What does defederating from Meta's Threads.net actually accomplish?
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I'm working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
From what I have read, I think it's all of the above.
a space is wanted free from corps, ads, data perversion
people are fearful that 30 million people joining threads has automatically made it the largest instance. Once it integrates with ActivityPub and can federate, it will dominate the space and produce the majority of the content. People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content and content production with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
many believe meta will not act in good faith and is doing this to appease European courts and laws
Because of all of this people likely believe keeping threads quarantined right off the bat is the best solution to mitigate the amount of damage they can do to what's already been established.
Edit: I am adding to this post as I just stumbled across a post from the host of the lemm.ee instance (which I am a big fan of). He has also listed some great cons of Facebook stepping into the fediverse:
-there is nothing stopping facebook from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores which would ensure they end up on the front page of "all" for federated servers
-threads already has more users than all of Lemmy's instances... therefore, they can completely control what the front page looks like by dictating what their users see and vote on
-moderation does not seem like a priority for threads which would increase workload for smaller instances
-REVENUE FOCUSED
I paraphrased a lot of this but as this is getting some traction I wanted to provide additional visibility to the cons of federating with the Facebook.
Anything that lands on Meta's servers is open for Meta's use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn't something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we're anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that's helping them.
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO's actions. The last thing we're interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
I'd say the biggest reason is culture and identity. The threadiverse is small at present - about 120k - and the microblogverse is bigger - 8m - but still smaller than the Threads.net 70m already and potential 1bn if meta leverages instagram. Why would a smaller and growing new independent social media platform want to be swamped by a commercial tidal wave? There isn't really a benefit to the independent parts of the Fediverse.
It's better for the independent parts of the fediverse to grow organically, remain independent and grow it's own identity rather than disappear into useless oblivion.
Also if I understand it correctly, the Threads.net is a microblogging site so while they may both use ActivityPub, Lemmy does not support microblog content. For Lemmy, it would mainly be the Lemmy content appearing within Threads.net. Federating with Threads.net is more of an issue for Kbin (which does both Threadiverse and Microblogverse content) and Mastodon (which does Microblogverse content) - the content would be visible in both directions. So for Lemmy it might be a big influx of users so may be manageable, but for Kbin & Mastodon it may also be a flood of content which might not be mangeable. But correct me if I'm wrong on that.
The reality is that it probably won't accomplish anything at all, particularly for lemmy users whose fediverse is structured considerably differently than mastodon.
You don't tend to see people from that side of the fediverse over here.
The mastodon instance I'm on decided to limit threads instead of banning it (decision made by voting). Threads posts will not show up in our timelines, but if we follow an account on threads we can still see them in home timeline. I think this took care of most of the stuff while still being flexible.
Honestly, I feel like the bigger issue is the immense flood of content that's going to pour out of Threads. I'm not sure if many of the self-hosted instances will be able to federate with it and continue to function.
Mostly because I don't like meta and have made a point not to use any of the platforms related to them. I don't respect them and don't want their content or their creators to be a part of my fediverse.
If I wanted to use Facebook and subject myself to the community that includes, I’d use that. I prefer a less hostile/more thoughtful place, which Lemmy.world is to me. If Threads becomes accessible to Lemmy.world and brings that community within this sphere, I will very likely move on.
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Facebook will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam.
Nope. It is because the admins of the instance have decided to do so. It might be for the reasons you list, for completely different reasons, or for no reason at all.
Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use, and eventually removing support for the open standard entirely, forcing other users to enter their walled garden because that's where all the people are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Just a reminder that on Mastodon, you can choose "Block domain..." on a post. So an instance federating with meta can be blocked by the user. It would be nice to have that here on Kbin and/or all the other Fedi platforms.
I don't understand why are people so fixated on facebook and twitter, if you want it just go there and have account there.
If we think that lemmygrad is bad, but facebook/instagram is not (even thou there are a lot of research papers showing that those are socian networks worst for psychological health) we are in big problem.
Let them do their thing and let's have some space put of it.
For the user experience, blocking meta just means that we won't have random people who are into baking and casual consumers of social media randomly stumble upon and
I think it might accomplish more to wait a few days or hours for them to do something that egregiously violates community standards, then defederate en masse—and use the defederation as an event to draw media attention to their practices.