I cam here to get away from all the corporate BS, but suddenly people want to welcome Facebook/Meta to the fediverse? I cannot fathom how people see their intentions as pure or innocent, especially since they aim to profit off of the open source software everyone has worked so hard on.
I just don’t see how the fediverse survives if it decides to let these massive companies make their instances. It feels like it’ll be a repeat of the rise of social media, where all the smaller forms got wiped out by large, consolidated social media platforms.
I for one would like to defederate from any and all corporations.
I love the idea that profit isn’t a focus of the fediverse.
Same. I’ve already added Threads.net to my “Blocked Domains” list on Mastodon. Hoping to be able to do that with Lemmy as well.
Isn’t a product of the fediverse yet.
Hard disagree. I want to interact with the grandma’s and family that aren’t tech savvy. The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power. I don’t see how Meta will change that. All I see is that the Oklahoma asshole who wants to debate will get ads and I won’t. Commerical sponsors of the Fediverse is validation of the idea, so let it happen. Yes, Meta will see my username and will try to make ads happen, but thats not what Meta needs or wants: they need high quality content and will accept that some of it they can’t monetize. But if they can monetize those users in their corner, then they see value.
“The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power today.” ftfy
The concern people in the fediverse have with companies like Meta joining, is that:
- Embrace: they will “start off” by making the fediverse easy to access for the masses. There will actually be great growth in the fediverse. People will flock to Meta as their choice platform because they will be faster and more reliable than self-hosted fediverse servers.
- Extend: Big companies will begin to introduce new features, some of it will be added for the open source community to use. Eventually, there will be new proprietary features added (integration with WhatsApp for example) . This means that Meta’s Fediverse will be different from the open source fediverse. It’ll probably start out as something innocent like “needing a Facebook account to post a message / comment in their channels.” Then it gets worse…
- Extinguish: Now the masses have flocked to Meta because it’s fast and stable. This results in many/most of the Self-hosted services to become extinct. Then Meta starts to add more" security", like a fediverse “reputation”. Meaning, if your self-hosted service submits “enough” posts/comments that are not spam, then your allowed to read/post on their platform. This means if your self-hosted and/or a smaller member you will be barred from accessing/posting content. Thus, the fediverse is now owned by big corps and you need to use their platforms (and watch their ads or subscribe) to access content.
Source: Compare the history of e-mail (the original fediverse) before Gmail and Hotmail compared to what we have today. I (as an individual) can run my own mail server, but most of my messages will be marked as “spam”, if I send it to a friend who has a Gmail address, because my reputation is too low. This forces me to “pay” for email.
Setting up an email server at home is almost impossible because domestic ISPs block port 25 and you need a reverse DNS to make your mail look legit. But set up a mail server on a leased VPS it’s not a big deal if you know your way between SPF and dkim.
Running a legitimate mail server is hard because of SPAM, not because of corporate greed.
The embrace/extend/extinguish arguments are all FUD arguments. Arguments 2 and 3 boil down to Threads effectively walling off their side, which would more or less mean de-federation. And what happens when your now free Lemmy instances starts requiring you to pay $8/month? Or what if some of the larger instances decide to commercialize and sell data? FUD is not a compelling argument: the same arguments were made about Microsoft and their open source embrace. And there are plenty of FUD arguments to make against Lemmy.
I would argue that federation with commercial entities will make for a better Fediverse. Sure Meta is subjectively Evil, but it’s motives are clearer than some random dude’s Lemmy instances. And by Federation there is ability to get high quality news, science and technology information. In less than a day, major players joined and were posting to Threads.
The email analogy is a false dichotomy. The reason behind the large email providers is because the cost of the running and maintaining an email server is cheaper than running your own. But you could run a trusted email service if you set up your DNS records correctly.
I really think a Fediverse separate from monetized social media is a healthier Fediverse.
We have a good thing going here. Let’s not invite the wolves into our little hen house.
Tbh if Lemm.ee doesn’t defederate then I’ll probably be moving on to a different instance.
A pretty good blog about the situation I think you should read - https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Take an upvote, but I think the situation I’d very different from the XMPP and the office standards or even kerberos. In each of those cases, it was a standard.
For the XMPP case, XMPP use for Google was primary business users. The XMPP case ignores the rise of other, more convient, more engaged communication like Facebook Messenger, discord and free text messaging. For the open standard of OOXML, Microsoft’s aim was to sell Office. And for Kerberos, the AD changed were driven by business reasons. Regular kerberos is insane to admin, and Microsoft made it easy; it doesnt help that Novell’s eDitectiry failed.
With Federation, the story is different. The engagement isn’t like XMPP of connecting to people you know, or the security reasons of AD or even the standards of OOXML. In a sense, Federation is more like DNS or a web server: it’s just about connecting communities.
I hadn’t thought about it this way until I read your comment, but why not let them join the party? If they’re federating like Lemmy and Mastodon, isn’t that an acknowledgment that federation is a valid competitor? And if they’re re-modeling themselves to act like this, doesn’t that indicate we’re on the path to the future and we should welcome as many converts as they want to make?
Edit: Let’s move further discussion here: https://lemm.ee/post/851217
I don’t see any Lemmy <-> Threads interoperability happening in the near future anyway. I haven’t looked at Threads very much, but from what I can tell, it’s mainly going to be a problem for Mastodon rather than Lemmy. Even from a UX standpoint, it does not seem like Threads is really designed to show Lemmy content (and vice versa).
Having said that, Facebook has shown countless times that it’s actively harmful to its users as a platform, so there’s not much reason to believe that Threads would be any different. If Threads ever becomes interoperable with Lemmy, then I think defederation would be completely justified, unless they can somehow completely change their approach to ads, user tracking and feed algorithms. If that day ever comes, I will make a decision together with the lemm.ee community on how to proceed. But for now, it’s not an issue - there is nothing to even defederate yet.
Can’t you put threads.net on the defederation list anyway, even if there’s nothing to federate yet? That way, there’s not even a chance for it happening.
What I mean is, how exactly would you know that Threads now has users participating with our posts? It probably wouldn’t be instantly, I wouldn’t bet on there being an announcement on Threads’ side, they might just start showing the content and comments from their users start showing up, and then you’d have this conversation you’re talking about.
Why not just nip it in the bud immediately by pre-emptively defederating so that can’t even happen? I certainly would welcome it.
I would prefer to have a conversation later about federating with Threads in case of those things you mentioned instead of the conversation being about defederating.
Please have this conversation with the lemm.ee community now about pre-emptively defederating. We can still have the other conversation about federating later as well.
Can’t you put threads.net on the defederation list anyway, even if there’s nothing to federate yet? That way, there’s not even a chance for it happening.
Well, at this point, we don’t even know for sure if threads.net will become their ActivityPub domain, so we can’t guarantee anything by doing this. But I will make a post about this topic.
I didn’t think about that threads.net might not be their domain. I still wouldn’t think it’d be bad to just put it there since that domain would very likely be it, but then it’d definitely be fine for me to wait for the actual domain.
Thank you for giving a clear and concise answer! We appreciate your hard work you’ve put into Lemmy!
People have made every point to be made already in the comments, so I’ll just say I’m here as a user of lemm.ee to put my vote towards de-federating from Threads. And frankly, from any other corporate entity that intends to bastardise the Fediverse.
The network effects are hard to overcome for a majority of people and they shouldn’t be punished for it. I think most of the people in charge of large fediverse instances are hyper aware of the embrace-extend-extinguish mindset and will be wary buying into corporate versions of the fediverse. Personally, I’ll remain skeptical but I won’t advocate for defederating or any punitive actions without cause.
I feel like past experience should inform the decision. Why give em another chance to shit things up?
Agreed. And believe me you, they’ll find a way to screw us all over if we give them half a chance.
This was my first reaction as well but it felt like collective punishment. I think the best path forward should be setting the example we would want them to emulate even if it’s naively optimistic.
Thats a fair take on the situation. Just hope everyone stays wary of the situation. I wouldn’t put it past instagram/facebook to try to feed ads all across the fediverse.
It survives through the way it works. If they suck enough, they’ll end up being cut off from the rest of it. At the very least, people can choose an instance not ran by them. Even start their own.
The purity test has arrived at lemm.ee.
I think the situation should be monitored and we should take a “wait and see” approach.
Likely, it will end up like all of Meta’s other products but, that said, I do think a place to easily communicate with a large population isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I see introducing a bigger group of people to how decentralization works is an ultimately good thing but Meta has history of being untrustworthy.
I’m obviously conflicted about it so I’d just like to see what happens and make a decision with as much information as possible.
What we really want is for all the platforms such as Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and any other you can think of, to get out of their silos. Let the content flow and you choose what you subscribe to. Maybe it will be the Fediverse, or maybe something like Nostr, which I think is even better since it incorporates the concept of validating the author of anything. Hopefully, the Fediverse incorporates that concept of validating the author, even if only the clients do it.
I honestly see no harm in assuming that Threads is a harmful actor, defederating, and if they prove they aren’t then we can easily federate again. Same wait-and-see approach. It’s no problem to switch from defederated to federated.
It’s just incredibly more likely that it is harmful, thus when using “wait and see” we should be on the default side of whatever that implies while waiting, which in this case is being defederated.
This is absolutely the right approach. Facebook’s reputation should be enough on its own for us to defederate.
If by some miracle, it eventually looks like it’s on the level, that’s when discussions of federation should start.
The problem in this debate is between open source and open choice. Open source purist are often anti choice. If you want to use a closed source, proprietary system, that is your choice. The key aspect of federation isn’t the open source (its great) but the open choice – you can choose your own server (I have my own, FWIW) or some random tech bro or some evil Corp marketeer, or Meta, the point is choice. For each user, there are compelling arguments and compelling reasons for why someone would choose Lemmy or Threads or whatever, the value is in the choice.
So in the demand for our SABDFL to make a choice, we are in effect saying that we want to restrict the choice. Why do we care if there is a great community on Meta or that a great. Community on our server is attracting a broader community? Walled gardens are walled gardens. So I have to ask, what walled garden is the community asking for: open source and closed community? Sound like hell to me.
The real problem in this debate is naivety. You are all over this thread going to bat for an objectively evil company. You had it explained to you why this is an awful idea a hundred ways. And you still want the leopard to eat your face.
I see, you want this thread to be an echo chamber? Got it.
The niavity in this debate is not realizing that most successful open source projects need both commercial sponsor and operators. When the current admin of lemm.ee decides that he’s done, or has financial troubles then this community goes away.
