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What does defederating from Meta's Threads.net actually accomplish? (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Kurt@lemmy.one to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?

(For my part, I'm working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)

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[-] Kill_joy@kbin.social 126 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From what I have read, I think it's all of the above.

a space is wanted free from corps, ads, data perversion
people are fearful that 30 million people joining threads has automatically made it the largest instance. Once it integrates with ActivityPub and can federate, it will dominate the space and produce the majority of the content. People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content and content production with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
many believe meta will not act in good faith and is doing this to appease European courts and laws

Because of all of this people likely believe keeping threads quarantined right off the bat is the best solution to mitigate the amount of damage they can do to what's already been established.

Edit: I am adding to this post as I just stumbled across a post from the host of the lemm.ee instance (which I am a big fan of). He has also listed some great cons of Facebook stepping into the fediverse:

-there is nothing stopping facebook from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores which would ensure they end up on the front page of "all" for federated servers
-threads already has more users than all of Lemmy's instances... therefore, they can completely control what the front page looks like by dictating what their users see and vote on
-moderation does not seem like a priority for threads which would increase workload for smaller instances
-REVENUE FOCUSED

I paraphrased a lot of this but as this is getting some traction I wanted to provide additional visibility to the cons of federating with the Facebook.

[-] Venator@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Just to play devil's advocate:
There could be some downsides to defederating it too:

threads could be a gateway to bring more people into the rest of the fediverse in a user friendly way.
It might cause the rest of the fediverse outside of threads to be more fragmented if some defedarate it and some don't.

[-] Kill_joy@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago

Absolutely agree. The optimist in me wants to be excited for what this means and how this could impact the future of, well, the Internet.

But then I remember this is Meta we're taking about. They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta. As someone who doesn't use meta products, this brings concern.

[-] GONADS125@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is such a blatantly obvious truth that I'm starting to suspect some users here are astroturfing, peddling this bullshit feigned naivety about the rampant unethical practices of FB/Meta. There's enough history that we don't need to question it or give Meta a chance.

I've been working on building the !vans@lemmy.world community, but I may look into moving it to another instance if lemmy.world doesn't change their mind on federating with Threads.

Edit: I guess they've only stated their plan for Mastodon, which is wait and see.

[-] maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, it feels like everyday there's a new post asking "HEY GUYS SHOULDNT WE ACTUALLY FEDERATE WITH THREADS?".

[-] lemmyshmemmy@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Agreed, feels like bots are here pushing for federation with Facebook.

[-] SaveComengs@lemmy.federa.net 6 points 1 year ago

btw, can we stop using the name meta and call them Facebook? i feel like the Facebook brand has worse connotations that should be leveraged to get people off their horrible platforms

[-] Venator@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta.

They definitely do things selfishly in a way that maximises benefits to meta and ignore any downsides to anyone else, but while thier impact is probably mostly negative, there's some small positive aspects to some things they do, sometimes...

[-] theterrasque@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've pointed it out a few times, but I think it still bears repeating.

Meta have done a lot of open source development, and in that way you're using "meta" products daily. They are the people behind React and GraphQL, for example.

React (and React native, also them) is one of the biggest JavaScript frameworks, and GraphQL is an alternative to REST api's that brings solutions to many problems around REST api's.

I can almost guarantee you that some of the pages you visit in a day use at least one of those.

They also have a lot of other things. You might have heard of pytorch, a major library for developing and running AI projects.

Just have a look at https://github.com/facebook and https://github.com/facebookresearch/

Edit: to clarify, my point is that maybe meta only thinks of itself, but technology wise they do it pretty altruistic and help the related technological communities a lot.