this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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So, what is Leminal Space's policy on de-/federating from/with Meta instances? (mstdn.social)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Threads are making gestures toward federating with ActivityPub. That opens for a ton of new fedi users, but also gives Meta leverage over the policies and access to user information on independent servers.

See the linked post for arguments in favour of defederating from threads.net altogether. My question is in the title, where does Leminal Space stand on this?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

EDIT: The below information is no longer current. See the updated comment.

The current Defederation Policy is outlined here, and Threads doesn't meet the criteria for defederation at this time. However, I want to be clear that I am no way a fan of Meta, their business model or their practices. I am sympathetic to many of the arguments for pre-emptive defederation and believe it will require further consideration going forward. I am open to putting defederation to a vote in the future.

My feeling is that we take a watch-and-act approach and see how things pan out after federation. There are a few reasons for this:

  1. I believe that most people use Lemmy as a curated platform for consuming content, i.e. using the Subscribed feed rather than All feed, so the potential for a popular platform like Threads to dominate users' feeds may not be as big a problem as some think. This is further ameliorated by point 2.
  2. The latest version of Lemmy, 0.19, has just been released (coming soon to LS) and allows users to block entire instances from their feed. This isn't a silver bullet as it still allows comments from blocked instances, but it's a significant step in the right direction.
  3. Lemmy is public so there's not a lot of additional data Meta will gain access to once federated. Yes, they will see things like who votes on what and how, but they could already access this data by others means if they wanted it (like simply creating a Lemmy instance).
  4. We can defederate at any time in the future.
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Ty for the update! I do think that meta has enough going on in threads for it to fail our ToS (e.g. unmoderated alt-right content) so I am not in full agreement of the "wait and see" approach; and additionally, as you mention, user level blocking doesn't exactly do much for the data harvesting processes they're infamous for. So I'd rather the preemptive block. But I am ok with a wait and see approach as long as we're able to act fast as soon as they inevitably do another war crime or whatever ๐Ÿ˜