this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I hate Zuck and Facebook as much as the next person, but I think the rollout is going slowly enough that we don’t need to fight about it yet.
The discussion is important and needs to be had, but it’s premature.
Everywhere this pops up, the users have decided:
Fuck meta. Fuck threads. Fuck the zuck.
Do not associate. Defederate now
Just block their domain, no need to take away the freedom of other users even if you hate Meta.
And get my server hoggud up by 1.000.000 biased meta shitposts a minute? No thanks.
That's not how federation works, which makes me worried that users who get to "vote" on this thing (they don't, it's the instance owners that do) actually do not understand what would happen.
It's exactly what would happen, as users on my server would look up instances on meta servers.
is there a writeup somewhere that ideally goes into enough detail to clearly understand how instances/federation work and what would really happen ? I hate Meta but I realize I have no clue what threads coming means and implies, decentralized systems are very unintuitive when you're used to conventional social media.
The simple thing that requires no deep dive into protocol design is that threads brings with it a metric fuckton of users: multiple orders of magnitude more users than the entirety of the fediverse across all platforms and sites put together. People have used the analogy of a cruise ship full of tourists unloading on a small seaside village of a few hundred people and trashing the place even without there being a need for malevolence, and there's a certain aptness to that.
Except that Meta is, on top of that, unequivocally malevolent. So to stretch the analogy further, the reason the tourists are unloading in the small village is that Meta Cruise Lines wants to force coastal villages to join their corporate "family" or get obliterated.
right, this is quite evocative and what I initially had in mind, but the question seems to be more subtle? A village is a single centralized unit, here instances can defederate and users can block traffic. Will threads users invade the fediverse village or just not care about it, even if they have access? Could it give an opportunity for ppl to read content that will ever only be threads (political figures. institutions, etc.) without having a meta account and using a meta app? Will the bots that apparently plague threads rn will plague the fediverse? Why don't they now? If some instances defederate and others not, could I have one account where I talk to the tourists, and another account in a defederated instance where I'm back in my calm village?
I agree with the imagery and moral aspects, but I feel like understanding the practical implications which are not obvious to me is important to gather momentum to kick them out - I felt like people disagree on subjects that they probably shouldn't if they both had the same understanding of the situation (which includes me).
If I understand correctly, your server will only receive posts from users that someone on your server has subscribed to, so the number is overblown by several orders of magnitude.
Except if there is a mega meta instance...
Why would that change it?
Because it would drown out all the Lemmy stuff (sorry late replay, Christmas and stuff).
@Valmond
According to what I've read, they haven't implemented yet but you'll have to opt in in the settings of a threads account to be seen on the Fediverse. In other words, it won't be possible to interact unintentionnally with the Fediverse. So, Fediversians will be in a state of complaining in case of bad behaviours coming from Threads.
https://kbin.social/u/@mosseri@threads.net
@xigoi @fediverse
See my other comment.
@Valmond
Another important quote : https://kbin.social/m/threads/t/708169
@xigoi
Interesting. But lemmy is not built to be a personal instance, more of a group thingy (I understand the complexity of it, and I like it, but there are things that will be hard to deal with computer-science complexity wise if one instance gets too big. That's why I'm not just on board against meta/threads.net, but totally against it). In a nutshell Lemmy will thrive being lots and lots and lots of small servers with sub 100k users (probably 10k is a nice number? Or 35 because you like that rare thing).
The best case scenario of letting Meta in is neutrality. Far more likely is then actively destroying stuff. Remember, their motto is move fast and break things
So what are they going to do?
The whole "Oh they'll microsoft it!"-narrative is clearly false already. As plenty people said the last time someone posted that sensationalist "how to kill the fediverse" (or so) blog post already, this is not about Meta trying to "kill" the fediverse. If anything, the opposite. This is them Mozilla-ing it, using it as a defense against new regulations. They can even point to instances defederating en masse as "See? We tried! They're all blocking us, so it's not our fault this cross-compatibility isn't working." and then in the future use that as a defense against further attempts to open up walled gardens. They tried, the supposedly "open" side actively blocked it, now the other side has to move before they try again.
People misunderstand the actually extremely obvious reason they're doing this. There's also an easy reason they're dragging their feet so much: They don't want to. But they have to. So they promise they'll federate, actively hope they get blocked (see above), and only actually do it last-second to avoid issues with new legislation.
your point about them trying to federate as a defense against new regulations is one i hadn't considered before. however, that doesn't reduce the potential harm of federating with threads. facebook/meta have proven at practically every possible chance that they are not to be trusted with even the most inconsequential of things and should be avoided by anyone smart enough to recognize this.
it sounds to me like you are suggesting that federating with threads will prevent them from having that out of "see? we tried", but i feel that cooperating with facebook/meta in any way is a compromise on my morals that i simply can't justify.
i'd love to hear what potential benefits you (or anyone else who wants to contribute) believe federating with threads will bring to us other than a ton of users from a different ecosystem, as the discourse around this has been pretty all over the place recently and i think we need more measured opinions on this.
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/111585528118111249
Zuck has been refining his unethical business model for decades, they aren't joining activitypub to be a team player
Which I never said. Is it required to leave reading comprehension at the door when joining discussions about Meta? Because 'hur dur meta evul" is the extend of allowed specificity?
There's nuance to evil.
So naive.
Thinking everything can be reduced to a DnD like morality matrix? Yeah I agree, that's pretty naive. Hence like I said, people think of this in far too simple terms.
Who is going to be swayed by a bunch of randos on the Internet blocking an obviously evil company from joining them? Congress? They'll just buy the votes for whatever they need. I know nothing about this topic, but it is very obvious that letting an evil company associate with the federal can only make things worse. They're a bad actor, ergo, we should not do what they want.