Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
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I dunno. I just stumbled on a movement to push instance owners to defederate any instance that doesn’t defederate Threads.
This seems very much in the vein of dictatorialism / authoritarianism. It’s honestly just gross. This whole “you’re either with us or against us” tribalism is what has made social media so awful these last several years.
Who is this this dictator/authority you refer to that’s forcing instances to defederate?
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I have no problem with people making educated decisions or ask for change based on facts. Fully agree about quality over quantity as well. My issue is FUD, having no idea what you’re talking about and still trying to convince everyone of that is harmful. When people working day and night on these protocols say there are no privacy concerns and no one can show you ads etc. and yet someone with literally zero understanding of the matter claims otherwise.
Defederation is a feature, not a weakness.
True! Defederation is great sometimes, if you have a niche community and there is some other instance directly opposing your values or if content there is illegal in your jurisdiction etc.
Nagging about every single instance with a few bad actors on the other hand is problematic in my opinion
Defederating “from this and that” is actually sometimes problematic here. It’s about instance admins finding balance between freedom and usability (limiting spam and hate). Beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world defederated from exploding-heads.com etc. These decisions were controversial, but they weren’t bold. On the contrary, much thought and care went into these and that can be seen in communities’ support for them (in case of Beehaw, along with hopeful awaiting of refederation by users and admins alike).
But that seems not to be the main issue you’re presenting. Defederating from Threads specifically is an entirely different matter. And people who advocate for it, including myself, have more arguments for it than just privacy.
Though it's not the main point of my comment, I'm gonna list some such arguments, simply to back my words.
- The EEE. Meta could (and quite probably will) try to federate with its millions of users, then use extended protocols putting pressure on Fediverse to adapt, in order to satisfy Meta’s users. They can make it difficult to keep up (e.g. by providing purposely flawed documentation) and the users will grow tired of stuff not working here but working there. Once users register with Meta (since it’s a part of the Fediverse after all, right?), they’ll cut the rest of us loose.
- Badly moderated content. Facebook is already full of it.
- Meta has a history of terrible actions and should not be supported.
Thanks for this great comment! Yes, I totally agree with your arguments and personally hate meta. My problem is posts like this and misinformation about underlying tech (like privacy and ads). Meta will do anything to be the sole winner, but as I’ve pointed here it’s a dilemma and defederating can actually encourage more users to stop using Fediverse to begin with!
We have a unique opportunity. Hitching ourselves to the same corporate social media we’re trying to avoid is counterproductive.
We don’t need everyone and their cousin to be federated. There’s plenty of other social media if you want that experience.
If an instance you’re in defederates, just start your own. Why complain about what people want to do in their instances? Just find another one.
Yes, that’s exactly how you sound.
But I literally said the opposite!
Copying this from another comment I made. Defederating would pretty much cut off a lot of potential new users that want to see posts on Threads while also not wanting to have a Meta account and all the issues that come with it. People here need to realize that they are in an echo chamber. Mastodon and Lemmy needs users and content. Cutting a big portion of that would kill it in the long run. There would be nothing to “extinguish” in the first place in their complaints of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I had a minor debate here re: Usenet, where OP said we basically had an “easy to use” internet 30+ years ago, and AOL won by blanketing people with CDs.
I’m a techie who first got online with a 2400baud modem and I am fully aware that nothing I do can be extrapolated to the general population. Now that I work in the field, designing for “normies” is how and why services grow. The winners are the most usable services, not the most ideologically righteous ones.
(Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term, users of lemmy and mastodon are not special or smart…in this moment in time we’re primarily idealists with strong opinions on centralized tech that most people couldn’t care less about lol)
Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term
I just think it acknowledges that we’re abnormal in how we’re approaching all of this.
Exactly, I have a lot of normie friends that use threads, I don’t want to use it but would love to interact with them. Best of both worlds
if you interact with them, you’re “using” threads
Can you elaborate?
I would have phrased it as “supporting” Threads. If you don’t defederate, Threads will take over your instance. Either directly through the sheer amount of posts, or indirectly by colluding with your instance admins. Or both. It’s how they operate. And then the ads and data harvesting and walled gardens will come.
Defederating would pretty much cut off a lot of potential new users that want to see posts on Threads while also not wanting to have a Meta account and all the issues that come with it.
Kinda the point, no? Kill Threads in the cradle by denying it access to the fediverse.
Part of being free and accessible for everyone is allowing defederation.
This might be what finally drives me to roll my own instance of Mastodon, and potentially Lemmy. I just worry that it’ll pummel my internet bandwidth and/or limited server capacity.
All of this yearning for drama and tribalism is exhausting… I thought I escaped it by leaving Twitter/Reddit, but it’s just bubbling its way back to the surface.
Exactly. Some people are just looking for drama
With a fair cohort moving here to escape the creep of corporate internet, it doesn’t seem, on the face of it, like they’re looking for drama. Saying they are is a handy way of dismissing them out of hand, though.
Did I say everyone is looking for drama? It’s above and not edited, Some people, if someone has no idea how this tech works and does no research and comes to conclusions, yes they’re just looking for drama. Of course, there are good cases for defederation and must be considered.
Like say for instance, calling people little dictators?
Glad you said this. People demanding large instances like this one defederate from stuff they don’t personally like are, frankly, very mislead and trying to be little dictators. That’s not their decision to make.
We are trying to prevent a repeat of Google with xmpp.
This and having a fuckton of scummy users being sent our way by accounts like Libs of TikTok. Harassment will be unbearable and large-scale, especially for tiny instances.
But what do you do when a known Dictator walks in?
Meta is going to establish itself, and go back to old habits once it’s on top in the fediverse.
Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.
I’m not new to this, though usually not very active poster. so yes I have not experienced much harassment tbh.
Aren’t the people demanding that no instance ever defederate for any reason and that defederation shouldn’t be allowed the ones who have an inner dictator that needs to be tamed? I thought the entire point of things being decentralized is that individual instances can operate the way they want, including choosing which other instances to federate with. But for some reason, this freedom shouldn’t be allowed? Am I missing something here?
If you cared enough to read my post (or comments under maybe) you would’ve seen that I have no problem with defederation in general. My issue is defederation of general instances with 10s of thousands of users for literally no reason but FUD. If you can prove that some other instance is harmful, you should definitely consider defederating
I read your post, which equated calls for defederation to being a dictator.
no instance ever defederate for any reason
did I say this?!
Also advocating for defederation (censorship) on an instance with 100K users is dictatorship. specially when you can’t prove that said instance is harmful.
Dictatorship would be one single authority over all instances telling each instance what they can, cannot, and must do. Individual instances choosing who to federate or defederate with when people are free to choose whichever instance they want to be a part of (including being a part if multiple instances simultaneously with different accounts) is nothing at all like a dictatorship. It’s not even censorship like you claim. Nothing is stopping you from joining an instance that still federated with instances that another instance has defederate from. Or starting your own instance and making these decisions for yourself.
Why did I say “no instance defederate for any reason”? Because instances that have defederate have given reasons, and they naysayers like you are not only saying they shouldn’t be allowed to do that, but that doing so is “censorship” and “dictatorship”. I think you need a dictionary because you don’t seem to know what certain words mean.
No one is stopping you to migrate from an authoritarian country either (most of the time) and yet they’re called authoritarian. Also, I’m not saying instances “shouldn’t be allowed to defederate”, I’m saying advocating for this on a general instance with 100K users is wrong. If this was a niche or small community with agreed upon and shared values (like beehaw for example) that would be understandable.
Saying things like “Oh, But You Can Run Your Instance” is dismissive of the issue, There’s literally no option to migrate accounts and expecting average users to deal with this mess is beyond me.
Did you really just equate trying to leave an authoritarian country with signing up for a different federated instance? Every post you make just further confirms that you don’t know what the words “dictator” and “authoritarian.”
Also, I’m not saying instances “shouldn’t be allowed to defederate”, I’m saying advocating for this on a general instance with 100K users is wrong. If this was a niche or small community with agreed upon and shared values (like beehaw for example) that would be understandable.
First of all, this is probably some nuance you should have provided in your original post where you only say that calling for defederation makes you a “dictator” and in no way indicate that there are situation where you think defederation is appropriate. I don’t have time to read your entire posting history just to determine where you’re actually coming from. You could have probably included this nuance in your original post and avoided some of the backlash you are getting.
But second of all, how would you enforce what you are proposing? If larger instances were prevented somehow from defederating, wouldn’t that require some sort of “authority” making that decision for those instance? That doesn’t seem to align with your values based on what you’ve posted.
Did you really just equate trying to leave an authoritarian country with signing up for a different federated instance?
Yes I am, you are suggesting I don’t know the meaning of these words, so I’ve provided an example of the exact same situation (importance doesn’t change meaning of words here, does it?)
If you censor me, you have censored me! The fact that you’re a government or admin of instance doesn’t change word’s meaning.
this is probably some nuance you should have provided in your original post where you only say that calling for defederation makes you a “dictator” and in no way indicate that there are situation where you think defederation is appropriate.
In hindsight, I should’ve but in response to most comments I’ve acknowledged that it’s fine in a lot of situations
But second of all, how would you enforce what you are proposing? If larger instances were prevented somehow from defederating, wouldn’t that require some sort of “authority” making that decision for those instance? That doesn’t seem to align with your values based on what you’ve posted.
May I ask what made you think I’m looking for enforcement here? I believe in human coordination and freedom of choice. If I join a general instance, I don’t expect admins to decide who I can interact with, that’s all!
