Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it’s not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it’s likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.

Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

  • As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the “all” page of federated servers.
  • Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don’t apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the “all” page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
  • Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
  • In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don’t have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can’t even imagine yet.

By the way, we’re not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

  • Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
  • Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
  • We don’t really know what to defederate from - it’s completely possible that “threads.net” will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.

Update:

By now, it’s clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

  • lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
  • Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it’s still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

  • The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
  • Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
  • We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

  • There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
  • Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
  • There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won’t please everybody, but I really believe it’s the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

  • user_already_exists@lemm.ee
    223·
    1 year ago

    Please follow lemmy.ml and stand up to the big guys and defederate in whatever form it comes. This is a chance to finally stand alone from the Mega corps and have some peace and quiet.

    • speaker_hat@lemmy.one
      9·
      1 year ago

      Peace and quiet is so rare in social media these days, that is so not obvious that we somehow have it here

    • RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip
      2·
      1 year ago

      Preach! There’s a good opportunity here to keep this space free from the greedy hands of a bunch of rich assholes. People are so eager for there to be a ‘new twitter’ but haven’t even raised one question about whether threads has fundamentally addressed the problem that has lead to the downfall of twitter and Reddit. Meet your new boss, same as the old boss. Why the hell should we keep just hoping that some billionaire ceo will do what’s right. Even if that ceo does the right thing, they will eventually be replaced.

      There can be a place on the internet free from capitalist exploitation for profit. Communities can exist solely for the sake of the community. Not every goddamn thing needs to be monetized. Send a clear message that past tactics will not fly here.

  • gravityowl@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    EDITED: After initially misreading the post, I’m actually very glad that I just joined an instance where the majority of people is so against Facebook and their scummy business.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPM
      5·
      1 year ago

      Hey, are you sure you’re not misinterpreting the votes? There was a small minority of users in favor of federating, but the majority was against it.

      • gravityowl@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I did misread lol thanks for reaching out. The way it was phrased confused my brain…long day at wok haha

    • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year ago

      Exactly, if we want them in our space why put up with the growing pains of the Fediverse, just go to them and forget Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. We need to be our own space or why exist at all. As said before, if you want their content just go to their sites.

    • NightOwl@lemmy.one
      11·
      1 year ago

      Absolutely on point. If it’s deal with Facebook or deal with Reddit that doesn’t have a partnership with Facebook I would go straight back to Reddit. Fuck Facebook and their rebrand attempt to distance themselves with the Meta shit.

    • focusforte@lemmy.world
      13·
      1 year ago

      Isn’t it pretty simple though, if you don’t want to see those posts, block them personally. Why make it so that none of the users can access them?

  • michikade@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    Considering Meta mines as much data from as many people as possible just to advertise to them and also they can’t even launch Threads in the EU right now because of how aggressively it tracks literally everything about their users and Threads’ only purpose is to gather more data to sell to more people, I think that alone is worth not letting them play.

  • Ballistic86@lemm.ee
    3·
    1 year ago

    Staying as far away from Meta has been my goal since leaving Facebook 8 years ago. I really like this instance, it meets all of my needs for my Reddit replacement.

    I don’t see a reason to federate with a corporation unless they were able to deliver something I’m not currently getting and their corporate support would greatly improve performance/sustainability for this instance. But based on previous experience, a company entering a space usually makes it worse.

  • magnetosphere @beehaw.org
    31·
    1 year ago

    I’m excited by the potential of the fediverse, and I want the fediverse to grow. That means more users. However, the noncommercial nature of the fediverse is why I’m excited by it in the first place. I couldn’t care less if there’s yet another gigantic social network full of ads.

    Allowing any profit-driven interest to influence the fediverse risks destroying what makes the fediverse interesting and special. I’m not willing to risk the fediverse in order to grow it.

  • NerfHerder@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    Personal feelings: If I ever want to view Meta content, I’ll go to a Meta owned app. I’m enjoying this new frontier and want it to thrive as safe haven away from massive corporate sponsorship.

    • focusforte@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      It would be way safer for you as a user though to have an account on this side and then view content through federation.

      By having an account on a meta-owned app you are giving them vast amounts of data whereas if you have an account here on the Fediverse, All they’re getting is what you choose to be publicly available on your Fediverse account…

      I’d really don’t understand your logic here… Because all of the data on the Fediverse is available to meta by them. They’re going to be able to read all of that data regardless. As far as I can tell the only thing that defederation will accomplish is preventing you from accessing their data.

  • PrivacyAdvocate28@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    Defederate! For many people migrating from reddit was, in part, to get away from big tech, this would ruin lemmy imo

  • Eh-I@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know what difference it makes at all, but I know this is a real shit way of deciding! 👍

    • Tigerfishy@lemmy.world
      01·
      1 year ago

      Calling for a casual early voice of opinion? In a post that states clearly “I’m not asking because you have a say, but because I’d like to hear”?

  • NightOwl@lemmy.one
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think like a lot of people the reason I’m putting up with the growing pains of a decentralized network, the fragmentation of communities that come with it, and sync issues across instances is because we want to try something that isn’t run by corporations that views users as something to sell off to the highest bidder. If I wanted to deal with a centralized large user base why wouldn’t I just skip this whole fediverse thing and go straight to Meta or reddit or Twitter or tiktok that is way more user friendly? I’m not here because I want another reddit clone that ends up being run or is influenced by another billionaire asshole down the line.