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!)

  • Lee Duna
    link
    fedilink
    101 year ago

    Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users

    Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

    https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/

    • @Trapping5341
      link
      41 year ago

      My only think is it would be trivial for meta to do this with any other instance and not tell anyone it was theirs. There is nothing stopping meta from spinning up an instance and not claiming it as there while the rest of the fediverse continues to federate with them. Would still give them open access to everything and their instance wouldn’t even need to be super populated to get most the information they could want.

    • Flat Pluto Society
      link
      31 year ago

      This is a legit concern and a very good reason to not federate with Meta, but I never want to see the phrase “social graph slurping” again.

    • @cybersandwich
      link
      01 year ago

      And they can’t do this now??? Everything is posted publicly.