Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you're suggesting? Do you get what's the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?

This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.

If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it's just natural that people tend to use it. I won't use it, you may not use it and it's totally fine! It's about having options. Also as Mastodon's CEO pointed out there's no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.

Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I'm not against defederation in general. It's a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.

If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.

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[–] TheBenCrazy 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Copying this from another comment I made. Defederating would pretty much cut off a lot of potential new users that want to see posts on Threads while also not wanting to have a Meta account and all the issues that come with it. People here need to realize that they are in an echo chamber. Mastodon and Lemmy needs users and content. Cutting a big portion of that would kill it in the long run. There would be nothing to "extinguish" in the first place in their complaints of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

[–] illah 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I had a minor debate here re: Usenet, where OP said we basically had an “easy to use” internet 30+ years ago, and AOL won by blanketing people with CDs.

I’m a techie who first got online with a 2400baud modem and I am fully aware that nothing I do can be extrapolated to the general population. Now that I work in the field, designing for “normies” is how and why services grow. The winners are the most usable services, not the most ideologically righteous ones.

(Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term, users of lemmy and mastodon are not special or smart…in this moment in time we’re primarily idealists with strong opinions on centralized tech that most people couldn’t care less about lol)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Defederating would pretty much cut off a lot of potential new users that want to see posts on Threads while also not wanting to have a Meta account and all the issues that come with it.

Kinda the point, no? Kill Threads in the cradle by denying it access to the fediverse.

[–] problematicconsumer 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Exactly, I have a lot of normie friends that use threads, I don't want to use it but would love to interact with them. Best of both worlds

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

if you interact with them, you’re “using” threads

[–] problematicconsumer -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can you elaborate?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would have phrased it as "supporting" Threads. If you don't defederate, Threads will take over your instance. Either directly through the sheer amount of posts, or indirectly by colluding with your instance admins. Or both. It's how they operate. And then the ads and data harvesting and walled gardens will come.

[–] problematicconsumer -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you choose to defederate you have isolated your users, made a decision of whom they can and can not interact with. Again, if this was agreed upon by the user at time of sign up (like niche communities) it's understandable. There's not even a migration option on some of these apps like lemmy, you can't change your instance easily if they decide to defederate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes. And I'm saying it's worth it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

sure! in the fediverse, the content of users and communities is stored on the servers of the actor you’re interacting with. for now, i’m just going to specifically refer to microblogging and user<->user interactions because that’s much simpler than the many different ways that the threadiverse interactions happen

so, if you send a message to a threads user, or that user interacts (likes, etc) your content then that data is stored on metas servers. heck, technically they don’t even need to interact: meta can just suck up all the data and use it for their analytics!

by contributing content to the fediverse on an instance that doesn’t defederate from, or you haven’t blocked threads some other way, your content is likely to be ingested by meta and go through their data processing…

you might not be using the threads UI, but threads is using you that’s for sure

[–] problematicconsumer 1 points 1 year ago

TBH, I haven't delve deep in exact architecture of these systems. AFAIK posts and all data remain on instance of OP but when you like, boost etc. it's not like your data is transferred to that instance, and you've lost your privacy.

Each time somebody interacts with your post by creating a reply, boosting it (retweeting), or favoriting (liking), this needs to be propagated to other servers (where your followers are located).

If the interaction itself happens on another server than where the post was originally created, first we need to notify the origin server and only then perform the propagation.

The architecture of Mastodon

But I guess you're making a different argument. Yes we're using threads every time we interact with a user there, but again we're not seeing ads, we're not giving every single click and page view to meta. It's not ideal but it's way better than using threads UI!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No one is stopping you from interacting with them on threads separately from lemmy/kbin/federated sites.

[–] problematicconsumer 0 points 1 year ago

But the beauty of Activity Pub is that I can have privacy and interact with them!