this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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[Facebook federation megathread] Downvote this post if you want lemm.ee to federate with Threads. (Updated) (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sunaurus@lemm.ee to c/meta@lemm.ee
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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.

top 18 comments
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[–] user_already_exists@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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 2 points 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 1 points 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.

[–] Anemervi@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] minorsecond@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Looks like I chose poorly with mastodon.social. I really don’t want to have to switch instances at this point.

[–] Eh_I@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Tigerfishy@lemmy.world -1 points 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"?

[–] SuperSpaceFan@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

Thank you for staying with the decision to defederate, and keeping lemm.ee a safer place when Threads arrives.

[–] Little8Lost@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

You had my upvote by the title, read your text anyway. I completly agree and as some people pointed out that we should federate so threads is a beginner drug for the fediverse: i dont think that this plus will matter, the threads users would have to see fediverse content to even notice the difference and i think that already would get pretty hard.

So i dont even think that the plus points are real plus points

[–] Kissaki@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Upvoting for visibility and content usefulness counteracting downvotes for interest in federation 🤷

[–] ghariksforge@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a lot of friends on Twitter who are now migrating to Threads. They are not going to come to the Fediverse no matter how much I annoy them. Federating with Threads will allow me to interact with them.

Also if the Fediverse works with Threads, a few of those people might come over.

[–] redshadowhero@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago

Federating with threads leads to the same issue that happened to google talk years ago - it once embraced the XMPP protocol, meaning anyone could set up an XMPP server and immediately start chatting with other XMPP users or google talk (or facebook chat, now that I think about it). This was amazing because if you had gmail, you suddenly had in-browser access to a lot of friends. I remember some friends way back then talking to me about getting a regular jabber account because it would be so easy to just use that. I also remember soundly rejecting that idea because "Why would I do that when I can already chat with you?"

The problem was that Google decided that XMPP wasn't sufficient for their needs and started to extend their internal implementation. Suddenly if you were on "regular" XMPP you were a second-class citizen. There were times when you couldn't connect cleanly to google's XMPP implementation and it created problems (admittedly, some of these problems were with the XMPP protocol, and others were Google deciding to "embrace" XMPP by inventing their own software to interact with it). From my younger and naive point of view it just seemed like my friends who used jabber et al were just running the inferior software/client.

Then, suddenly - Google decides to kill talk and replace the in-gmail version with something else entirely. All those friends I had were just "offline". You couldn't reach them; I also didn't see the need to create a jabber account because of all the perceived difficulties of interacting with them at that point. Some of them gave up and got google talk/hangout/whatever else accounts. Big corporations are pros at killing open source; the example above is just one of many. You can see examples all over the place such at VSCode and how they've been closing up access to their plugins, Apple with the GPL3 change to the open-source software they use, and now Facebook with threads.

You aren't going to be able to convince your friends; they aren't going to move regardless. And if Threads federates and, months/years down the road decides to defederate because they claim to have more content/features/whatever anyway, to all your friends on Threads you'll just go "offline" - and your friends will just wonder why you didn't use Threads in the first place.

[–] Kissaki@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

I think the negative points make sense and take priority at least before/until Meta decides on and announces written behavior rules how they intend to and will operate and interact.

[–] moriarty@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In favor of federating

  1. Presumption of innocence - until they actually push ads to ActivityPub, there’s no formal reason to defederate. The moment they do - cut the cord
  2. Same thing with EEE - defederate the moment they change the protocol unilaterally, not before
  3. It’s a stress test for Lemmy. What if lemme.world grows 100x and dominates the global feed - it’ll be sad if our only solution at that point was to defederate from them
  4. Federation does not give Facebook more ads data: entire ActivityPub ecosystem is open and scrapable, they will still know that buttface17@lemmy.wtf asked a question about growing shrooms
[–] yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
  1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook

This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Its current readable prose size is 108 kilobytes.

  1. They cannot change the protocol unilaterally. What they can do is add new, proprietary features incompatible with the protocol to their own apps to disadvantage competitors.

  2. It seems unlikely this could happen. It hasn't happened to Mastodon either, why should it happen to Lemmy? In addition, if Threads decided to federate, no instance would be capable of handling the load hundreds of millions of posts from Threads would generate for quite some time, I assume. Lemmy has currently one million total posts.

  3. They need consent in order to use and process any of the data from each user or they'll receive even more fines - at least in the EU. They'd have to limit scraping to non-EU citizens, which is an impossible task.

[–] moriarty@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. That’s exactly what I mean by changing the protocol unilaterally, without changing the standard. The way I see it: if they play fair and work with community on extending the standard, that’s a good thing. If they start creating non-standard extensions, ban them
  2. Don’t we want the fediverse to grow though, one way or another (a few large instances or several medium-sized)? If that’s the case, we’ll have to deal with the scale at some point
  3. Legit question - is this really how it works? My understanding is: indexing public internet is fair game. Google scrape(d) Reddit and twitter and indexed with no issue. So I’m assuming fediverse will be indexed. The missing link for ads is knowing that buttface17 is “John Johnson” on Facebook - does this problem become easier if we federate with them?
[–] yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

  1. I'm afraid something like this could happen. After all, the Fediverse is competition in Meta's point of view because Meta cannot advertise to everyone.

  2. Growth is great, but it must grow sustainably. Spontaneous growth is harmful because the necessary structures, such as powerful (enough) servers, moderation tools or even the number of capable moderators haven't evolved alongside the user increase.

  3. Scraping is legal, I believe, but using the scraped data for profiling is probably not. And just a few days ago the EU court has ruled that because of Meta's dominant market position, forcing users to agree to data collection can be an abuse of said position. This may only be tangentially related but there's no doubt this has implications for Meta's involvement in the Fediverse.

[–] DelilahBlack@lemm.ee -1 points 7 months ago

Federate with threads. More exposure and more people