I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.

They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:

  • Helping enhance genocides in countries
  • Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
  • Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
  • Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
  • Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
  • Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.

Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.

In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.

Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^

Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?

When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?

I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:

  • Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
  • Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.

Edit 1 - Some More Arguments

In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:

  • Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
    • This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
  • Federation will attract more users:
    • Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
    • Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
    • Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
    • Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
  • We just need to create “better” front ends:
    • This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
    • Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
    • This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
    • Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.

PART 2 (post got too long!)

  • Venomnik0@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wouldn’t creating a walled off garden ourselves bolster these corporations? There will just be more users on threads than anything else and people are already moving to threads anyways because that’s where “all the people are” especially people who have a major following and want to interact with where a majority of their followers are. This would just create more harm to artists/influencers on the mastodon platform than it will help and just make Meta even more powerful than they already are. This will just take us back to where we were, a bunch of people separated by social media servers rather than unified. I don’t want to have to make 3 different social media accounts just to talk to people that I’ve known for years. All you’re relying on is assumptions on what the future will be like without actually seeing it first hand. We need to be reasonable and we need to see for ourselves how this will all go before we defederate from millions of people. Sure, Instance admins need to be cautious but the people shouldn’t be separated just because of fear. You’re extinguishing a service already by doing this.

    At the end of the day, I will respect whatever the instance admins on the various mastodon servers decide (especially smaller instances with minority groups that do want a safe space) because I believe Open Source is the freedom to choose. I just simply think it’s too cautious and the people of those major services like Threads are not willing to go use a service like Mastodon. It’s too new and they’ll never understand until we slowly but carefully mass educate them on what even is going on here and what even is a fediverse? We need to get people to see that mastodon is the safe space they need to be because there are people there who want specific things that threads already fails to provide (due to strict ruling and such). We need to be available for them just as mastodon is available to us.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Allowing Threads will increase its power. Not even the totality of Mastodon instances can fight zuckerbot’s size and money. Long term, they want to destroy the competition and be the -only- option.

      Giving the benefit of the doubt to Facebook/Meta is a mistake. They’ve been caught lying to investors, the Metaverse failed harder than the Sega 32x, they aren’t growing in any of their owned platforms (Face, Insta, Whatsapp) because, for all intents and purposes, there’s nowhere for them to grow. Twitter’s slow implosion is opening space for competition, which is what Threads wants to dethrone

      The practicality and ease of use of Threads will naturally bring the majority of people there. Allowing them to federate means that people will prefer it over any Mastodon instance. Given time, Meta WILL apply changes to their ActivityPub protocol in a way to make the Mastodon users’ experience worse, annoying them and possibly cutting off the whole fediverse, forcing anyone whose interactions were mostly with Threads users to migrate there.

      • Venomnik0@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Their Activitypub protocol? We’re all using the same protocol unless you’re implying they’re making their own which isn’t the case since they’re using the activity pub protocol that we’re all using. The most they can do however to make the Mastodon user base much worse is if they bar off features like DMs or something to their own app otherwise. If they’re slowing down overall service in general then absolutely defederate especially if they’re not contributing themselves.

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          ActivityPub is open source. They can use it “as is”, like all mastodon instances currently do, or add their own custom stuff to the json object. There’s nothing stopping them from changing how Threads interacts with the protocol, and we won’t have access to those changes’ source.

          To give an example, this is the current standard - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

          It lists things such as “id”, “context”, “content” etc. What’s stopping anyone from adding a brand new object to that json list, like “replicate_to_instances”? Or appending a spammy message at the end of any message sent to any instance that isn’t “threads.com”?

          The above could theoretically happen to any given instance. It’s possible because that’s how it’s supposed to work. Hell, Akkoma has some stuff that Mastodon lacks, mainly discord-esque reactions to posts (toots), but the two are still compatible.

          Now, suppose that Akkoma added a bunch of closed source things, and they kept working on top of that, adding more and more stuff, until only the barest of ActivityPub remained compatible with the rest of Mastodon, while only people running Akkoma could get “the full experience”. That’s what everyone is expecting to happen from Threads.

    • Bubs@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Defederating won’t do any harm to artists, everyone here will remain here, threads will just be a replacement for twitter and nothing will change. Creating a “walled off garden” as you say is actually a protection. We’re excluding the well known threat that is the Zuck. But we’re not excluding any users, anyone can join lemmy/mastodon… Would you partner up with a country run by nazis, even though the people in the country are the first victims ? No because you know their goals are not compatible with yours (I hope), and you know it will only benefit the nazi leaders and not the people anyway. If we just wait and see, it will probably be to late to act, big corporations are the best at fooling people (otherwise they couldn’t have become so powerful)

    • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pubOP
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      1 year ago

      Did you read my post? Meta/FB is a well known threat. We already know they are continuously engaging in information warfare towards their own ends and federating with threads just saps our momentum and redirects it towards them >.<

      Defederating doesn’t stop people who want “exposure” from creating an account on Threads or even starting a masto instance. I highly doubt FB will make it obvious to Threads users that Mastodon even exists, which you would know if you read my comments on how their app acts as a silo.