There has been significant discussion in recent weeks regarding Meta/Threads. We would like to express our disappointment with the negative and threatening tone of some of these discussions. We kindly ask everyone to engage in civil discourse and remember that not everyone will share the same opinions, which is perfectly acceptable.
When considering whether or not to defederate from Threads, we’re looking for a decision based on facts that prioritize your safety. We strive to remain neutral to make an informed choice.
First, there seem to be some misconceptions about how the Fediverse operates based on several posts. We’ve compiled some resource links to help explain the details and address any misunderstandings.
Fed Tips , Fediverse , ActivityPub
Initial Thoughts:
It seems unlikely that Meta will federate with Lemmy. When/if Meta adopts ActivityPub, it will likely affect Mastodon only rather than Lemmy, given Meta’s focus on being a Twitter alternative at the moment.
Please note that we have a few months before Threads will even federate with Mastodon, so we have some time to make the right decision.
Factors to Consider:
Factors to consider if Meta federates with Lemmy:
Privacy - While it’s true that Meta’s privacy settings for the app are excessive, it’s important to note that these settings only apply to users of the official Threads app and do not impact Lemmy users. It’s worth mentioning that Lemmy does not collect any personal data, and Meta has no means of accessing such data from this platform. In addition, when it comes to scraping data from your post/comments, Meta doesn’t need ActivityPub to do that. Anyone can read your profile and public posts as it is today.
Moderation - If a server hosts a substantial amount of harmful content without performing efficient and comprehensive moderation, it will create an excessive workload for our moderators. Currently, Meta is utilizing its existing Instagram moderation tools. Considering there were 95 million posts on the first day, this becomes worrisome, as it could potentially overwhelm us and serve as a sufficient reason for defederation.
Ads - It’s possible if Meta presents them as posts.
Promoting Posts - It’s possible with millions of users upvoting a post for it to trend.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.
Instance Blocking - Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet). This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate, disappointing those who desire interaction with Threads, or choose not to defederate, which will let down those who prefer no interaction with Threads.
Blocking Outgoing Federation - There is currently no tool available to block outgoing federation from lemmy.world to other instances. We can only block incoming federation. This means that if we choose to defederate with our current capabilities, Threads will still receive copies of lemmy.world posts. However, only users on Threads will be able to interact with them, while we would not be able to see their interactions. This situation is similar to the one with Beehaw at the moment. Consequently, it leads to significant fragmentation of content, which has real and serious implications.
Conclusion:
From the points discussed above, the possible lack of moderation alone justifies considering defederation from Threads. However, it remains to be seen how Meta will handle moderation on such a large scale. Additionally, the inability of individuals to block an instance means we have to do what is best for the community.
If you have any added points or remarks on the above, please send them to @[email protected].
It doesn’t start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren’t evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.
The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren’t really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.
They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There’s outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn’t come to pass, and looks like it never will.
Facebook doesn’t need malicious intent for what’s going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what’s wrong with them trying to build an audience?
Thread’s improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.
After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It’s not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don’t turn the heat up too many degrees at once.
It’s wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn’t 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.
Facebook needs to make money, and they won’t do so by directly charging users. There’s only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.
Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet’s monomyth. You don’t have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.
If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don’t have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say “your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you.”
Threads is already significantly bigger than the fediverse. They seeded their network with Instagram which already has more than 2 billion users. If people on the fediverse wanted the shiny big tech experience they’d already be there. I’m not against defederating with them but I don’t think they need to federate at all to attract users based on uptime and features and a larger network. We’re here because we don’t like them.
I suspect Facebook’s interest is not in users, but in content. I don’t have an account but Threads seems to be mostly thirsty grindfluencer nonsense, which isn’t the appeal of Twitter and friends. Regardless, if the Fediverse survives this particular threat simply because it wasn’t big enough to be eaten, then I’d still be concerned. There will always be another bad actor coming down the pipeline.
Out of curiosity I checked it out a couple days ago. It’s been years since I’ve actually been on Instagram so I had to reset my password. Anyway you are absolutely correct about the influencers posting to get attention with lame jokes and low level memes. They don’t even let you have a feed of just people you follow. In the time I was there 35 companies tried to track me over 600 times. They can keep it. I think every instance should block them but that’s just me.
That’s basically what Instagram is and that’s plenty successful. I don’t think the Instagram bootstrapped user base will care about or even like the fediverse content. I honestly don’t really even expect meta to go through with it since I don’t see how it benefits them so my personal prediction is this is all a hubabaloo about nothing. I hope the fediverse gets big enough to sustain itself and good content and discussion, but I don’t think I really care about it getting as big as Facebook.
Requoted for emphasis and truth.
The F/OSS community is utterly terrible at messaging by and large and the result is that F/OSS looks like a place for whiny nerds, not the critical concept it needs to be perceived as.
Agreed EEE doesn’t need to be strictly technical (but it certainly could be! See the example of increasingly complicated and quick moving web standards driven largely by Google which makes creating a new browser so hard).
But a UX path could easily look like:
Find the top 500 lemmy communities by size/engagement. Create those communities before the server ever opens up to the public. Pre-poulate with content.
As people join, sort them into these communities based on their FB/Insta/Twitter/Threads profile. Indicate in some way that their existing contacts are into those things too and “may” be there to encourage adoption. Open up to federation.
Voila, f/linux has 200k users in the first month all chatting and posting. People like content, so native lemmy users subscribe and start engaging over there. The UX is great, very polished, etc. Maybe they create an account migration tool.
A while later, BigCorp decides it’s time to pull the rug, defederates (for whatever reason, probably moderation issues), and now everyone who’s still a Lemmy user is cut off from the communities they followed and the “native” Lemmy communities are tiny and quiet. Lemmy users cry foul, and no one cares because Big Corps get to set the message and for some reason people come out of the woodwork to defend them.
Facebook has no incentive to Federate (seriously for what?), but has insane incentive to kill a federated service before it gets off the ground or ever grows to be anything approaching the size of reddit.
I acknowledge Threads is a bigger problem for Mastodon, but you would be incredibly naive if you think there wasn’t a team of people working feverishly at getting a FB owned ActivityPub targeted at a Reddit replacement. It would even integrate with Threads, like Kbin has microblogging.
Hey - thank you for this response, it’s the first one I’ve seen that tried to take the question “How could they EEE?” seriously.
What I still don’t really understand is - how is this different from just creating a better competitor, without the federation at all? If you’re worried about people choosing a superior, shinier corporate product, then surely they’d do this even without federation. At least with federation, we’re not excluded from the walled garden, and don’t have to have an account on their platform to interact with users we know or like there.
I have a Facebook account because there are people in my life that I want to communicate with on there, and that is my only way of contacting them. If FB was a federated platform, then I wouldn’t have to have that account to do that.
The only (EEE-related) risk I see is that if Threads federates, they could then choose to defederate one day. But that would just make them into a walled garden again, the situation we already have today.
The way I see it is two fold.
One, any success on Lemmy/Mastodon will contribute to their platform as well. These platforms are all about content and critical mass. By federating, they get access to “free” content. At their current states, these platforms are drops in the bucket for Facebook so I doubt it’s a primary interest.
Two, if they can get their content in front of Lemmy/Mastodon users, they hope some of those users will see it as “grass is greener” and switch sides. There’s another comment in here where someone mentioned all their friends moved to FB Messenger but they didn’t want to, but all their friends were using it, and it had features that weren’t supported in standard texting, so they eventually gave in. Imagine that, but you can also see your friends feeds in front of you, just not some of the bonus stuff. It dangles the carrot closer to your face. Not only do you know about it, but now you also directly see it.
This is all leading up to the “extinguish”. They probably see the fediverse as evidence people are willing to move off Twitter, so they may also be willing to swith to Threads if they aren’t too invested. On top of that, they may see the fediverse as a potential future threat. And it’s much easier to kill off that threat early than to wait until it has evolved and grown. Again, these platforms are about critical mass, and if they can nab at it before it reaches that point, they’re more likely to succeed in killing it.
Elsewhere I’ve contextualized the Reddit uprising away from the API changes and towards a broader question of “What actually is Reddit? Who is it for? Who gets to decide what direction it goes in?” Spez and the admins have an obvious answer, but they only own have the software and the servers. It’s the communities that make Reddit, and communities are not owned by anyone.
I like the Fediverse because it reflects that. It’s up to the communities to form themselves and decide what rules they want and what servers they will reside on. Participating in the Fediverse means you provide some small amount of influence of what direction it goes in. Allowing a company like Facebook in means they will also get to influence it.
I was trying to weave a narrative on how Facebook could slowly dominate and bend the Fediverse to its will and its interests - even if they aren’t actively trying to do so. I suspect they don’t have time to slowly ramp up Threads and I’m skeptical they are actually interested in federating. But there will always be more bad actors.
An engineer notices a significant delay between when new posts appear on Threads and when they appear on the public API. There was a database issue their team resolved a few months ago, but another team owns the API server. They file a ticket and details their fix in the body.
The intuition was correct and the issue is quickly fixed. A project manager tracking growth metrics notices a slowdown a few months later. After finding the ticket, they notice an increase in growth when the API issue was introduced, and the slowdown occurring not long after it was fixed. They are not comfortable with intentionally reintroducing it, but the conclusion is in the data.
Later a very senior engineer learns all this. They like the Fediverse, but that’s not what they are worried about. Their last performance review was poor. Their manager softly sounds the alarm about the next one. Their parent’s nursing home is burning a hole in their finances. They can’t afford to lose health insurance. Putting their kids through college is on the horizon. Their org chart has already been cut down over the last year, and there are rumors of more layoffs next year. Important people are asking difficult questions about Threads.
Maybe just a fifteen minute delay so Threads can reach its target numbers.
So your argument revolves around the fact that Lemmy/kbin/FOSS projects are inferior interfaces and that will draw people to FB?
If FB/Meta make a better product people should use it. Stop expecting users to kneecap themselves into using a worse product. All of the things you mentioned (uptime, cleaner ui, more responsive, better algorithms) are legitimate reasons to use other platforms. The average user doesn’t care about federation or instances or any of the other technical details and they never will. People don’t want to care about that stuff anymore.
You read my post and thought about it, even if you disagreed with the conclusion. I read yours and also disagreed, but thought enough about it to type this reply.
That’s what this is all actually about. Thinking about things you find interesting with other people you find interesting. I agree that people don’t want to think about technical things, and that is my complaint about the FOSS community. People want to think about cats.
The problem is not with any of the features themselves - they are all good things to have! If you run a service and rely on donations (and aren’t Wikimedia), then maybe you can cover $300 a month but probably not $30k. Things are going to have to be frugal. The upside is they can run it however they think it provides the most value to their communities. Everyone wants to think about cats, and no one will try to dissuade you or try to nudge you into using the platform more.
Facebook/Threads present themselves as free, but $30,000 will maybe cover a few junior employee’s salary for a month. These things are expensive, and the money needs to come from somewhere. They’ll operate at a huge loss while building up the platform, but eventually they’ll need people to stop thinking about cats and start thinking about brands. That cycle has played out over and over and over again. Build something useful, build walls around it, and then exploit it for as much shareholder value as you can.
Facebook doesn’t want you to think about cats. It wants you to think about brands. If it is allowed to be part of the Fediverse community, it will flex its influence and move it towards its own interests.
Pinboard is a simple one man Delicious like bookmarking site that charges a flat yearly fee for use. It comfortably covers its owner’s living expenses. I’ve been on the lookout for my own Pinboard idea for years, and I’m toying with the idea of starting a feature packed instance that charges people a yearly fee to have an account on it. That would be fun to build but miserable to administrate.
The different between PinboardLemmy and Facebook is I would have no reason to act against my user’s interests. You get all the fancy features because you pay for them. Why would I not want people to think about cats? Why would I care about maximizing their time on the site? I care about making my mortgage payment each month.
So go forth, and think about cats.
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