this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Has there been any talk of lemmy.sdf.org preemptivly defederating from Meta/Threads? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 year ago by scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org to c/sdfpubnix@lemmy.sdf.org
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[–] thomask@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

  • Proprietary variations to ActivityPub, probably starting with something that seems "understandable" like moderation reasons.
  • Certain new features get centralised on Meta's servers only (e.g. search) claiming that it's for efficiency in the distributed environment.
  • Claiming spam problems, require individual instance operators or their users to verify themselves with Meta to enable federation.

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.

[–] scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] zumi@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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?

[–] ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Facebook will cause harm by its very presence.

In any event, people with your opinion may end up in one fediverse "neighborhood," and people with my opinion will end up in another.

I'm fine with that, as the "neighborhood" I end up in will have a lot less inane garbage everywhere.

[–] ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I didn't join the Fediverse to have Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or any other corporate surveillance outfit follow me here and mine data my data from here. I too hope SDF will block Threads.

[–] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] epg@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

As I said in the other thread: Would you want to federate with Reddit?

Google hasn’t actively tried to shutdown its competing email providers… Meta has (tried to purchase or shut down its competitors on multiple occasions). Why do you think they aren’t trying to do that this time?

[–] quickleft@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

This analogy keeps being made but I am not convinced it is correct.

Any participant in a dynamic network can choose with whom to have relationships. That's the point of a firewall or cloudflare or a million other security efforts.... to prevent interactions which due to malice or accident would cause some harm to come to the local system. There is no obligation to participate and in fact with the fediverse it is specifically designed with defederation in mind.

The comparison has been made to email explaining the fediverse concept to new users. Most people know about email. But Usenet is much more apt, if you are familiar with that. Usenet had (has) similar concepts such as the way servers share, mirror and distribute content from others servers. There is a burden imposed on any given server according to the others it has communication with. If you never had the pleasure of being on Usenet, it was basically like email discussion lists where the inbox was public. But you still needed to have access to a server to read and post. Messages were sent in similar way to email but every server would retain a copy of messages prior to forwarding them on to a list of other servers. They would in this was percolate through the network. Every server had its own version of the history of usenet according to the choices of the admins and there was not central authority or main copy.

Usenet server admins exercised broad discretion deciding who they would have a relationship with and what they would accept. Nobody was every perfectly connected to everybody else for various reasons including: legality, morals, politics, technical, geography, taste and happenstance. Individual people, hosts that allowed too many bad users, problem communities, filetypes, topics of conversation.... all kinds of things were blocked by admins. Some news servers were permissive and some were restrictive. Servers that were excessively permissive became hubs of spam, and thereby risked losing their relationships with other servers because other admins got too annoyed having to deal with it. And servers that were excessively restrictive had a hard time keeping users because you couldn't really participate properly if unable to see a lot of groups and not seeing a lot of the traffic, plus your messages would not propagate for others to see. So it was a balancing act.

For the most part this is an analogy that isn't helpful for a lot of people.. But maybe on SDF there are some who can recall those days. I do not think the concept of blocking servers breaks the concept of the fediverse at all.

(I am still undecided on my opinion on the question but I think it is a legitimate possibility.)

[–] arcdrag@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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"

[–] scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

The point would in part be to prevent them from pulling an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish like Google did with XMPP.