Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
Meta is a socially transmitted disease. There’s no reason to “wait and see” with Meta, we already know them. Meta is not new, it’s Facebook, with a new name and a fancy new logo to deflect attention away from all the terrible shit they do and have done, to individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole.
So much terrible shit that unlike many Wikipedia articles that have a “controversy” section, Meta/Facebook has entire pages devoted to their terrible shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulation_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
There’s more. Meta is not some new and exciting player in the ActivityPub field. They’re a known quantity, and there’s nothing to gained by allowing them to flood the Fediverse with low-quality shitposts at best, massive social manipulation campaigns at worst, and everything in between. In my humble opinion.
EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.
I’m no fan of Meta or their practices, to be clear. Though I do think there are potential benefits in having the ability to communicate cross-platform, so long as some reasonable safeguards are put into place. I’m firmly in the camp that doesn’t believe that Google killed XMPP because XMPP was never a popular or widespread protocol prior to GTalk, and the users who came and went when Google did what they did were Google users, rather than XMPP users. So much like Eugen here says, it went back to how it was before they got involved.
That said, I do think that Meta in its current incarnation is an entirely different animal. I suspect that early on in a post-federated world, we’ll start seeing dark patterns intended to lure users to Threads. I’m envisioning registration gates similar to paywalls on news sites. “This content is available exclusively on Threads! Click here to register your account!” type stuff. More sinister, there’s nothing to stop Meta from appending advertisements in the body of posts created on Threads. Hell - they could go full evil genius and suppress that they’re doing it entirely on their own platform since they’ll have some other ad delivery mechanism there, which would mean the only people being served those ads would be federated users OFF of Threads who see or interact with content created on Threads.
So while I’m not a doomsayer about Threads and federation, I do think that we as a community are going to have to make some decisions about how to handle them. Having access to a community the scale that Meta will produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And because of how Lemmy / Mastodon / KBin / Fediverse apps work, we as users will always have the ability to control what we see in our feeds. At worst, it makes /All/ less usable, which is admittedly quite a big loss given how useful it has been to get subscribed to worthwhile content since joining Lemmy. And obviously, some instances will elect not to federate with Threads at all, which gives users choice on the type of community and content they want to interact with regularly.
With some care, likely some effort around defining usage rights for user generated content, and some new content control / filtering capabilities yet to be developed, I think that these networks can coexist in a way that is mutually beneficial to a degree, but if not - defederation is a click away.
Stop giving big corpo any more chance at 3E saying “no this time it’d be different” no the outcome is the same every time.
As has been mentioned before, Meta can scrape most data from the Fediverse already as it is publicly available.
One strategy could be to default to publish to followers only, and not public? It would be a great loss for the open web, but it might be a necessary one to make sure blocked instances do not get access to most of our data.
Another solution could be to publish all posts under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I assume would legally block Meta from using our content in any context as they earn piles of cash on mixing user generated content with ads. Not sure if they would respect it, but it might give us an option for a class lawsuite in the EU?
Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.
It’s just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we’ve seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn’t have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn’t hear where that ended up going.
I’m hoping that this happens irrespective of other steps that may need to be taken with respect to Meta or other corporate interests in the Fediverse. Since the data is all completely public, it would help clarify “ownership” of original content, allow for meme culture and virality to continue to occur, but still give some avenue for people to raise claims against these large entities.
Someone is eventually going to try to marry a blockchain to this tech so that there’s an infinite record of content with receipts to the beginning. Privacy concerns all over the place, but it seems like such a natural extension to the already completely public nature of the content being generated throughout the fediverse.
The Mas.to admin claims to have “blocked Meta’s domains” already. Maybe that could prevent the scraping? Maybe not.
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It’s very… basic. One timeline, can’t filter anything out… ton of garbage. No thanks. Holy shit it’s bad.
And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.
Paid promotion I’m sure — if not, sad that people are admitting they are “addicted” so far.
I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.
Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.
If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.
Yeah I’ve been taking a similar approach, to social media. I’ve avoided the algorithm.
I mean, I don’t really do social media in the usual sense, never had Facebook, nor Instagram. I did have a Twitter account but I used it to follow certain accounts and didn’t tweet, so it was basically an RSS feed. I used a 3rd party app and only saw my subs, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts.
Same for Reddit, used a 3rd party app, no ads, no suggested/promoted posts, I only ever read a feed of my subs.
My Reddit and Twitter subs/follows have been mostly hobbies, niche areas of interest, products I own, sports etc. no politics or news discussions. So I’ve really avoided being exposed to most of that toxicity I keep reading about.
This is why losing 3rd party apps was a big deal for me. I don’t want to read sponsored/promoted/suggested posts or ads. I’d rather not use the service at all if I have to.
That’s why I’ve fully moved to Lemmy and Mastodon.
Umm…read the article.
I did already.
Honestly, I’m kind of bummed that so many people are stomping their feet and saying they don’t want the big guy to find their little cabin in the woods.
If mas.to – where I signed up for Mastodon – defederates Threads, I’m just going to lose access to the vast population that will simply use that easiest means of joining the Fediverse.
Defederating is just going to chase droves of people off independent servers and into the arms of Zuck.
It does either way. As you said defederating threads makes an instance not viable for you. Many people might think that way. This defacto lessens decentralization and increases vulnerability to an eventual takeover.
And defederating threads has the issues you mentioned. Both comes with problems and in the end it might split the fediverse.
Or am I missing something?
But the other side of the coin is that if they don’t defederate, my instance remains completely viable. I will continue to happily chug along on mas.to in my Trunks app.
If we federate now (i.e. don’t actively defederate), even the normies will learn early-on that they can sign up on a non-Threads instance & use a non-Threads app, and not have The Algorithm crammed down their throat like it is now on Threads. And they can still see Taylor Swift or Paris HIlton or whoever’s posts, if they choose. Additionally, if they see non-Threads content up-front, normies have something to be upset about if Meta splits from the Fediverse in a likely inevitable dick move. And if our first move isn’t to chase every normie off a non-Threads platform, there will be stuff they actually value not-on-threads-dot-net.
If we defederate from the beginning, normies don’t know what they’re missing, and they don’t care about non-Threads instances. Anything not Threads fades into obscurity as more & more people trickle away to where the content is. And we just make the doomsday Meta takeover actually more possible.
I think both scenarios are absolutely possible and possibly huge have up and down sides. I just hope this cool place we got here will survive and stay cool. I find it impossible to predict what will happen at this point. Some instances will block meta and some won’t. Which is the nature of decentralization and the thing instance owners should do. Decide for their instance and the people on it what they think is right. People can then leave or join instances that align with their ideas. Shit is going to get real soon around here.
Block the shit outta it. Hope no one signs up lol
There’s a 90% probability that Threads takes over from the failing Twitter. Nothing will change. No one will learn anything. More of everyone’s data will be stollen.
They had 10 million signups within 7 hours of launch.
So they say
Anecdotally, through what I’ve seen of even just local Twitter accounts (like breweries, reporters, friends talking about Instagrammers they follow, etc), I think I believe them.
Threads being federated fascinates me. In one hand, it ends up being a gateway to mastodon / Lemmy for some. People who grumble about how “evil” Twitter / Facebook is but use it anyhow because “that’s where everyone is” may at least have their toes dipped into those concept and some of that may now see leaving as a viable option to something that isn’t evil as long as they can still see that content. It’s still seems to early to tell.
They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).
I think it will depend on the type of community, whether “the main one” ends up on Threads.
Stuff like FOSS communities will actively avoid threads. It’s just like hipsters avoiding mainstream whatever V2. We’re seeing that same scorn in these threads.
Stuff like “what’s Taylor Swift up to today” communities… 100% threads based.
Really, the only things I think the current Mastodon userbase would care about losing if Meta pulls an inevitable dick move and splits Threads off Fediverse are corporate things.
I’d wager that I’m not the only one who still keeps a Twitter account so I have access to customer support on Twitter for product & services I use. Because, lets face it – customer support on Twitter is almost always better than waiting on hold via the “official” support lines. Those same channels of communication will 100% start showing up in Threads.
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Sounds like mastodon doesn’t mind lying with vipers and is trying to justify it
If threads becomes larger than the entire fediverse, then it’s stupid to not be compatible with them to use their content for the mastodon users. You can also begin to pillage users every time the platform does something stupid with theoretically minimal issues of losing followers.
it already is no? Threads has 15 mil users in 24 hours.
Locking post as comments are getting off topic and are not following the rules of the community.
I think a lot of people getting the fantods over this don’t grok the finer points of federation.
I see it as free advertisment. Especially because it won’t be available for some time in most of Europe. Word gets out that you can join Threads(without ever joining it) anyway, that is basically free advertisment for Mastodon instead. It have a fairly big chance of working like a boost for Mastodon it self.
Very sensible. Nothing wrong with increasing the scope of the fediverse. If things start getting evil we can take steps at that point.
I am just afraid at that point it will be too late… Anything created by facebook is imho quite dangerous and the fact they want to come to fediverse is a bit scary for me.
