Technology

What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this "us vs. them", "you're either a part of the pact or you're against us" nonsense

Let's all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.

I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn't need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.

Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.

The usual MO of buying the competitors isn't posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish

Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we'll be right back at the corporate social media we're trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it's profitable

Utterly idiotic.

Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.

Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.

Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.

I don't know why. They “trust me” Dumb fucks.

• Mark Zuckerberg

Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it's a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:

I've used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don't have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren't going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn't really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It's an easy forecast.

Here's the important bit, just because they've never been in the cruise line business, doesn't mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.

It is not dumb. Thinking that this time it will be different is dumb:

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

When this was happening I was a huge proponent of Google, and Google Talk, recommending everyone I knew to switch to it, because Jabber with the help of Google will remove monopoly from AIM, MSN, YIM etc.

Google fucking killed the network and I contributed to it (maybe not in a significant way, but I still feel very bitter about it)

If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it's reasonable to want to avoid that.

For people who don't remember, the pattern would be something like:

1. Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
2. Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
3. Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don't care. (Extinguish)

It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it's grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.

The super cool thing is that you're more than welcome to start your own instance where they don't block it. Or move to an existing one. Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.

I think the fear is that this turns into an "embrace, extend, extinguish". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I don't know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.

They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.

Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there's an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.

If we let corperate avithilea gain a foothold they'll EEE us. Learn from history, Meta's not doing this for our sake

I'd argue the system is working quite well, every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.

That's what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.

I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.

Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.

An organized group of fediverse admins all united at not federating with Meta, i.e. against federation and also united in this goal

https://fedipact.online/

Meta is a company that is gonna join us in being open and when they get enough users to have their platform running organically they cut us off.

Threads is Meta, one of the largest corporate enshitifiers on the internet - the crap most of us fled from that landed us in the fediverse in the first place.

...it's userbase is a relative ocean compared to the fediverse's drop, so the immediate concern is being able to moderate the tsunami of submissions; the long term concern is that things go peachy at first and the fediverse becomes so intertwined with Meta that it becomes functionally dependent on it... and then Meta decides to pull the plug, effectively destroying the parts of the fediverse that didn't defederate right out of the gate. This is called "EEE" or "embrace, extend, extinguish" as others have mentioned in this thread. It's a shitty thing bigger tech can do to destroy budding competition before it has a chance to become actual competition. Google has a history of it, and a lot of folks here naively think Meta will for some reason handle things more ethically.

It's owned by meta/facebook

Call GEICO.

It's pretty logical actually: The advocates of openness must be closed to one thing, and that is whatever aims to destroy openness itself.

This is like inviting the Catholic church in an institution specifically built to protect former victims of same and similar institutions.

Given that anyone can start an instance and federate with Threads, or join an instance that does, freedom of choice is unaffected.

We just don't want history repeating itself like what happened with xmpp. Do you really think facebook of all companies is joining the fediverse with good intentions? Do you really think they're not trying to monopolize this?