Programming.dev Meta

Yes. We should avoid them like the plague.

Yes, because we already know exactly how this is going to go. Their need to constantly make more and more money means that we know TODAY what is going to happen: EEE. We know this because of Fark, Digg, now Reddit, and to a lesser extent Slashdot and StackOverflow. The profiteers aren't interested in federating, or having well-run communities; they're interested in money and nothing else. We know for an absolute fact that Meta needs to make money and they're only interested in the Fediverse because they see money in it (quite simply: because if they didn't they wouldn't be).

I completely get "we shouldn't strike pre-emptively" but if you wait until the third E it's too late. But we already know it's not pre-emptive because they've already enshittified their own communities. Ever tried scrolling through Arsebook recently without FBP and uBlock Origin? Article - article - ad. Article - article - ad. One item in fucking THREE is crap you're not interested in. That's what they want to force onto the Fediverse. We know it today. We have seen what they have done to their own stuff. So when they come sniffing round here we are completely justified in slamming the door in their face even if they promise to be nice this time, because we already know what they want.

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it," and you don't have to look far. The influx of people into the Fediverse is directly caused by the profit-motivated enshittification of Reddit. If we don't draw the line here then we have to retreat back from Lemmy and invent something else, which they will then want to enshittify.

I'm already a day late and I haven't actually read all the comments because they're surprisingly a lot here. But here is my two cents, hopefully I'm not just repeating someone else.

Do you want the fediverse to be as big as possible? Or do you want it to grow in a steady manner in a healthy way with healthy discussion?

Letting on the garbage that is popular social media giants like meta, will completely and utterly overwhelm this community. They have millions of users, we have thousands. Every single one of our posts will be drowned out by them. Say goodbye to high quality discourse, we will just become what Twitter and Facebook turned into, the same way that Reddit is going.

I do not care if we have millions of users, our higher bar of Discovery and usability means that we get people who are self-motivated to learn, learn about technology, learn about our culture, learn about our rules.

Would it be nice if it was easier to discover/join the fediverse? Sure. Would it be nice if we had millions of users? Sure. But I want to grow carefully and sustainably. I would rather have a small or medium-sized community with healthy discourse, than a worldwide gigantic social media community where conspiracy theories reign supreme, and the less techy people don't understand how threads are different from Lemmy, and are constantly cross posting and are confused about what they're looking at.

I can block meta communities myself, but I can't block all the hordes of people that will jump on our threads. This is a scalability problem waiting to happen, this is a social discourse problem waiting to happen.

Lastly the only reason that I could possibly imagine that Zuckerberg wants to federate is to keep the only viable alternative to monopolistic social media conglomerates in check. The more people that can talk to us through his platform, the less people will look into and join us. If they can assert their monopolistic practices on the fediverse, they could use the EEE model to make it irrelevant. He is trying to destroy the federated social networks before they are big enough to be a real threat.

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy's recent popularity is that people are fed up with the "if something is free, you aren't the user, you are the product" situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).

Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy - I'm surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the "chicken and egg" problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don't care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.

I personally like this instance very much, and I've been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn't hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.

EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse

Yes, I think we should defederate. Don't give them free content, and don't let them monetize Fediverse.

Also, I'm not really interested in having the millions of Facebook and Instagram users here, it's one of the worst and most bland people and content internet can offer, right behind Tik-Tokers. I don't see how it would add any value, other than moderation issues.

TLDR; YES.

They are just trying to pull an EEE(Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) on fediverse. Federating with Thr*ads is just putting a shotgun at the mount. Just see how Google killed XMPP

Pertaining to the discussion in case you missed it https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta's Threads?

That's what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta's folks and be in touch with Meta's community would end up creating accounts there. We'd be handing users to Meta by doing that.

Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they'll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they're launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:

1. We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
2. We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.

What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the "decentralize so that no one can gain too much power" model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the "fediverse" are people without resources, then what's even the point? Who wants an email service that can't send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?

The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I'd prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.

EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:

We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
• Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
• Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
• Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.

That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

I've already made my view on the issue known in other comments, but I've just stumbled upon an argument that I think is really important to consider, and should make de-federation an absolute must.

Allowing Meta in goes directly against the idea of Fediverse, and we should fight it as much as possible.

This is a literal quote from the main header on https://www.fediverse.to/

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.

Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.

Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.

I've seen a lot of comments mentioning that defederating with Meta goes against the principles and main ideas of the Fediverse, that it should be inclusive and allow people to connect. But, judging by this main selling point of the Fediverse, it sounds to me like Meta shouldn't be in the Fediverse do begin with.

Here are some good articles and responses I've seen on this topic:

• https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
  • counter argument
• https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/john-gruber-no-understand/
  • rebuttals to counter
• https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
  • historic precedent and prevailing trends with open protocols

Absolutely, yes. It's hard for me to see federating with corporations such as ~~Facebook~~ Meta much differently than doing so with an instance run by spammers.

Yes, refuse to federate from the get-go. By the time the hostilities become open, it'll be far too late not only to attempt to repair any existing damage, but even to avoid further damage coming down the line like a juggernaut.

Plenty of large corporations have shown time and again that SOP is to take over and kill any potential threats before they can develop. When a corporation finds another corporation using their resources for gain, even while still following terms and conditions, the lawyers come out and the fur flies. Why should we be pushovers just because we're not rich and don't have a legal fiction to hide behind?

The Fediverse is a direct competitor to monolithic social networks. That's definitely how they see us, and it's how we should see them. I know that there's a "share and share alike" ethos behind all of this, and that blocking any entity arbitrarily feels wrong and unfair, but it really isn't. I also know that, assuming that things go well, one day there will be successful business ventures that evolve naturally from the Fediverse, and the community is going to have to decide how to respond to those situations in time. But right now we're a group of little pigs playing in a somewhat secure pen, and a huge, voracious wolf is asking us to open the gate so it can join in our game. By the time we realize that we haven't seen Jerry or Louise for a while, the wolf will have changed the lock on the gate and spread rumors about us to the other animals.

If people still feel uncomfortable with refusing a large corporation "just because", then make a policy: "Due to the dangers inherent in unequal business relationships, it is our general policy to refuse federation with any entity with an average annual turnover in excess of US$200,000." You can always make exceptions, and even change the policy later, but it can ease your conscience that you aren't unfairly targeting one entity without justification; you're sticking to a sensible policy.

Yes

Yes, defederate. Facebook/Meta have show time and time again that they are up to no good.

Yes

yes

As a matter of principle: yes.

Don't know how much impact threads will have on lemmy though since the types of content are so different, kind of like how I don't interact that much with mastodon from lemmy. It's a different story if you're running a mastodon instance though! Maybe I'm wrong though in which case I hope someone more knowledgeable about ActivityPub can correct me.

Yes! This way who wants to interact with programming.dev just has to make an account on this or any of the federated servers. Nothing prevents them from having a second account on threads to view all of that 'content' as well.

Yes

Yes

I don't know how I feel about defederating but I would like this instance to have a Terms of Use or Policy that prevents anyone who federates with us to use content on this instance for profit. Or something similar to spirit of Open Source licenses.

The link to mastadon's blog you posted is very informative. I encourage everyone who peeks in this post to read it.

I don't necessarily agree with Mastadon's official stance because say the largest Lemmy instance (Lemmy.world) was owned by Meta. Once enough users relied on content from Lemmy.world, Meta could then start charging other instances to federate with it if they want content. Which won't kill "the platform" but will make information inaccessible.

Mastadon's stance :

We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

However I'm confused how Mastadon's official stance reflects their devs and admins because one of Mastodon admin, kev, from fosstodon.org, has been contacted to take part in an off-the-record meeting with Meta. He refused politely and, most importantly, published the email to be transparent with its users. Thanks kev!

Mail from Meta to Kev, from fosstodon, and reply.

I'm unsure. A lot of people are saying yes, but they are also implying to do so preemptively which I don't agree with. I would rather wait a few weeks and see what effect it has on this instance before making a decision.

Yes

Yep.

It's programming.dev though. Do any Meta platform host a substantial tech community? I honestly have never heard of any, but I might be wrong. Maybe they should be joining us?

Yes, I don't trust Meta, i think we should defederate. Threads is their first step to the enshittification of the Fediverse.

Yeah

Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can't keep a large instance controlled by "the enemy" from destroying what we've got, then we just have to do better next time.

My instinct and ideology tells me that no, we should not make that decision before it whatever Meta does becomes reality.

Fortunately, I have laboured long and hard to develop a scientific frame of mind, where decisions are based not on instinct and ideology, but on the evidence of reality, even in the face of incomplete information.

TLDR: we should not federate with Meta and that should be the decision taken by the majority of instances. Not because it's Meta, but because of the power that comes with a having a "controlling interest."

This is a network of independent actors. Other such networks are publicly traded companies, condo developments, and most cryptocurrencies. Whenever you have such a structure, you must be vigilant against the 51% problem, because whoever controls the majority, controls all.

This is why publicly traded companies do stock buybacks when they have extra cash and the company holds less than 50% of outstanding stock.

This is why condo developers (especially in condo conversions) like to hold the majority of units as rental units. That way they dominate the vote, and do so in their favour.

This is why cryptocurrencies must be vigilant against "51% attacks."

Also, the reality is that it is frequently unnecessary to actually hold 51% to gain control. In a system of widely dispersed small holdings, it may be possible to have de facto control with much smaller percentages. If the typical holding is less than 1%, one actor holding 30% might gain effective control with a minimum of effort. Think of them being a "super swing voter" whose interests must be satisfied in order to get things done.

If you've read this far, then you can probably guess that my real point is that we must be vigilant against any instance becoming too large. Not because they are untrustworthy or bad citizens, but because we have little recourse should they decide to exercise the power they have. In other words, Meta is just a specific case of the general problem.

Yes. Federating with them only means they can do the ol embrace extend exstinguish.

What kind of things do you think they would do in order to "extinguish" activitypub? Would they implement features that only exist on their platform as proprietary extras?

I vote no, but I highly suspect I'm in the minority. I think defederating now just fast forwards us to the end of the enshitification process people are concerned about. Feels like we're shooting ourselves in the foot out of a fear that we might get shot.

I'm skeptical of their intentions. If we do federate I think we should be ready to defederate if the need arises. I also think Lemmy servers should try to come together and agree what the "need to defederate" from them would look like so everyone can defederate together. It is likely some servers will defederate from the start and that's fine, I'm not totally convinced that's not the best course personally, my mind isn't fully made yet.

Defederate, or fediverse will be a niche satellite of Meta and not its own thing.