Fans of SDF
I guess I don't understand why we would be lenient with a corporation that has actively destroyed the modern internet for profits, blatantly violates user privacy, etc etc.
The topic of defederation seems to really make people want to break out their soap boxes to talk about open access and free love, despite you know... the real world being real, and corpos willing to shit on your good thing for a few bucks.
Remember, Facebook literally facilitated ethnic cleansing as a result of their techbro "move fast and break things" philosophy and their disinterest in paying for content mods with knowledge of local languages.
Meta doesn't give a fuck about anyone here or anything we've built. Mark Zuckerberg wants power and money and to push his weird bloodless McDonalds-ized vision of what the Internet should be on every single person on this planet.
Fuck that, and fuck any sort of cooperation with it.
I made the decision to leave shitty corporate platforms for a reason. The people I'd like to follow or interact with who still only use such platforms can come to their decision in their own time.
I am not interested in selling out my values, nor am I interested in enduring a tsunami of bottom-of-the-barrel interaction with average Meta users, in the name of interoperability. Meta made the choice to be a shitty entity with shitty values that builds shitty things. I don't feel like being covered in shit.
Allowing an org to federate is not being lenient, it is how federation works. Defederating should be done to protect the federation from a node causing harm to the federation--not preemptively in my opinion.
So let a known criminal into your home, until they commit a crime? Wouldn't not letting the known criminal into your home be the safer, more protective route?
I think a house isn't the best comparison here, as a house isn't a public space, whereas the Fediverse is. A better comparison might be a town square or a park. Anyone is welcome to be there, but if they do something bad, or it becomes obvious that they are going to do something bad, then they can be removed from that space. Otherwise they should be allowed to exist in that space.
The counterargument to that (I'm not taking a stance on it, but I get why others would) is "it's already obvious, look at their past history and what they've already done just within the past few days".
Ask yourself, in three years from now will you be thinking "it's so nice how Meta lets me follow and interact with their enormous userbase for free, without advertising, using my own open source server and frontend"?
Remember that's the basic expectation today for a participant in the fediverse. If this feels implausible, doing anything else is very incompatible with the fediverse's existing values.
The problem isn't just that it's Meta, it's any situation where a much larger actor comes in with different motivations. Today we have a small number of users whose servers are almost exclusively run on a "community service" model. Meta is an advertising business. They are much bigger and will define the fediverse if allowed in. If we allow them to connect, it should be much later after organic growth which means we can assimilate them properly and deflect any bad behaviour.
What might happen if Meta throws their weight around? I can predict at least three outcomes
The question in my mind is whether their intention is to destroy the competition, or keep the fediverse alive as a way to claim that they are not a technical monopoly that needs to be broken up by regulators, in the same way that Google provides most of the funding for Firefox.
I wrote a longer take on point 3: https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/07/07/if-i-was-meta-and-wanted-to-make-fedi-implode.html
Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can't keep a large instance controlled by "the enemy" from destroying what we've got, then we just have to do better next time.
I have been making a related point that we should be concerned about any instance capturing too large a fraction of the space. I'm less concerned about the fact that it's Meta than I am about any one instance having a critical mass that gives them a controlling interest.
History has shown that those with a controlling interest eventually use that control for their own benefit.
That's why I joined a small collection of focused instances and try to subscribe to communities that are hosted in their "natural homes" instead of those on generic instances.
As much as I hate Meta, I don't think it makes sense to defederate preemptively. I personally feel like doing that would be telling Threads users "if you choose to use Threads, you aren't allowed to be a part of the Fediverse" which I think basically defeats the point of federation.
I also think Threads is a good entry point for a lot of people to experience the Fediverse and move to other platforms such as Lemmy or Mastodon.
That being said, if Threads proves to be a huge problem down the road, beyond it just being Meta-owned, then we can defederate. Otherwise, we should wait and see. I think the Fediverse is big and strong enough that waiting to see won't hurt us.
As somebody who's been on the microblogging side of fedi for nearly 6 years, and who dicks around running a couple tiny instances and is chummy with a couple other sysops - I am 100% aboard the "will never federate with Meta, and may defederate with others who do, depending on how this goes" train.
Netsplits suck. But Meta is pure cancer, and sometimes amputation is necessary.
I'm all for defederating corporations.
The fediverse is already a reaction which is intentionally anti-corporate. Most of us are here because we don't want another Twitter or Reddit or Instagram or Facebook or whatever.
Considering how Google killed XMPP, by the time the harm was done, it was too late to exclude them.
The fediverse is not for corporates. Keep them out.
I don't understand the point of doing so preemptively. Just make a standard set of rules. Defederate when someone breaks the rules. Keep it simple. No point of sending the message of "there is no value in integrating with the fediverse if you're a large corporation". Much better to send a message of "if you continue to be a bad actor, you'll lose out on the benefits of the fediverse"
The point would in part be to prevent them from pulling an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish like Google did with XMPP.
What is the policy then? Can no large company integrate any product with the fediverse for fear of EEE? Is there a certain size company where it is acceptable, or is there a list of companies that are on a blacklist?
We could make a policy against federating with social media companies that have a history of either trying to take over their competitors, or when that doesn't work, trying to get laws passed to outlaw them.
I think it's a bad idea to federate with Threads. If I understand correctly, we'd be mirroring Threads content and Zux' userbase in large. This would put undue stress on SDF equipment and degrade the user experience. Further, there is a lot of 'junk' on Meta's platform which we won't have a problem with if we don't engage with it.
I'm new here, and I dont have a very developed opinion about this, but my gut says that Meta is going to try to absorb (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse.
I've seen a lot of good reasons to do that, but I think that it might just be to get at the software. It seems silly that they would do that given that it's free, but also they would be destroying a competitor at the same time, and really I've been working long enough that it wouldn't surprise me.
Anyway, i think that maybe democracy would be a great way to decide a question like this, and it would also be interesting to figure out how to set that up in a way that the people asking the question can know whether someone is trying to cheat.
commenting on the responses more than the original question:
imho taking a wait & see approach with meta is like pursuing a wait & see approach with the plague.
My opinion on this is to preemptively defederate as Meta has proven itself time and again to be a bad actor; they have proven willing manipulate their feeds and algorithms to induce rage based engagement and even though they wouldn’t be in control of the fediverse, they will still at the very least try to heavily influence it. If the fediverse wasn’t a possible threat to them, they wouldn’t have created an app for it and made current fediverse operators sign NDAs. Additionally, if we are complacent, they could start creating Lemmy style fediverse communities to gain control of that aspect of the fediverse as well.
If they defederate does that prevent following specific users on threads once activitypub goes live?
Yes, if lemmy.sdf.org defederates from the Threads server, you wouldn't be able to follow Threads users using your SDF account.
I think Threads is Mastodon-like, even with federation it's not currently easy for the two to interoperate. Threads users could subscribe to a community and post replies, but how I've seen it on my Mastodon account is that it's super hard to keep track of discussion.
Personally, I like the "wait and see, defederate after first offense" approach that some are taking.
I joined this instance because I like what SDF does as an organization. It's cool that they offer so many public services that anyone can use if they follow the rules. Supposing Threads ever joins the Fediverse, I'd hope SDF keeps them around as long as it's not harming SDF users.
@OneCardboardBox @scroll_responsibly I feel the exact same way. I hope that defederation is saved for a last resort. I have friends and family who I would still like to follow, and Threads (riding on top of Instagram) could be a really helpful way to bridge that gap in a user-friendly way.
I searched this discussion for /mail/ and was surprised to see not one hit.
Defederating from Threads is analogous to refusing to accept mail from or deliver mail to Gmail, is it not?
As long as there's no concern with Threads knocking SDF over due to outsized mass, I think it's a bad move.
I hope it doesn't. There is always time to defederate if something is going on.