this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I think this is a culture clash between the privacy minded FOSS crowd that is naturally drawn to a project like Lemmy and the influx of average redditors thats just looking for a new home.
If you already have zero trust in these megacorporations you will naturally gravitate towards preemtive defederation.
and we're better off for it -- it's such a pleasure to be able to have more coherent (and dare I say, insightful) conversations again!
Indeed, though plenty of comment threads and instances have hiveminds of their own
If you're out there reading this as a reddit user looking for a new home, and you can still have trust in these megacorporations, idek what to say lmao
Accurate. I've known for years that Reddit was going to go this way. As soon as I heard of this place I was onboard.
I don't think any sane reddit refugee would trust corporations after experiencing first-hand how that ends up lol
I suppose that does explain the trust in corporations ;)
I happen to fall into the center of that venn diagram and honestly I feel like the "preemptively defederate!" crowd is acting before it's even truly clear how to best act and everyone else who says "ehh let's wait and see how this is going to go before we act" is just getting drowned out by the folks screaming about the end of the Fediverse.
I don't trust Meta any further than I can throw their servers, but I find it hard to imagine there won't be some middle ground that isn't "BLOCK EVERYONE WHO SO MUCH AS TOUCHED A META PRODUCT ONCE" that ends up being the healthiest option
Edit to add: I've taken a similar approach to the instant defederating of Lemmy instances with unverified signups since the current phase of Lemmy is so fresh I have no reason to take a hardline stance before it's clear exactly what the ramifications are. Obviously as an individual I also have the benefit of being able to just go with the flow that an instance admin might not but still
I can totally see where you're coming from.
On the one hand, the reason why I have chosen to eshew all social media and run degoogled Android on my phone is because of privacy concerns. So if Meta federates, I can access all that content from an app and network that respects my privacy, so that's good right?
My problem is not so much privacy, I'm more worried about the dominant position Meta achieves on the fediverse by it's sheer size. It will absolutely dwarf everything else. We already know this by just looking at the numbers, so if we wish to preserve the culture of the fediverse I see no other choice but to defederate and set up quarantined servers that exclusively federates with Meta and nothing else. Any server that federates will only see posts from Meta.
There might potentially be technical solutions to limit how much you see from one instance, but we don't have them right now.
For people in the FOSS sphere there is also a sense of "fool me once" when it comes to megacorporations engaging with projects, e.g. Google with XMPP, Microsoft with internet explorer, Google with Chrome and so on. There is simply no trust and we have been burned before in ways that has left lasting impressions that might be hard to understand if you have not experienced it yourself. Maybe it reaches a degree of suspicion that might seem paranoid to others.
I also feel that Lemmy right now gives me back a sense of what the internet used to be, before the walled gardens, and I feel that it is a fragile state of affairs that must be protected at all costs. It feels like I can finally breathe again after a long time with my head beneath the waters, and I don't want to be plunged under again.
Sorry for the ramble, I just felt like I had to put my feelings in print.
You know you're taking a stance either way? It's nice to say "wait and see", but you can wait and see while being defederated as well. Starting to federate is basically the same decision as stopping to federate. Just because the one happens by default does not mean that federation happening isn't a conscious choice.
It's like laying in bed all day. Yea, you were in bed, so it's the default, so you could say you just "wait and see what the day brings". But you're still effectively choosing to stay in bed. You don't need to be surprised if nothing interesting happens in your day, and it was your choice that nothing interesting happens.
Same with federation and defederation. We already know Facebook is a bad actor. If we federate with them, we're saying "all right let's tolerate the shit coming at us", we're not "waiting and seeing what the day brings", because we already know the day is not going to be interesting, since we're staying in bed.
Sure, you might discover a new game on your phone while in bed and the day might still be amazing. We might discover threads is not bad after all. But it's just so much more likely to have cool things happen in a day when you're out of bed doing things. Same as it's much more likely that Threads is going to be shit.
They don't want normie content and they're coming up with insane speculative excuses like a failed Microsoft playbook from the 90s that didn't even target open source software.
The fediverse is entirely public. Every action you take (all posts, votes, favorites, etc) is public. Meta will scrape all the data whether Threads federates or not, there's no privacy difference because there's no privacy!
Why would they need to scrape anything (which puts them at legal risks)? Threads is vastly bigger than the Fediverse. What do they care about having 1% more content, especially if a lot of that content is stuff their users don't care about? They don't even need to scrape stuff because humans will naturally repost content. How much of reddit was reposted from other social media sites by humans?