I cam here to get away from all the corporate BS, but suddenly people want to welcome Facebook/Meta to the fediverse? I cannot fathom how people see their intentions as pure or innocent, especially since they aim to profit off of the open source software everyone has worked so hard on.
I just don’t see how the fediverse survives if it decides to let these massive companies make their instances. It feels like it’ll be a repeat of the rise of social media, where all the smaller forms got wiped out by large, consolidated social media platforms.
I for one would like to defederate from any and all corporations.
I love the idea that profit isn’t a focus of the fediverse.
Same. I’ve already added Threads.net to my “Blocked Domains” list on Mastodon. Hoping to be able to do that with Lemmy as well.
Isn’t a product of the fediverse yet.
Hard disagree. I want to interact with the grandma’s and family that aren’t tech savvy. The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power. I don’t see how Meta will change that. All I see is that the Oklahoma asshole who wants to debate will get ads and I won’t. Commerical sponsors of the Fediverse is validation of the idea, so let it happen. Yes, Meta will see my username and will try to make ads happen, but thats not what Meta needs or wants: they need high quality content and will accept that some of it they can’t monetize. But if they can monetize those users in their corner, then they see value.
“The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power today.” ftfy
The concern people in the fediverse have with companies like Meta joining, is that:
- Embrace: they will “start off” by making the fediverse easy to access for the masses. There will actually be great growth in the fediverse. People will flock to Meta as their choice platform because they will be faster and more reliable than self-hosted fediverse servers.
- Extend: Big companies will begin to introduce new features, some of it will be added for the open source community to use. Eventually, there will be new proprietary features added (integration with WhatsApp for example) . This means that Meta’s Fediverse will be different from the open source fediverse. It’ll probably start out as something innocent like “needing a Facebook account to post a message / comment in their channels.” Then it gets worse…
- Extinguish: Now the masses have flocked to Meta because it’s fast and stable. This results in many/most of the Self-hosted services to become extinct. Then Meta starts to add more" security", like a fediverse “reputation”. Meaning, if your self-hosted service submits “enough” posts/comments that are not spam, then your allowed to read/post on their platform. This means if your self-hosted and/or a smaller member you will be barred from accessing/posting content. Thus, the fediverse is now owned by big corps and you need to use their platforms (and watch their ads or subscribe) to access content.
Source: Compare the history of e-mail (the original fediverse) before Gmail and Hotmail compared to what we have today. I (as an individual) can run my own mail server, but most of my messages will be marked as “spam”, if I send it to a friend who has a Gmail address, because my reputation is too low. This forces me to “pay” for email.
Setting up an email server at home is almost impossible because domestic ISPs block port 25 and you need a reverse DNS to make your mail look legit. But set up a mail server on a leased VPS it’s not a big deal if you know your way between SPF and dkim.
Running a legitimate mail server is hard because of SPAM, not because of corporate greed.
The embrace/extend/extinguish arguments are all FUD arguments. Arguments 2 and 3 boil down to Threads effectively walling off their side, which would more or less mean de-federation. And what happens when your now free Lemmy instances starts requiring you to pay $8/month? Or what if some of the larger instances decide to commercialize and sell data? FUD is not a compelling argument: the same arguments were made about Microsoft and their open source embrace. And there are plenty of FUD arguments to make against Lemmy.
I would argue that federation with commercial entities will make for a better Fediverse. Sure Meta is subjectively Evil, but it’s motives are clearer than some random dude’s Lemmy instances. And by Federation there is ability to get high quality news, science and technology information. In less than a day, major players joined and were posting to Threads.
The email analogy is a false dichotomy. The reason behind the large email providers is because the cost of the running and maintaining an email server is cheaper than running your own. But you could run a trusted email service if you set up your DNS records correctly.
I really think a Fediverse separate from monetized social media is a healthier Fediverse.
We have a good thing going here. Let’s not invite the wolves into our little hen house.
Tbh if Lemm.ee doesn’t defederate then I’ll probably be moving on to a different instance.
A pretty good blog about the situation I think you should read - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Take an upvote, but I think the situation I’d very different from the XMPP and the office standards or even kerberos. In each of those cases, it was a standard.
For the XMPP case, XMPP use for Google was primary business users. The XMPP case ignores the rise of other, more convient, more engaged communication like Facebook Messenger, discord and free text messaging. For the open standard of OOXML, Microsoft’s aim was to sell Office. And for Kerberos, the AD changed were driven by business reasons. Regular kerberos is insane to admin, and Microsoft made it easy; it doesnt help that Novell’s eDitectiry failed.
With Federation, the story is different. The engagement isn’t like XMPP of connecting to people you know, or the security reasons of AD or even the standards of OOXML. In a sense, Federation is more like DNS or a web server: it’s just about connecting communities.
I hadn’t thought about it this way until I read your comment, but why not let them join the party? If they’re federating like Lemmy and Mastodon, isn’t that an acknowledgment that federation is a valid competitor? And if they’re re-modeling themselves to act like this, doesn’t that indicate we’re on the path to the future and we should welcome as many converts as they want to make?
Edit: Let’s move further discussion here: https://lemm.ee/post/851217
I don’t see any Lemmy <-> Threads interoperability happening in the near future anyway. I haven’t looked at Threads very much, but from what I can tell, it’s mainly going to be a problem for Mastodon rather than Lemmy. Even from a UX standpoint, it does not seem like Threads is really designed to show Lemmy content (and vice versa).
Having said that, Facebook has shown countless times that it’s actively harmful to its users as a platform, so there’s not much reason to believe that Threads would be any different. If Threads ever becomes interoperable with Lemmy, then I think defederation would be completely justified, unless they can somehow completely change their approach to ads, user tracking and feed algorithms. If that day ever comes, I will make a decision together with the lemm.ee community on how to proceed. But for now, it’s not an issue - there is nothing to even defederate yet.
Thank you for giving a clear and concise answer! We appreciate your hard work you’ve put into Lemmy!
Can’t you put threads.net on the defederation list anyway, even if there’s nothing to federate yet? That way, there’s not even a chance for it happening.
What I mean is, how exactly would you know that Threads now has users participating with our posts? It probably wouldn’t be instantly, I wouldn’t bet on there being an announcement on Threads’ side, they might just start showing the content and comments from their users start showing up, and then you’d have this conversation you’re talking about.
Why not just nip it in the bud immediately by pre-emptively defederating so that can’t even happen? I certainly would welcome it.
I would prefer to have a conversation later about federating with Threads in case of those things you mentioned instead of the conversation being about defederating.
Please have this conversation with the lemm.ee community now about pre-emptively defederating. We can still have the other conversation about federating later as well.
Can’t you put threads.net on the defederation list anyway, even if there’s nothing to federate yet? That way, there’s not even a chance for it happening.
Well, at this point, we don’t even know for sure if threads.net will become their ActivityPub domain, so we can’t guarantee anything by doing this. But I will make a post about this topic.
I didn’t think about that threads.net might not be their domain. I still wouldn’t think it’d be bad to just put it there since that domain would very likely be it, but then it’d definitely be fine for me to wait for the actual domain.
Thank you for your work!
deleted by creator
The risk is not so much Threads having access to our data, but thst Threads, with millions of users and teams of full time devs, becomes the standard, allowing Meta to control the development of the open source protocol, and browbeating everyone into using their instance/version/servers.
Companies hate competition more than anything. If meta gets its tentacles in the fediverse, it’ll do its best to be the only option available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I’m pretty sure that, under the hood, they become evil towards their users and don’t change from that. And will never reconsider rescinding the things we’re grateful to not have in the fediverse: profits fueled by advertising rather than donations, tracking sensitive information (including that one can and will use against you), selling that information, and obscure, closed algorithms.
But what you said may be right. Those goddamn C&D orders backed by powerful lawyers…
The network effects are hard to overcome for a majority of people and they shouldn’t be punished for it. I think most of the people in charge of large fediverse instances are hyper aware of the embrace-extend-extinguish mindset and will be wary buying into corporate versions of the fediverse. Personally, I’ll remain skeptical but I won’t advocate for defederating or any punitive actions without cause.
I feel like past experience should inform the decision. Why give em another chance to shit things up?
Agreed. And believe me you, they’ll find a way to screw us all over if we give them half a chance.
This was my first reaction as well but it felt like collective punishment. I think the best path forward should be setting the example we would want them to emulate even if it’s naively optimistic.
I think you are indeed being a bit naive if you think Meta will have any interest in following any good example the Fediverse sets. They only care about profit. They will eat this place if possible.
Yes, that is the most likely outcome and I still think preemptive action is the wrong way to go.
If you expect them to ruin it like corporations have done at every opportunity in the past with federated hosting, why would you even allow them the opportunity. Let people join. Corporations are not people. Don’t treat them as if they are.
In this case, I think there could be some benefit to exposing the larger meta community to the fediverse. How many more people will try linux/self-hosting or learn to appreciate their privacy by becoming aware of all the tools that are out there? Maybe some of those same people who started with threads will switch over to a foss client after learning about how their data is being used. It’s likely going to be a tiny percentage of people but we’re already a very small subset of the social media space. Maybe some of those people will have some influence in their family/community. Again, all of this is pie-in-the-sky thinking and weighing the risks and benefits is worth talking about.
Thats a fair take on the situation. Just hope everyone stays wary of the situation. I wouldn’t put it past instagram/facebook to try to feed ads all across the fediverse.
It survives through the way it works. If they suck enough, they’ll end up being cut off from the rest of it. At the very least, people can choose an instance not ran by them. Even start their own.
My concern is content originating from Threads is going to be tainted by their sorting algorithms.
Are sorting algorithms shared across instances? 🤔
It’s not direct no, the concern I have regarding Meta’s algorithm stems from their size. By being so large, what is popular on Meta’s side would spill over. And I feel the way Meta shapes conversations through their algorithms always ends up in the most dumb and harmful content.
I’m honestly just kinda hoping it won’t be me scrolling on Lemm.ee and all the sudden see the type of shit I can view on Facebook because one person went and visited a Thread made up of Instagram users who just got enrolled in “the new Twitter”.
Then don’t use the platform sorting content by those algorithms? But I see your point. A facebook-sized community would drown us out if they didn’t purposefully expose the rest of the fediverse to our communities and magazines. But, it is my hope that Meta has learned how to do their research, and knows what it is about the fediverse that attracts people, and would build as minimally invasive a filter as possible to allow smaller niche content to bubble up (and not force Lemmy’s hot feed to look exactly like threads.net). I would hope they plan to engraciate themselves with the established communities on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin so that those very vocally anti-corporate groups (and they must know this) would at least tentatively allow content from their platform into the “wider” fediverse.
Thank you for taking the time to respond and see my point. At this point I want a ten foot pole between me and Meta.
But yes, it would be the ability for Meta to drown out and saturate content. It would start all nice and friendly between Meta and the rest. But Meta has to Meta and slowly start pumping things to drive eyes to a way that makes them money.
What I really don’t like is how it seems all of these recent corporate decisions are based on a companies viewing ANY eyeballs that are not looking at their content is a threat that has to be taken out. The sheer entitlement to a human being time. To go out of your way because you feel that they are costing you money because they don’t want to play with you.
People have made every point to be made already in the comments, so I’ll just say I’m here as a user of lemm.ee to put my vote towards de-federating from Threads. And frankly, from any other corporate entity that intends to bastardise the Fediverse.
The purity test has arrived at lemm.ee.
Please answer admin
especially since they aim to profit off of the open source software everyone has worked so hard on.
That’s a two-way street, though, right? There are Lemmy clients like wefwef that are built using open source software (React) that Meta worked on.
It’s an interesting thought experiment. Would wefwef or some equivalent have been possible if React had never been released? Course it would; Angular was and still is a great framework, as is Vue.
Time for a controversial and uninformed take: React gained so much traction early on because of the connection to FB, back before everyone hated FB. Every halfwit tech manager heard of it and had to get on the hype train. It wasn’t ever “better” than Angular but it reached a critical mass and just snowballed.
The FB engineers built it and GraphQL for themselves to solve a specific set of problems on the Wall page but it took a LOT of open source contributors to evolve it to where it is now.
My proxmox virtual manager uses Facebook’s zstandard compression algorithm, it’s fast and it works. Can’t complain.
You’re right, it is a controversial and uninformed take ;)
AngularJS was awful. It was clunky, relatively slow, and wasn’t intuitive to use. It wasn’t until Angular (2) where they started gaining back some good will. Vue wasn’t very popular back then.
React came in with one of the easiest flows you could pick up. Prototyping with React is a breeze. The flow of data makes sense. It is intuitive for a non web developer to use. It was 100% better than AngularJS for the vast majority of things that people needed for it.
Where React falls apart is when you are scaling up with systems that are firing many events at once. It just has no good way of dealing with the amount of re renders. But for small projects and prototypes? Yea, it’s great.
I’m a Software Dev, and I’ve used React for a couple of years now. Using Angular atm though lol.
I get the hate boner for Meta, I have one myself. But Meta maintains the React codebase, you’re really selling them short in that aspect.
Isn’t there ongoing work on Lemmy to give users the ability to block whole instances? I personally would love it if meta never federates to begin with but if they do, next best thing is being able to block them out of my life.
I also suspect that several instances will choose to de-federate and this will be a silo I would gladly join.
I think the situation should be monitored and we should take a “wait and see” approach.
Likely, it will end up like all of Meta’s other products but, that said, I do think a place to easily communicate with a large population isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I see introducing a bigger group of people to how decentralization works is an ultimately good thing but Meta has history of being untrustworthy.
I’m obviously conflicted about it so I’d just like to see what happens and make a decision with as much information as possible.
I honestly see no harm in assuming that Threads is a harmful actor, defederating, and if they prove they aren’t then we can easily federate again. Same wait-and-see approach. It’s no problem to switch from defederated to federated.
It’s just incredibly more likely that it is harmful, thus when using “wait and see” we should be on the default side of whatever that implies while waiting, which in this case is being defederated.
This is absolutely the right approach. Facebook’s reputation should be enough on its own for us to defederate.
If by some miracle, it eventually looks like it’s on the level, that’s when discussions of federation should start.
What we really want is for all the platforms such as Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and any other you can think of, to get out of their silos. Let the content flow and you choose what you subscribe to. Maybe it will be the Fediverse, or maybe something like Nostr, which I think is even better since it incorporates the concept of validating the author of anything. Hopefully, the Fediverse incorporates that concept of validating the author, even if only the clients do it.
Isn’t there an issue with scale here?
With 30m users already, Threads could absolutely create problems for many lemmy instances. I’m not familiar enough with the activitypub protocol to know what gets synced and how often, but seeing the growing pains that already exist I feel like a user count orders of magnitude higher than what we have now couldnt be great.
Can you as a user “defederate”/ignore it? Then it should be up to the user.
No, you can’t. Best you can do is blocking communities and users.
You would gave to pick/make an instance that has the fed-list you desire. But you can make your own custom instance for just you and your friends. Don’t even need to host any communities or take up any server space doing it. So, if you look at it that way… Yes. Yes it is up to the user. It’s just a bit tricky.
So theroerically I could make an instance like lem.ee by myself for the sole purpose of holding my profile, give it a cool name like flipping.flops and then “block” the instances I don’t like?
This is what I ended up doing with Invidious. Rolled my own instance and serve it out to my devices over a ZeroTier network. It is kind of funny that there is all this PostgreSQL table and backend setup to support a single user, but it works really well.
If instances start blocking other instances, that is where the federative system starts falling apart. Don’t subscribe to anything you don’t want to participate in, but don’t make that decision for others. My two cents.
federation means that you cant make that decision for others, as they can set up shop in an instance thats more conservative with their defederation
I’d like to challenge this… I think that’s the entire point of federation and a great strength of the system.
It does put the onus on us as users to choose a home instance meaningfully. The only instance that 100% aligns to your individual preferences is the one you run yourself, which is an option.
I totally agree. Having said that I would change instance if mine restricted what I could view or reach.
Some apps can block instances (Lemmy Connect can) for you locally as a user, but it doesn’t stop your content from making its way INTO the fediverse which is a problem for some.
The problem in this debate is between open source and open choice. Open source purist are often anti choice. If you want to use a closed source, proprietary system, that is your choice. The key aspect of federation isn’t the open source (its great) but the open choice – you can choose your own server (I have my own, FWIW) or some random tech bro or some evil Corp marketeer, or Meta, the point is choice. For each user, there are compelling arguments and compelling reasons for why someone would choose Lemmy or Threads or whatever, the value is in the choice.
So in the demand for our SABDFL to make a choice, we are in effect saying that we want to restrict the choice. Why do we care if there is a great community on Meta or that a great. Community on our server is attracting a broader community? Walled gardens are walled gardens. So I have to ask, what walled garden is the community asking for: open source and closed community? Sound like hell to me.
The real problem in this debate is naivety. You are all over this thread going to bat for an objectively evil company. You had it explained to you why this is an awful idea a hundred ways. And you still want the leopard to eat your face.
I see, you want this thread to be an echo chamber? Got it.
The niavity in this debate is not realizing that most successful open source projects need both commercial sponsor and operators. When the current admin of lemm.ee decides that he’s done, or has financial troubles then this community goes away.
No one is against choice. If someone wants to go on Threads then they certainly are allowed to.
But Threads and what it stands for is the antithesis to everything ActivityPub and the fediverse stands for. Overwhelmingly large instances, even without Facebook association are already a problem through too much consolidation of power. Social networks are only valuable if they actually connect people, and link aggregators in particular do actually depend on there being a decent amount of users and activity. If too much is on one instance, and that instance decides to defederate with smaller instances, those smaller instance may very likely be killed through that due to lack of content.
This would instantly happen through the 100 times as large instance that Threads would be. Your argument of choice is non applicable imo, because as you say, if someone wants Lemmy they can go to Lemmy, if someone wants Threads they can go to Threads. The two do not need to be federated for there to be the choice you mention.
When is a large instance too large?
The bigger threat to ActivityPub right now is the admin’s credit card or legal liability due to hosted content. The most successful open source projects either become or attract commercial projects. IMO, the hobbiest operators will be the downfall of ActivityPub. The hobbiest operators are subject to life happening. I would love to see the number of Fediverse instances that have blinked in and out of existence.
