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].
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I appreciate the thoughtful response and agree - no need for a knee jerk reaction when there is still some time until a decision needs to be made, and there are still quite a few unanswered questions.
As long as you maintain this level of transparency I trust that you make the right decision for lemmy.world.
As usual, thank you!
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Just keep one thing in mind: even Meta themselves are saying they’ll wait until they have a billion users, and then they’ll decide what to do.
Freely admitting they’ll play nice (not even ads) until they have a monopoly.
Now it’s not surprising, that’s how companies like Meta operate anyway. It’s just quite brazen for them to just say it outright. That shows how confident they are that nobody will challenge them.
So that’s the kind of company we’re talking about here.
I would prefer to defederate, but as long as Meta doesn’t attempt to fuck with Mastodon or Lemmy I don’t care what the devs here do. That being said,
Fuck Meta.
Thing is, once they do decide to fuck, or cause other problems, it will be too late to be reasonable. The only recourse will be to defed and destroy all the connection that have popped up in the meantime.
It’s like cancer, once it spreads, you need to cut off the whole leg, or it can just kill you outright.
I think it’s more that we need guards against a monopoly within the space to be honest.
That too. But corpos will always find some ways around.
Then what good will defederating do if they’ll just do whatever they want anyways, like if defederating is the best solution, because otherwise they’re too powerful, why can’t we just defederate at a later date? We can disconnect at any time going forward.
Because if you do it later, you’ll break all the connection people will have made in the meantime.
If you never federate in the first place, the Fediverse can grow on its own in peace, and people who want to join, can join.
It’s the same problem as what happened with Beehaw. They’ve always wanted a small community and do their own thing, but they left the door open and after closing it, made a mess of everything.
(Except thousands of times worse.)
You know, that’s actually a good point. Alot of others are solely saying “well it’s meta, so no!” But that argument makes a lot of sense, especially with the beehaw comparison, I was annoyed with that because while I understood parts of their argument, doing moves like that just feels like people trying to gatekeep the fediverse, but it would have been much easier if it started disconnected. For that reason alone, I’d be ok with starting defederated and possibly reconnecting later, but that way the band-aid never needs to get ripped off when it turns out thread will be worse than people like me hope.
Tbh though, I know people are flipping out here demanding it be defederated today, but the moment the federated posts start to flood in (I mean thread is huge in comparison to the fediverse), it’s going to get turned off probably right away until things can adjust and they figure out a plan. I’m not 100% sure how federation works on the server side, but I remember kbin not being able to federate due to intense server load, I wouldn’t be surprised if lemmy.world struggles HARD the first few days after all of the thread posts start flooding in, if they even come to Lemmy (rather than just Mastodon like they talked about)
Please don’t give Meta even an inch.
They wouldn’t be stepping into the Frediverse if they didn’t have a plan to either monetize the user base or destroy their competition.
Don’t let them take a pound and then some.
One FUCKING hundred percent this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
I’m glad you mentioned this, because this seems like the most important point that seems to often get lost. This is primary a potential issue for Mastodon servers, not Lemmy/Kbin/etc.
Kbin’s microblogging is basically msstodon so it would be affected.
Not only that, but the way Magazines work, you can access them via Mastodone, and Masto users can interact in threads just like lemmy users. There is a lot more integration with mastodon than many people realize.
I’m answering to your comment from Mastodon. So yes, even if Threads doesn’t federate with Lemmy, there could be some interaction.
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It’s still an issue for the Fediverse, and even the concept of free software, federated services as a whole.
I said before - right now, Fediverse has momentum due to Twitter and Reddit blowing up. Threads is already taking some of that momentum away both in news articles and taking in potential Twitter/Reddit refugees.
If they decide to fuck with Mastodon after people get used to Threads presence, they can leave the whole concept in pieces.
Threads is already taking some of that momentum away both in news articles and taking in potential Twitter/Reddit refugees.
In both cases, the only ones who are running away and using Threads are those who can not handle Twitter’s entertaining hell scape and normies who used Reddit. Whom also, already had an Instagram account, dormant or not, or in less percentage made a new one for the first time. Threads remains unavailable in Europe because it’s incredibly invasive on privacy any how.
Kbin has a microblogging feature and that puts them at immediate risk. And if their one dude or however many people are on their development team can put together something that combines both, do we really think that we won’t wake up to meta’s new community feature a month or 2 from now?
It’s so bizarre to see people complaining about “kneejerk” reactions as if it’s the user’s fault and not Meta’s.
Have you people just forgotten everything about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook?
You’re goddamn right the reactions are kneejerk, that’s the point.
After over a decade of abuse, controversy, and horrendous practices that have defaced the very idea of social media and caused actual, real damage throughout the world, people have rightfully identified Meta as a monster.
And when a monster is coming for you, the kneejerk reaction is turn around and run.
It’s very telling that all the arguments for allowing them in are basically “well, we can survive it”. Like, everyone seems to be on the same page, here: Meta is terrible and wants to monopolize everything. Yet rather than the sensible thing and just get away from them, people are arguing we should fuck around and find out?
100% agree.
The admin who wrote this post should have their admin powers removed. If that were even possible.
They clearly do not have Lemmy’s best interests in mind.
Jesus, anyone who disagrees with me doesn’t care about Lemmy? I mean 1. The admin who posted this is literally the owner/hoster of the instance, who’s doing this because he wants to support the platform. He spends his personal time and effort to make lemmy.world a thing and just because he isn’t planning on doing what you want until he has more info, he should be removed?
Plus since when is one instance all of Lemmy? People can go elsewhere and leave lemmy.world to die if it’s really that controversial of an opinion, but this has nothing necessary to do with the platform itself, any other instance can do what they want, and thread has nothing to do with the activityPub standard yet so beyond seeing their post, it can’t effect it anymore
I came to the fediverse to be rid of big social media companies, not join them
Cool.
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It’s fair (if sometimes foolish) to see individuals as innocent until proven otherwise, but my stance on corporations is that the more powerful they are, the shorter the leash they get.
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Facebook/Meta have repeatedly shown horrible behaviour, from poor moderation to Cambridge Analytica to enabling the Rohingya genocide, I think they’re already in the guilty camp.
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While I typically subscribe strongly to a stance of “Innocent until proven guilty,” in the case of Facebook, that doesn’t seem prudent.
I don’t see a conflict. Facebook has been proved guilty a thousand times over by now.
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Not to mention the fact that it’s not a question of IF they post Ads as posts, but WHEN. Reddit and many others are already doing that. How can that even be an “if” factor for the admins? I really don’t want my lemmy feed to be inundated with Ads from Threads or posts that are actually Ads in Disguise. I left Reddit because of that shit.
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I agree with this. Why not defederate first. Then if meta behaves (if!) that’s the time we federate.
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In this case there is ample evidence to prove them guilty. Just because they haven’t done the same things in this space that they’ve done in every other space they’ve occupied doesn’t mean they won’t. This definitely isn’t some startup that we need to feel out. They have a reputation and they have it for a reason.
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Was this considered? https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Google essentially destroyed Jabber this way.
I was there and Jabber at the time also looked promising and Google adding its GTalk was the push everyone thought Jabber needed and everyone was welcoming it.
Meta will join Fediverse only if it will be still a threat to them, once users will switch to it (let’s be honest, majority of users on Fediverse aren’t purists, and if metra will have some unique features they will switch) they will defederate and Fediverse will lose meta users as well as old users. Just exactly as it happened with Jabber. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Some people think we are stronger than Meta and their influence, which is nonsense, they can ddos all federation with legitimate trafic, let alone influence community.
A lot of people forget that they are master manipulators and have algorithms decide what is popular. Thay can easily choose what they want from fediverse and make it popular, which could lead to painting totally wrong picture of this community.
They can also exert influence on the communities directly by going after their mods and convincing them to move the community to a Threads instance and lock the non-Meta community up behind them.
This will be sold to the users as a way to simplify things, to keep everything from being too splintered, to make things more convenient by having everything in one place…ya know, centralization.
It literally just happened with one of Lemmy.worlds biggest communities: [email protected]. After “speaking with” the moderators of a different instance, the lemmy.world mods decided, with no apparent input from the users that I can see, to lock the community and force it over to a different instance. And instance that seems to want to set itself up as the “primary” place for Android discussion. A more locked down instance with a very different style of moderation which is effectively killing off the ability for users to post anything and deleting just about everything, which wasn’t a problem here on lemmy.world.
So in effect, [email protected], as it was, has just been taken away from the community, all because of external pressure. And if that instance defederates from everything else? Then it was in effect lifted from the fediverse wholesale. Forced centralization by mods that want to go work for the bigger instance.
This will happen again with Threads, and it will happen a lot. Just you wait until the bribes start.
I still don’t understand that decision. Seems like the original community was a lot more popular and was more established, and exactly like you said, they just decided to move with absolutely zero input from the community.
I think this might be somewhat the wrong lesson for Freddy.
The harm Google and Microsoft did to open protocols wasn’t federating with them. The harm they did was snatching up devs from those projects and then later killing their support for those protocols. That is, they sucked up the brainpower maintaining these things and left them to rot.
It’s important the realize this because whether or not every mastodon or lemmy instance says “screw meta” and defederates, the real damage happens when meta hires a bunch of Freddy devs to support their support of Freddy tech, puts them under aggressive non-competes, and ultimately abandons the effort.
The solution to this is figuring out how to pay our devs so they can refuse offers from meta. That or ditch capitalism, but that seems more daunting.
Boy, I sure hope Freddy is careful. Sounds like they’re in danger /s
But more seriously, Lemmy is developed by like, 5 people, most of whom are wholely anti-capitalist. I’d be quite surprised if any of the official devs jumped ship.
You would be surprised at how many anti-capitalists flip on a dime when someone backs up a dump truck filled with cash and empties it on their porch.
I know I was shocked when I found out.
The thought process probably goes something like “This is obviously a ploy to destroy what I’ve helped build but it’s not gaining as much ground as I hoped anyway, this capital will give me the ramp I need to build something that will be better, with blackjack and hookers…”
I think it’s more “Woah! That is a shitload of cash! Let’s go swimming in it!”
There is well-documented impact that money has on thought. You can see it everywhere. Remember what happened to that Minecraft guy…?
An address to @Ruud and the lemmy.world team:
I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you’ve done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines our community’s sentiment and reservations.
I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the “wait and see” approach.
What’s to say Threads won’t follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?
If I go to a friend’s house and their child spits in my face every time, I don’t want to go to my friend’s house. I tell them this. The friend says, “Well this time just might be different, let’s just wait and see!” Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.
Why should I believe this kid won’t spit in my face all of a sudden, when they’ve taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein.
Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users’ well-being. There’s no reason to wait and see. It’s not logical to believe this time will be different.
Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.
Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta’s practices as a company.
This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads… That alone should tell you there’s no reason to “wait and see.” Just look right now. They haven’t changed…
FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!
Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government…
I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:
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Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];
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Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;
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Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;
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Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;
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Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and
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Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.
I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?
I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.
However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.
Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.
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This isn’t “our community’s” sentiment, you can see a number of different sentiments in this thread.
You pretty much summed up everything I fail to articulate because i’m pretty stupid lol. Well put man.
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EEE is underestimated there. Google was not the sole destroyer of Usenet, but its acquisition of DejaNews and its deployment of Google Groups both did lots of damage. So did AOL joining in. Sure, Lemmy post-EEE will still exist in some form, just as some feeble remnants of Usenet are still alive. But we want to flourish rather than just survive, I would hope.
Most telling is the likely culture invasion. I just saw news reports that extremist trolls are already leaving Twitter for Threads. We don’t need that here. Exploding Heads is already defederated over what sounded like a much milder version of Meta’s toxicity. So I’d want parsecs of distance between us and Meta, or as close to that as we can get.
I agree that it is not an emergency needing immediate action if you prefer to take it slower. But, from a distance at least, it looks to me like lemmy.ml has done the right thing in assuring their users that they want nothing to do with Zuckerberg.
Yeah. The problem with EEE is they want to get rid of the competitor, not the software. Even if Lemmy survived the EEE, Lemmy World will not, and what left is a very fractured and small instance here and there.
People use fediverse stuff not because it’s the new hip trend, but because they want to distance themselves with giant socmed company as much as possible. That statement above is so out of touch.
We kindly ask everyone to engage in civil discourse and remember that not everyone will share the same opinions, which is perfectly acceptable.
It’s really actually not acceptable to ignore what a bad actor Facebook/Meta has been. Catch up on the news if you need to. Cambridge Analytica scandal, unwitting social experiments, and the insane amount of intrusive permissions required just to use threads etc. They’ve been anti-consumer in an almost dystopian way and failing to call that out is an immoral stance. There’s really no polite way to say, “that’s a hell no, fix your attitude, or I’m out.” That people have characterized folks telling you this is a deal-breaker as “blackmail” is the absurd stance here. We’re asking you to stay true to the anti-corporate “power to the people” spirit that created Lemmy in the first place and call out Meta for being an obviously bad actor in this space, as a bunch of Reddit refugees… You actually arguing against this and acting like “both sides are fine” about it is being completely tone-deaf and is 100% antithetical to the purpose of the fediverse.
“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” You’ve already committed to doing nothing during an important time with a “wait and see” attitude. Meta is still a face-eating leopard, a frog-stinging scorpion, or whatever analogy does it for ya. It’s not a tough choice and there IS a right and wrong answer.
As always, appreciate the transparency!
Looks like lemmy.world got hacked.
I thought it just was me. I kept getting redirected to NSFW links and i didn’t know why lol.
Lemmy.world is titled as “israel” for me.
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I use Linux. So, no need for antivirus for this. But, yeah this is quite bad
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Yes it appears so. Oh my god scared the crap out of me with porn and redirects :(
Instance Blocking - Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet).
This is the real problem.
