When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
I haven’t heard a single valid reason why federating with Meta is bad. Only people misunderstanding how technology works.
edit: remember pretty much all objections can be solved by personally blocking the domain, rather then forcing it to be blocked for everyone. Also that all the information Meta could possibly get, they can already get regardless because all of our content is public.
The user base on a platform like Threads is probably quite different from that of Lemmy (or reddit) Federating with them means their content is starting to also flood to our platform and in a big way due to their huge number of users meaning that we’re getting our faces stuffed with facebook quality content that many specifically is trying to escape here.
Then block their domain. Problem solved. Any other objections that can’t just be resolved by personally blocking the domain? Don’t ban it by default, give users the choice to ban themselves or not. There’s no downside.
There is a downside: Because many people don’t see the negative long-term effects, Facebook will have enough time to influence and dominate the Fediverse in a negative way. The masses don’t see what Facebook is doing in the long run.
There’s also not much reason to federate with Facebook. Sign up there if you like that network.
I say not federating is influencing the Fediverse in a negative way. Since I obviously don’t agree with that, it’s more content. I don’t like gatekeeping and this sense of toxic superiority that fedi users are above average Meta users. I want to talk to my family. Same can be said with your influence argument, they can sign up there already and use the fedi, which means they’re being influenced already.
I’m extremely against this gatekeeping and want these users. That’s the whole point of social media, to communicate with people. More people is more content, which is the whole point. I don’t want to only communicate with smug users who think they’re superior to a normal person.
I’m very suspicious of Meta and its intentions. I also don’t think I’m better than a Meta user except in my choice of social media platforms, which is only even possible because I haven’t gotten myself into social groups that primarily communicate there. Not everyone is so lucky. If my social group were slightly different I might be a resentful Meta user holding my nose because I would value having a social life over avoiding a company that’s got pretty much everyone entangled anyways. I’d probably try to get people to move platforms, and probably complain about Facebook and Meta as often as I could without annoying everyone, but it’s very likely that they wouldn’t all move off the platform just because one person in the group hates it.
Meta users are welcome to come here. I want everyone to have a non-enshittified, non-corporate social media and that includes people who are currently on an enshittified corporate social media. But Meta itself is not welcome. That means no Threads, no touching us with Meta, go make a non-Meta Fediverse account first. Even if defederating them might not be the most effective, even if they can scrape all our stuff regardless of their federation status, I want to send the message that Meta is very unwelcome here. But its users are welcome. We shouldn’t try to hoard the non-enshittified place all to ourselves. Only gatekeep the place from people who will try to enshittify it—and Grandma from Facebook is not going to try to squeeze us for cash.
So you want the users, but not them to enshittify it, but you also want them magically to come without federating because you think you have a superior sense of social media. Which reality are you in, and how do you intend for the fedi to magically become mainstream with this zero compromise dream scenario you’re coming up with? I don’t even agree with gatekeeping people you think are shitty, because there’s already a terrible fedi population out there like creepy anime instances, truth social, and kiwifarms, etc. Those are all much worse then what you’ll find on Facebook and are already on fedi. Has it ruined the network?
This is just completely idealistic hoping that wants a situation that will never happen, has already failed to happen, and is ignoring the reality of the situation. For the fedi to grow, it means also shitty people coming. That’s where the proper moderation tools become important.
What I meant by “enshittification” is this:
The linked article explains it a lot better with a specific example in my opinion, but the example is pretty long, so I just provided the quick definition from the article.
I am very much not talking about “oh no the normies are coming, polluting our beautiful pure place with memes and innocent questions about how things work that we superior people already understand.” I am also not talking about people I think are shitty, you handle that by defederating instances with a high volume of shitty people and blocking and reporting the shitty people you still come across. I really shouldn’t have said
because what I actually meant here was gatekeeping it from corporations who will try to enshittify it. Like Meta. I misspoke and I apologize for that.
Lemmy doesn’t currently give the option for users to block individual instances. If it did then that would indeed be a better solution
Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! has plenty of perspectives from both sides.
They don’t need to. There’s not any more information they’d get that they can’t already get. You realize all our comments are public and scrapable, right? Regardless if they’re federated or not, our content is public for anyone to scrape.
That’s incorrect. Followers-only posts (and local-only posts on instances that have them) aren’t public. Profiles that don’t make public and unlisted posts aren’t discoverable. And, as Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy discusses, there are plenty of things that could be done to reduce the amount of data that’s public.
Also, that’s only one of the many reasons people oppose federating with Meta.
Because the long-term influence of such a powerful yet detrimental network like Facebook is bad, and when the negative effects for the Fediverse show up, or even later, when enough people realize it, the Fediverse will have been influenced in a way that it can’t go back to a healthy state.
So who determines what’s healthy, and why do you feel the need to take away the choice from others?
“healthy” here means “healthy for the Fediverse”, which means “being nice to each other” and supporting diversity, both values being contrary to the Facebook network, which is predatory to other networks, as having proven in the past.
The need is to prevent the predatory network from accessing the weaker one that promotes diversity and freedom of choice.
It’s that way because of moderation. Trust me when I say, there are some extremely vile servers out there that are significantly worse then anything you’ll find on Facebook. Also I just read this as gatekeeping, assuming that the current users are somehow better to each other then the average person. Also the fedi is one of the least diverse communities I’ve ever seen.
It’s not about the users, but Facebook as a company that has its own agenda against its users in order to make as much money as possible.
It’s also about Facebook seeing other networks not as friendly co-spaces, but as competitors that it tries to crush.
If you talk about users though, the “worse servers than Facebook” are by far less powerful than Facebook, and they impose no danger to the Fediverse.
It’s simple. Meta does not do this because they are nice. Their goal is to collect data, grow the Market and remove competitors. This also includes appeasing (mostly European) Regulators by appearing nice.
Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Don’t know how many times this needs to be said. All your content on the fedi is public. There’s nothing they can see by federating that they can’t already see. Please understand how the technology and privacy works on fedi.