breakoff. 'd seek opinion of ActivityPub dev, is it easy to break the twitter era stuff by adding (what?) new feature

CoolBeance,
@CoolBeance@lemmy.world avatar

Wow, this is crucial reading. Previously I was basing my dislike for Threads federation because Meta but this has refined my overall stand greatly. Thanks for this.

Redecco,

That’s a great article, thanks for sharing

yesdogishere,

Anything from meta or threads or instagram needs to be permabanned from our network. ban them NOW.

red,

The XMPP stories/comparisons are such bullshit, imho.

Sure, both Google and Facebook both used XMPP for a while (even at the same time, so you could message someone from Google on Facebook), but XMPP was an unpopular niche protocol before that and it’s still the same today. I used to be an uber (foss) nerd at the time but even for me the appeal was close to zero - although I’ve tried it several times.

I’ve also literally never heard of anyone signing up for Google or Facebook due to their alleged XMPP 3E strategy. Google Mail was already the most popular and most hyped mail provider and Facebook was at its height as the defacto quasi-monopolist social network as well - everyone who was willing to sign up with them had already long done so.

(Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)

faltuuser,

You are absolutely right. Really getting tired of that one post about how to destroy the Fediverse. XMPP and lemmy/kbin comparison are not equivalent. XMPP didn’t have enough users to sustain themselves in the first place. Also google tried the same with AMP and failed.

ShittyKopper,

(Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)

XMPP is still chugging along on the backends of stuff like that. I’m not sure but I think WhatsApp has some XMPP in it still.

The most ironic one though is Jitsi, which is what Matrix uses/used (until they started working on Element Calls) to do video calls.

red,

Yup, and I guess XMPP is fine for Cisco’s solution or Jitsi. But XMPP has always be used in a rather centralized way, the feature to talk to users on other services was always niche. And this centralized way has survived, where XMPP is used among users on the same server. Which is alright, but don’t tell me Google/Facebook killed XMPP.

Gointhefridge,

Great article. It’s pretty obvious to me now that the Fediverse should have room to grow on it’s own naturally. It’s probably in the best interest to block any massive corporate entity from joining in and swallowing it whole.

It’s interesting seeing how fast it’s already growing due to mega corporate incompetence, and I think the sheer desire to escape that landscape is driving growth now and we should nurture that as long as possible.

jakwithoutac, (edited )

@Cevilia has the most correct answer I think but I want to add my opinion as a refugee.

Right now newer Fediverse users like myself are experiencing a new level of choice and autonomy that we didn’t get with the other centralised services. EEE is a practice that slowly erodes that freedom by diluting our user base and eventually forcibly absorbing it.

An analogy:

The centralised services (Reddit, Facebook, etc) are a city and we used to be citizens. However, we took exception to how the city was being run and protested. In response, we were told ‘tough luck, like it or leave’, so we left and are now outside the city walls.

We enjoyed a lot of what the city provided so we’ve started our own village and built the tools so that other people can start their own village too, all in the hopes that this collection of villages will eventually function like the city but without the small group of councillors who were in charge of everything.

Now the councillors are peering over the city walls, seeing that we’ve got some basic services set up and are starting to attract more villagers and that means the stuff we’re making is pretty cool. So they’re expanding their city wall to a point that’s right next to our village and telling their citizens to visit us to look at our cool stuff, and will say that it is actually the city providing the cool stuff because they were generous enough to allow the citizens through a gate. Eventually they’ll try to expand the wall around our village too and the citizens will like this so too few people will say anything about it.

Now we could just move again and start a new village, but should we have to? Why would we bother when we can just put up a magic invisible wall of our own that stops the city seeing our cool stuff, but still allows the citizens to move to the countryside with us and become villagers.

Very_Bad_Janet, (edited )

OMG, I just realized that this is the Jacksonville-ization of Social Media. (Florida peeps will get what I'm saying.)

Today,

I want to learn about that. What does that mean?

Contramuffin,

Great answers in general, but I just want to pitch in my answer, because this was how I was able to make it click, and maybe it’ll help someone else

Let’s imagine if a company wants to destroy a small group. In this case, Meta likely wants to destroy the Fediverse because it recognizes that the Fediverse could compete with Meta in the future. What can that company do? If you were that company, this is what you can do:

  1. First, pretend to be nice and say that you want to work together with that group. You want a cooperation, and as a big company, you have the resources to make the group even better. The small group is ecstatic and accepts the cooperation.
  2. At first, you do exactly what you said you would do. You put in 50% (or sometimes even more) of the effort, and the developers of the small group put in 50% of the effort. The cooperation seems pretty good and lots of work is getting done.
  3. Over time, you slowly start putting in less and less work into cooperating. Maybe for one feature, you put in 40% of the work, then for the next, you put 30%, etc. Eventually, you’re developing your own features without sharing your work with the devs of the small group, and the devs have to struggle to try to figure out what you did. Meanwhile, the devs still think you’re acting in good faith, so they’re still sharing their side of the work.
  4. Users look at your platform and the small group’s platform, and they think that the devs of the small group are just not really that competent. They don’t realize that the reason why the small group seems to be lagging behind is because you’re refusing to share your side of the work. Users start switching over to using your platform, since it’s so the same content anyways, right? It’s just less buggy and has more competent development, right?
  5. Once most of the users have switched over, you then suddenly flip your stance and say that, really, cooperation isn’t really working and that you want to stop cooperating. You break off from the small group, and since most of the users have already switched over to your platform, they leave your small group, not realizing that they’ve been duped. The sudden decrease in users in the small group completely devastates the group and the group never fully recovers.

The group could still exist after the break, but its reputation has been destroyed and people no longer see it as a viable alternative to big companies. As a result, even if the group remains standing, the user base will not grow any longer, and the group may even end up with fewer users than they started with.

How do we know for sure that what I said will happen? Because other tech companies have done this exact same thing before. In fact, it’s so common that it’s got its own name: EEE. So a lot of people here are seeing the writing in the wall. If Meta is offering a cooperation with the Fediverse, what do you think is the likelihood that they’re actually wanting to cooperate in good faith?

count_duckula, (edited )
@count_duckula@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Even if there is nothing wrong with Meta trying to federate with the Fediverse, I do not want them here.

Honestly, at this point I am quite jaded and sick of the shenanigans of big tech. Repeatedly they have violated the trust of their users. Unless they show active change in the way they conduct their operations for the benefit of the end user and not advertising agencies, I would prefer to not have them in my life if I can help it.

EDIT:

I might have misread the intention of your post. If you are asking about the fallout of Meta federating, there is a possibility that they attract too many users to their platform. This is my personal anecdote. I wanted to get rid of all products owned by Facebook to the point where I told my contacts that I am switching to Signal and will be uninstalling Whatsapp. I even reasoned with them that I wanted to choose not to use Whatsapp, and that I still wanted to communicate with them, albeit on Signal. I even emphasised that I wasn’t asking them to uninstall Whatsapp. Ultimately, only about a third of my contacts joined Signal.

Everyone says there is a choice in not using Whatsapp, but is it really a choice when there is no one to talk to on Signal? That is my worry that something similar would happen with Threads.

foni,

I think what some are saying about triple E may make sense, but closing the door is not a solution, the fedivers will grow and that will attract companies, they can be large and obvious as Meta, or they can grow within the fedivers, but they will arrive and try to take over the place, because that is what companies do. If our system is not strong enough to resist this when the company is as obvious as this, what will we do when a new google '05 is born? It’s a challenge, but one you have to go through

Pokadots,

In addition to EEE danger, there are privacy/monetizatiob concerns that others highlighted in another thread (sorry the link is weird, not sure the right way to do it yet) https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/145063/Threads-Monetization-Fears

Th4tGuyII,
Th4tGuyII avatar

The old Tripple E is the problem...

Meta come in with open arms embracing ActivityPub. They use our established communities to supplement their own content, and draw in users that would never have heard of this place to sign up to Threads.

All's going great. But over time they start extending what Threads can do past what ActivityPub can. This "accidentally" starts causing incompatibilities with ActivityPub, which could already cause some users to migrate to Threads.

Once they've done this enough, they use their generated incompatibilities as an excuse to defederate from the Fediverse. This forces anybody on this side that still wants to interact with the friends and content they've made through Threads to sign up over there leading to an exodus.

If that exodus is big enough, it could be enough to extinguish the Fediverse completely. Meta wins, we lose.

faltuuser,

Meta doesn’t need Lemmy. They don’t care about Lemmy. Last time I checked they already had 10M+ users

Th4tGuyII,
Th4tGuyII avatar

They don't need us, but that doesn't mean they don't want us.

We're a market as much as any other, and by them explicitly saying they want to support ActivityPub (Mastodon in particular), they clearly do see us.

faltuuser,

Pre-emtive Defederation is not the solution.

Th4tGuyII,
Th4tGuyII avatar

Maybe it isn't the best solution long-term, but if we fully embrace them they will cannibalise us.

It's silly to be optimistic when we've already seen EEE in action.

Rendh,

Hey Mark, maybe keep your threads to yourself. Thanks.

faltuuser,

Hello to you too!

RBWells,

But they don’t have me. I don’t want a Facebook and want to stay the hell away from Facebook.

faltuuser,

Ofcourse. That is completely your choice.

blackbelt352,

Apologies but Triple E? Quick definition unpack, Google results are giving me all kinds of other information about mosquito viruses, education and electrical engineering

dedido,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Vittelius,

I think the primary fear seems to be giving Meta access to our user data. The concerns seem to be not completely founded but even then there is still the uneasy feeling with helping facebook of all companies with their next project

fossilesque,
@fossilesque@mander.xyz avatar

Don’t believe this, sorry. vox.com/…/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collectio… This has been happening for years with no real recourse.

Vittelius,

Oh I don’t doubt that meta will be mining all the data they can get via this integration. That’s what the company exists for. I’m just not sure it’s any additional data they aren’t getting anyway.

Very_Bad_Janet, (edited )

Will Meta mine user data on a device via its app, or just what is entered on the app? That hasn't been clearly laid out. Meaning, will it look at, say, activity on a bank app or health provider app or pharmacy app on the same device as Threads? Does FB/IG/WhatsApp take device data?

Today,

They take everything! I can say, “We need a new couch,” and suddenly furniture advertisements are thrown at me. Have to remember that we are the product. The platform is just the magic trick that distracts us while the pickpockets strip the crowd.

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