I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create “better” front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
I think one of the ways we could combat as well as defederating them from instances is provide such a good user experience to consume content on the fediverse that threads - or whatever else - becomes just a shittier, ad-ridden version of what we use.
Look at Reddit for example, if they didn’t have the power to remove our access to APIs, third party apps would still provide the best experience. Can any of the features Reddit provides that third party apps don’t justify the number of ads thrown in your face? Nope.
Same here, if we focus on improving the experience of a Lemmy or kbin user and ignore whatever meta is doing, nothing is stopping us from becoming just the better way of consuming all fediverse content. Then if threads were to drop federation, we would still have the upper hand.
The only thing that might hurt us in the end is if we start giving in and host communities on their instance. But if we don’t, and keep our ground, we can have the best of both worlds. See their content without their ads, and keep control of our own content, without their rules.
I certainly am not against improving the UI, but at the current scale of the Fediverse we don’t have anywhere near the resources to compete directly with Facebook/Meta. It’s too early. The primary defense must be defederating.
Making our UI advancements in a way that a corporation cannot - for instance, exploiting their need for advertising to make sure we have better experiences - is a good strategy in the long term. But it is a secondary strategy to immediate defederation ^.^, because Facebook is only at the start of the enshittification process for Threads and hence they won’t be pumping it full of ads and their engineers can focus on having a “better” experience in the short term until they destroy us.
You can’t have the best of both worlds, unfortunately. By exposing Fedi users to Meta/Facebook content, we expose ourselves to a company that has a long and continuing history of social manipulation and is able to pressure us to host communities on Threads - even if it’s only done by sheer mass of users.
By letting them in, we’ve already almost lost. Whether by direct EEE, or by simple user agglomeration onto primarily-Threads communities, or by a deliberate campaign by Meta/Facebook, they will eventually try and gain direct control of the network.
My opinion is that the only useful response to an organisation that is openly known for direct deception and manipulation and attempting to assimilate existing networks (like e.g. what happened to Instagram and Whatsapp and XMPP, and probably others I’m not specifically aware of) is outright rejection.
Well said, I’m definitely going to switch to an instance that defederates meta if mine does not. I don’t want us to get drowned in corporate nonsense. I am so happy to see Lemmy succeed and hope this wont affect us like it did XMPP