With the launch of Threads, there's been a lot of interesting talk about the safety and privacy risks it poses to people on the fediverse, if and when Meta begins federating. But it's also worth examining the risks to the social systems....
This is a good point, and embarassingly, I wasn't aware of the changes to the reputation algo until just now! For me, one of the underlying issues at play here is that someone on a lemmy/kbin instance is seeing information presented in a certain way: pages with ranked posts, with other 'competing' content next to each other. A Threads user (or Mastodon user, for that matter) just sees a post in a feed they scroll through, so their interactions with it don't have the same meaning, in a social sense.
I really think that making a boost or a favourite from a non-kbin/lemmy instance count toward the rankings undermines the social and psychological dynamics of the link-aggregator style of presenting information. Maybe I'm being a little vague here, just trying to find the right words to express the problem. But your solution is along those same lines, so I think we basically agree on the issue even if we're coming at it from slightly different angles :)
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
The first one that comes to mind is that defederation DOES stop your posts from going to Meta's platform when combined with the AUTHORIZED_FETCH server setting, while a simple user-level block may not. Depending on your server's settings, your posts may or may not be available on the open web where Meta could scrape the data - but this is still very different from them appearing in the feed or search results of, say, the transphobic, racist, or antisemitic groups that call Meta home.
This has serious implications for user safety and should not be overlooked. In fact, user safety is one of the biggest issues I have seen people mention when advocating for defederation.
Second: it's not yet clear if threads will allow their users to follow people on Lemmy or Kbin servers. But if they do, their users - including, for instance, the millions of followers of some big celebrity or politician - would be able to uprank posts and influence what you end up seeing. You might have LibsOfTikTok tell their users to brigade any posts critical of them, who knows. Meta's own algorithms could end up surfacing certain posts to their users, making the post rankings here largely a reflection of what Meta wants their users to see.
In other words, there's a lot more to the story than just 'blocking their content' when it comes to why you would want full defederation.
Here are a couple of blog posts that go into more detail around some of the data & privacy issues with federation:
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)
There have been a number of polls - virtually every one ends up at ~63% in favour of a preemptive block. I've collected a few polls about the topic, here's some links
Threads Will Break Kbin And Lemmy: interoperability isn't just about the protocol
With the launch of Threads, there's been a lot of interesting talk about the safety and privacy risks it poses to people on the fediverse, if and when Meta begins federating. But it's also worth examining the risks to the social systems....
Congressional Report Finds Meta and Tax Prep Companies “Recklessly” Shared Taxpayers’ Data – The Markup (themarkup.org)
I swear, almost every single day there is a new piece on how terrible this company is.
Defederation, Threads and You
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 | CNN Business (www.cnn.com)
Keep in mind, this company had 23 Billion dollars in profits in 2022:...
FediPact gets a mention on the BBC! (article titled Threads: Meta sets out planned new features) (www.bbc.com)
Nice to see the Pact getting a little bit of press :)...
FreeFediverse.org wiki <3 (freefediverse.org)
great collection of resources, writing, etc for supporters of a Fedi that's free from the clutches of surveillance capitalists. Thanks to @ophiocephalic for putting it together :)
Why Defederate Meta?
(x-post from Fedia.org/m/DefederateMeta)...
Instances with 25+ members that have signed the FediPact
The list below is being updated manually, so if an instance is incorrectly listed, or its signup status has changed, please let me know....