this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Defederation is cancer and it will kill Fediverse faster than any Meta.
Millions of Facebook users outnumbering previous users 100 to 1 will kill it. Oh, there'll be more activity than ever, but it will be a sanitised corporate safe space for advertisers, where millions of normies argue about politics, with misinformation and ads sprinkled throughout.
Okay, and as inevitable as that seems, how about instances wait until that happens, and THEN defederate? The preemptive defederation is disappointing to see. My home instance has done it. I'll have to wait and see who DOESN'T defederate so I can make an alt account and see for myself what happens.
Meta is a known bad actor right up to the point of knowing they were facilitating a genocide and choosing not to do anything about it because "growth".
"Yes, he's murdered people before in cold blood, but maybe he won't this time. There's no excuse for banning John Wayne Gacy from the party!"
I'm well aware and deleted my Facebook long long ago.
And yet, despite "knowing" that Meta is a known bad actor, you're fine with "wait and see" when John Wayne Gacy wants to come to the block party.
Yes, because they aren't in control of the platform. We are. We can observe and decide, and they can't stop us. The choice here isn't "meta or not meta", but rather "act based upon evidence or not" - meta and their handling of their own platforms where that had absolute control is not what we have here. This is a new situation. But here's the thing, we will see the data, regardless. Some instances will choose to not defederate immediately, and we will still all benefit from the observation.
Meta has no control over elections but has had definitive negative impact on the same. Meta has no control over Myanmar's government nor Buddhist institutions yet had had definitive negative impact (to the tune of tens of thousands of bodies and millions of displaced people) on that nation.
This one fact alone should give you pause about letting Meta stink up the fediverse: Threads' userbase is so large that the entire fediverse, all platforms, is a rounding error by comparison.
So federating with Threads means federating with a userbase that has been algorithmically-conditioned to doomscroll and rage (because that causes "engagement" by which Meta means "ad revenue") for well over a decade and letting them loose in the fediverse at large.
Fuck that noise.
Let Meta stay in its own smelly shack with the faecal discharge coating the floor, the walls, and the windows. I don't want that here.
You imagine the doomsctollers aren't present here already?
They're here, sure, because they're everywhere. But the platform doesn't amplify their addiction via careful rage-baiting algorithmic feeds.
So you're saying you Want your experience here to be dominated by ads, lies, and propaganda?
You're almost as good at it as them, the way you put words in the mouths of others.
How about you wait until you have aids, and THEN use a condom?
wouldn't Facebook/Threads users be the ones getting the ads?
Not all ads are marked as ads
So, companies will create Threads accounts and use them to post ads as regular Threads posts, then? Because that's what the block button is for.
There's also nothing that stops any company from doing exactly this in any instance that currently exists, including spinning up their own instance.
If we're talking ads that Threads will be inserting into the feeds on their site, what does it matter? Either they are a user making a regular post treated like any other user or they are something that Threads can only push on their own site.
Federation on Threads will be opt-in, you'll be able to see posts only from people who actively decided to be available on the Fediverse. So it's not going to be a 100 to 1 situation.
Posts on threads might be, but they can't force their standards onto posts or users on other servers. That's kinda the point of federation.
So, posts from Threads users will have to meet Threads "safe space" rules (because they are Threads users and Threads can require whatever it wants of them), but this means nothing for your posts on any other server. Worst case, Threads blocks you from visibility on Threads.
Threads has no power to push their ads onto any federated server. They can show whatever ads they want on Threads, but those ads don't appear to anyone else and likewise they couldn't do anything to artificially make their content show up higher on any other server.
That's called growth. Or do you want to keep Lemmy exclusive for marginals?
Ability to choose with whom to federate with is a core concept of the Fediverse
If you don't want any defederation, join an instance that doesn't do it.
No, that's not a core concept of Fediverse, that's exactly the opposite. You want echo chambers? There are plenty of them already. It should be the user who decides what content to see and with which instances to interact, not instance admins.
Imagine Chrome not allowing you to visit specific sites and then Firefox not allowing you to visit a different set of sites. That would be a death of the web.
Imagine a worse, less fitting analogy
You can literally spin up your own instance in 20 minutes and see every instance ever if you'd like, it's a choice and its good to have
You can build your variant of Chrome yourself as well. Analogy is fitting.
Yeah, and it will end up with huge echochambers full of xenophobes scared of everything and defederating everyone. Defederation is the last step, not the first. Here, paranoia over what might happen years later down a very slippery slope makes people throw away the opportunity to actually grow the platform instead of leaving it with barely any people at all.
baby its not xenophobic to defederate, calm down
No one said such a thing. Where did you get it from?
Go join a monolithic network if you are not interested in the features of the fediverse.
You have yet to show where your statement came from
They literally quoted that statement. Your lack of reading comprehension sounds like a you problem.
Read the original comment again. They didn't state what this person is claiming at all.
And yet I'm the one who can't read...
I went back and read it three times because I thought I was going crazy, it does say that - in charity you can say that he's not saying it's a xenophobic action but an action taken by xenophobes people, trivial distinction though.
Also though I will go a step further and say it is xenophobic because xeno is like in xenomorph, the alien wasn't from a different country the word means from a different origin so fits perfectly apt to describe the situation as it's the origin of their accounts. Though of course it's common usage does normally imply nationality.
A xenophobe is scared "of the others". Usually this means people from another country. But right here, it means the countless users that can't accept other people, simply because they are from another platform. Or better yet, thinking that those users are somehow inferrior because they come from that platform. And better yet, right now the proposition is to "block them all" for no reason whatsoever other than "we are scared of 'them'"
Do you see the comment from user “Maalus” immediately prior to the comment that you first replied to? That’s where it was said.
If you cannot see that comment it’d be interesting to understand why. Maybe you have blocked that user so can’t see his comment but you are seeing replies to it?
I don't get why they want to defederate without any experience of it either. Let's see what Meta brings to the table. Maybe they'll shine a light on the Fediverse and we get a more varied group of people on the platform.
What Meta has brought to the table in the past. "Maybe we should give them a ~~second~~ ~~third~~ ~~fourth~~ umpteenth chance!
Anyone wondering it's a long winded article blaming meta for a genocide, personally I don't really see how it fits the conversation beyond 'zuck bad' because it's nothing that's going to happen here
It is an illustration (and a particularly powerful one) of just where Meta's ethics lie.
You don't invite serial killers to your Halloween party. You don't invite Meta to your online community. Same reason in both cases.
On the contrary, defederation is vital to the health of the network. Choosing which instances to not interact with, like far-right groups and hate speech groups, allows users to focus on reasonable content on their home server.
The instance should also be transparent on which instances they defederate with so occasionally the user can venture out into the wild west and see other instances and their points of view.
That causes fragmentation of the network, which in turn will kill Fedi over time.
On the contrary: Advising popular instances to defederate with threads will actually help promote diversity of instances, since the Threads population is orders of magnitude a larger network than Mastodon. Having popular instances defederate with threads will keep lemmy from actually just merging into the threads network.
No, as I explained in other comments.
federate with gab again
I totally agree.
Users should have the power to block instances themselves, not just moderators.
Exactly cuz threads will lure a lot of people in the fediverse after the fediverse gets even more accessible and for all means more recognition than we can think about defederating threads.