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Pros and cons of federating with threads? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by Jackolantern to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I saw in the posts recently how Metas thread grew rapidly in a span of just a day. I understand that since threads posts a privacy nightmare (no surprises there) I’m leaning towards de-federating with them.

But I am also cautiously excited about the massive amount of content if we federated instead.

So for purposes of discussion, may I know the pros and cons of federating with threads?

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

As I've heard Threads is not yet ActivityPub federation enabled- meta is going walled garden for the foreseeable future.

Benefits of federation would be:

Massive available content boost for Lemmy, making user retention and growth easier.
Much wider general user awareness of Lemmy and the Fediverse via federated content titles showing off instance names. May drive more natural user growth.

Cons of federation would be:

Data security. it's Meta. Any and all user information, including admin data, naturally exposed by federated services instantly gets sucked into the Zuck data vacuum to build a user profile. Right now, we're still reasonably insulated from them.
Spam. Threads is already massive by virtue of sucking in all the Instagram users. They would COMPLETELY drown any natural Lemmy content in their sheer volume of posts and votes, meaning lemmy native communities will struggle to gain any widespread traction over their Threads counterpart.
Content manipulation. Anything Meta chooses to promote via their "algorithm" will end up on the top of every federated instance, meaning they can now effectively manipulate all Lemmy content by simply bombarding federated instances with whatever they want.
Moderation. I'm not gonna sugar coat it, the average Instagram user is really dumb and it brings in all the shitty people with it too. Moderation of small instances will become impossible by sheer volume while federated with Threads.
Principle. Meta's practices of extensive monetization and monopolization goes against every principle the fediverse was founded upon (freedom, decentralization, and emphasis on the user rather than the advertiser). By federating with Threads, you are giving Meta a free license to monetize the content you are paying to host on your own independent instance, for free. That just fucking stinks.

[–] Polydextrous 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Long story short, it’s a 1:15 pros/cons

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Pretty much lol. Given Lemmy's current community situation there's really very little reason to ever federate with them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm wondering if they will even decide to try to federate. They're bootstrapping threads with Instagram that already had 2+billion users. That's insanely big compared to the fediverse. What do they even benefit from enabling it?

[–] TeddE 18 points 1 year ago

They crush a potential rival in its infancy. That's literally all. It all reads to me as textbook embrace, extend, extinguish.

If the federated web were a company, they'd just buy them out if they got big enough. But it's not, so they can't, and that worries them. But they see the open part of open source as a vulnerability, so they put on a smile, pretend the game is 'if you can't beat them, join them' and then sabotage the protocol in a million ways from the inside while convincing users that your app is clearly the best way to experience the federated web.

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

Data security. it's Meta. Any and all user information, including admin data, naturally exposed by federated services instantly gets sucked into the Zuck data vacuum to build a user profile. Right now, we're still reasonably insulated from them.

Couldn't they just run another instance and not tell us the domain name and silently steal all our data anyway? I feel like there is no way to have data security when it is decentralized. All my Lemmy data is on hundreds of other servers already.

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

This much is true, I concede that. It's highly likely they're farming this very thread as we speak- the vacuum covers all, and Zuck has clearly been thinking about the fediverse for quite some time. However it's of limited use to feed the other points when they can't use the data to develop direct connections with their own internal users via direct interactions.

Also you doubleposted by accident.

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

I saw the double post and immediately deleted the second one. The one you replied to was the one I actually deleted, but it looks like the delete didn't federated to you. That's really scary actually if you can't guarantee that you can delete stuff on Lemmy. If I rant about something in the heat of the moment and say something I regret, I can't guarantee that I can remove it.

[–] Jackolantern 4 points 1 year ago

This is very thorough. Thank you!

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

Data security. it's Meta. Any and all user information, including admin data, naturally exposed by federated services instantly gets sucked into the Zuck data vacuum to build a user profile. Right now, we're still reasonably insulated from them.