I appreciate the thoughtful response and agree - no need for a knee jerk reaction when there is still some time until a decision needs to be made, and there are still quite a few unanswered questions.

As long as you maintain this level of transparency I trust that you make the right decision for lemmy.world.

As usual, thank you!

Just keep one thing in mind: even Meta themselves are saying they'll wait until they have a billion users, and then they'll decide what to do.

Freely admitting they'll play nice (not even ads) until they have a monopoly.

Now it's not surprising, that's how companies like Meta operate anyway. It's just quite brazen for them to just say it outright. That shows how confident they are that nobody will challenge them.

So that's the kind of company we're talking about here.

Please don’t give Meta even an inch.

They wouldn’t be stepping into the Frediverse if they didn’t have a plan to either monetize the user base or destroy their competition.

Don’t let them take a pound and then some.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

It doesn't start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren't evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.

The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren't really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.

They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There's outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn't come to pass, and looks like it never will.

Facebook doesn't need malicious intent for what's going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what's wrong with them trying to build an audience?

Thread's improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.

After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It's not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don't turn the heat up too many degrees at once.

It's wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn't 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.

Facebook needs to make money, and they won't do so by directly charging users. There's only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.

Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet's monomyth. You don't have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.

If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don't have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say "your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you."

It seems unlikely that Meta will federate with Lemmy. When/if Meta adopts ActivityPub, it will likely affect Mastodon only rather than Lemmy, given Meta’s focus on being a Twitter alternative at the moment.

I'm glad you mentioned this, because this seems like the most important point that seems to often get lost. This is primary a potential issue for Mastodon servers, not Lemmy/Kbin/etc.

It's so bizarre to see people complaining about "kneejerk" reactions as if it's the user's fault and not Meta's.

Have you people just forgotten everything about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook?

You're goddamn right the reactions are kneejerk, that's the point.

After over a decade of abuse, controversy, and horrendous practices that have defaced the very idea of social media and caused actual, real damage throughout the world, people have rightfully identified Meta as a monster.

And when a monster is coming for you, the kneejerk reaction is turn around and run.

It's very telling that all the arguments for allowing them in are basically "well, we can survive it". Like, everyone seems to be on the same page, here: Meta is terrible and wants to monopolize everything. Yet rather than the sensible thing and just get away from them, people are arguing we should fuck around and find out?

I came to the fediverse to be rid of big social media companies, not join them

Was this considered? https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Google essentially destroyed Jabber this way.

I was there and Jabber at the time also looked promising and Google adding its GTalk was the push everyone thought Jabber needed and everyone was welcoming it.

Meta will join Fediverse only if it will be still a threat to them, once users will switch to it (let's be honest, majority of users on Fediverse aren't purists, and if metra will have some unique features they will switch) they will defederate and Fediverse will lose meta users as well as old users. Just exactly as it happened with Jabber. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

An address to @Ruud and the lemmy.world team:

I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you've done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines our community's sentiment and reservations.

I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the "wait and see" approach.

What's to say Threads won't follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?

If I go to a friend's house and their child spits in my face every time, I don't want to go to my friend's house. I tell them this. The friend says, "Well this time just might be different, let's just wait and see!" Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.

Why should I believe this kid won't spit in my face all of a sudden, when they've taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein.

Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users' well-being. There's no reason to wait and see. It's not logical to believe this time will be different.

Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.

Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta's practices as a company.

This really should be obvious by now.. but Meta mines and sells their user's information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads... That alone should tell you there's no reason to "wait and see." Just look right now. They haven't changed...

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users' feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government...

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?

I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.

However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.

Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.

EEE is underestimated there. Google was not the sole destroyer of Usenet, but its acquisition of DejaNews and its deployment of Google Groups both did lots of damage. So did AOL joining in. Sure, Lemmy post-EEE will still exist in some form, just as some feeble remnants of Usenet are still alive. But we want to flourish rather than just survive, I would hope.

Most telling is the likely culture invasion. I just saw news reports that extremist trolls are already leaving Twitter for Threads. We don't need that here. Exploding Heads is already defederated over what sounded like a much milder version of Meta's toxicity. So I'd want parsecs of distance between us and Meta, or as close to that as we can get.

I agree that it is not an emergency needing immediate action if you prefer to take it slower. But, from a distance at least, it looks to me like lemmy.ml has done the right thing in assuring their users that they want nothing to do with Zuckerberg.

We kindly ask everyone to engage in civil discourse and remember that not everyone will share the same opinions, which is perfectly acceptable.

It's really actually not acceptable to ignore what a bad actor Facebook/Meta has been. Catch up on the news if you need to. Cambridge Analytica scandal, unwitting social experiments, and the insane amount of intrusive permissions required just to use threads etc. They've been anti-consumer in an almost dystopian way and failing to call that out is an immoral stance. There's really no polite way to say, "that's a hell no, fix your attitude, or I'm out." That people have characterized folks telling you this is a deal-breaker as "blackmail" is the absurd stance here. We're asking you to stay true to the anti-corporate "power to the people" spirit that created Lemmy in the first place and call out Meta for being an obviously bad actor in this space, as a bunch of Reddit refugees... You actually arguing against this and acting like "both sides are fine" about it is being completely tone-deaf and is 100% antithetical to the purpose of the fediverse.

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." You've already committed to doing nothing during an important time with a "wait and see" attitude. Meta is still a face-eating leopard, a frog-stinging scorpion, or whatever analogy does it for ya. It's not a tough choice and there IS a right and wrong answer.

As always, appreciate the transparency!

Looks like lemmy.world got hacked.

Instance Blocking - Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet).

This is the real problem.

The fact that there's even anything to consider is pretty concerning. This is a company that has actively performed research on whether they can intentionally give people eating disorders.

Just from a user safety point of view they have proven themselves to be entirely untrustworthy. And anyone even considering exposing their userbase to people like that is also entirely untrustworthy.

Instance Blocking - Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet). This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate, disappointing those who desire interaction with Threads, or choose not to defederate, which will let down those who prefer no interaction with Threads.

This here is the sticking point. With mastodon.world there's no particular urgency to look for an instance that will block Threads because in a pinch I can block the site myself. With lemmy.world this is not an option at this point and is a direct data point in my preparing to move instances (again: I moved from lemmy.ml to here).

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

Uh ... all the XMPP clients survived. It's not like anybody snuck around into people's houses and deleted the XMPP apps when Google and Facebook decided to stop playing nicely.

The issue isn't "survival". The issue is "thriving". They can quite easily turn the Fediverse into an irrelevance again.

This is a balanced post, and it is very much appreciated. That being said, I am new to the Fediverse, and I finally found a viable replacement for Reddit that is less toxic (at the moment at least,) and where I can socialize. I only use Telegram and Lemmy now. This is all I have. I don't have friends in the real world. I appreciate your strategy, but you should think of how this influx of toxicity would affect people like me who have difficulties socializing and making new physical friends and maintaining those friendships.

This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate, disappointing those who desire interaction with Threads

Who are these people? 🤔

Thank you for this post.

My biggest worry is not privacy, I know lemmy doesn't store any personal info and whatever you post in public can be used by anyone (if you don't like it, you'd better off not posting at all on public forums).

Big corporate controlled platforms are well known for botting/astroturfing/vote manipulation/propaganda on top of a huge amount of shitposting, they are dozens of millions, that could very easily overwhelm lemmy and kill it on a whim, from a content perspective, this is what worries me the most.

I will trust you anyway to keep an eye on them and react quickly if necessary, like you proved you're capable of with the hacking situation.

I understand your open policy, that's a good approach in general, but I hope lemmy devs will consider adding a function to allow users to block instances, because I really don't want to see facebook shit here.

Thanks for being clear in what goes on in the decision making. As long as you're making your decision with the user's safety and privacy in mind, then I trust you'll make the right decision if/when the time comes.

Some points/concerns I'd like to bring up though:

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - The biggest concern I have with this is rather than people thinking of us as separate platforms, people will start to associate us as Threads. We basically become Threads but for nerds/the paranoid/weirdos to many people. And as Meta begins to use their resources to introduce features lacking in most fedi sites, we'll eventually be seen as "shitty threads". Then after relying on threads for traffic and content without developing our own community, Meta yanks the plug, everyone who's still here will have to choose to prop up what remains of the fediverse, or join their friends on Threads, and then we start to see a decline in usership. Granted, because Mastodon is more of the Twitter analogue, they are more in danger of this happening than us. But we still get participation from Mastodon via federation, and they can still see and interact with us in various ways. If you have every received a comment reply where someone responds with @username, they are likely responding from a masto-like instance (you see this a lot in kbin, which is a hybrid of mastodon's/lemmy's interface), and there's a good chance we could also get those interactions from Threads users too. Also, nothing's stopping Meta from making "Threads but reddit" later down the line, and presenting a more direct threat.

Blocking Outgoing Federation - This is a little bit concerning that even if we do defederate, they will still be able to see us, and any interacting they attempt will have to be done from their end. I thought defederation would be a little more...secure. Like if people on threads decided to target communities on this instance, they could see everything we are doing, and then all they would have to do is sign up for lemmy, and commence. Basically all that would do is make us blind to anything happening on their end.

Regardless of whether Lemmy or other fediverse sites decide to defederate from Threads, there are definitely a lot of security concerns that should be addressed before federation occurs. Giving mods the tools to do their jobs and protect their users should be top priority for the development staff.

I don't have much of an opinion to add other than I wouldn't trust Meta even slightly -- but I do want to say that I appreciate this openness and thoughtfulness from the lemmy.world/mastodon.world admins.

I would prefer lemmy.world defederate from Threads and any other major social media giant's attempt at federation. My reasons for doing so have been covered really well in other comments in this post.

I just want to remind everyone this is a direct quote from Zuckerberg regarding people handing over their data to Facebook: "They trust me. Dumb fucks."

Thanks for posting your thoughts; they seem completely reasonable to me. However, my personal choice if the decision was in my hands would be to take the same wait-and-see approach, but with the default switched: I would start defederating with Threads until we see how it seems to go with instances who don't.

If there was a guy standing in my driveway who I didn't know, I'd probably keep an eye on him a bit, but wouldn't worry much unless he started doing something threatening. But if the guy was the same one who beat the family next door to death, I'm calling the cops and making sure the doors are locked. Meta gets no benefit of a doubt me; we don't need their interaction and it's hard to believe much good can come from it.

I don't fault you for your opinion though; it's a grey area and I'm at a different spot than you in it.

Coming to this 3h late but w/e

What are the conditions that will trigger defederation? It was mentioned via the "wait and see" approach. What is the See? What does Meta have to display, that they haven't already, to cause the needle to sway over to defederation.

The concern that I see is that if instances federate with it, their posts and interactions will become reliant on Threads users, due to sheer volume. This means Meta can then threaten to defederate with that Instance, and just to stay afloat that Instance will have to comply - or be left on the losing end of the "blame game" - Meta will say the Instance owner was the problem as its users cry in outrage for losing c/boomersdidnothingwrong.

By defederating early, it prevents instances becoming reliant on Meta users to comment and share. While they can see our content it basically becomes the new "reddit post of Twitter screenshot about reddit"

Another significant issue is that Facebook was widely panned in the Analytica scandal, and it's users targeted to sway votes. I came here to escape ads and look at memes not "vote for X" bullshit

A lot of people in the comments are missing the point that there's nothing to defederate from yet. Adding "threads.net" to the defederation list is pointless because:

A) Threads isn't using ActiviyPub yet, and we don't know if they ever will.

B) We don't know if that's gonna be the actual domain they would use on ActivityPub.

IMO the whole thing stinks of vaporware. I think Threads is gonna flop and fall into oblivion, but if the future proves me wrong they can certainly block them when that times comes.

Adding threads.net to the defederation list right now only serves to publicly make the statement "We don't like Meta" and serves no technical purpose whatsoever.

Best way by far would be to implement user-side blocking for specific instances. I personally don't want to see the corporate cesspool that Threads will be. But others might. And the fediverse as a whole will profit from more users and more mainstream engagement.

User-side blocking would combat the content-fragmentation problem and ads. Privacy is not really an issue (as already said: anyone can scrape your shit from anywhere anytime. If you don't want your personal data on the internet, then dont put it there)

It also keeps the power to the people. Moderation by people in charge of instances is really important ofc. But the last thing I would want is for them to become people dictating user behavior (as it is with some Reddit moderators and subs). Thankfully that's not the case here, but if we could keep as many decisions as possible to the users, that would be great.

So many excellent comments against Federation, but in case my two cents contributes...

I remember when Facebook released the Messenger App. I think it was around the time they swallowed Instagram. Before that, messaging was all part of the same platform. With that transition, some (more extreme) privacy settings left the walls of the app and started crawling into everything our phones experienced. I didn't want to play that, so I held off as long as I could.

But eventually I couldn't text my friends the same way they could text each other. I wanted that feature, but I didn't want to feed my data into it. Eventually, I relented. I mean, shared payments and location sharing... Things I now take for granted.

But I could never take that data back. The data that fed Cambridge Analytica. The data that feeds politicians and special interests, with UI designed around the mind by psychological experts, and alorithms that optimize engagement regardless of the path to get there.

I don't want the Fediverse to be swallowed too. They ARE going to build walls that drive profits. They're incapable of doing anything else. It's their entire business model!

Please defederate while we watch to see. It's the safer default.

Thank you for the actual sane and level headed response

so much FUD circling lately

Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I'm of the opinion that it's better to defederate, mainly for the reasons your post already covers, but I'd stress the quality of content is/will be Lemmy's biggest asset. I think many users (myself included) are on Lemmy to get away from the existing social media experience. Lemmy/fediverse is refreshing because it isn't governed by a mandate to grow quarterly profits at its users' expense; it feels like the internet in the late 90s and early 00s where people made content because it interested them rather than trying to garner views or promoting the most polarizing/inciting content (or even just downright trolling). I hope the admins can see what the risks are and take proactive steps in the interest of the community.

I think this is a reasonable response. I don’t want an admin that makes sudden, drastic changes without careful consideration, no matter the pressure from some members.

Don’t like it? Join another instance. That’s the magic of the fediverse.

I'm here because I wanted something far from Meta given their track record over the decades of being a privacy nightmare with their data collection and their apps and influence of the population their algorithms have had. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

To me whatever tech it is doesn't really matter. It could an old school message board. If Facebook isn't there I'd choose it over Facebook, since the tech itself isn't what makes something good. It's the organization behind it, and their long term plans for it and what they plan to do with the extra data collected from users beyond just public comments.

So it's personally why I have red flags for instances that plan to join with Meta, since I don't view something being fediverse to mean automatically safe and uncorruptable. These instances aren't even built with privacy in mind with ip logs available to admins. So that's even more of a reason why I don't want to associate with Meta instances. That instantly makes me highly skeptical of the ethics of the individuals running the instance, and the NDAs meta has had people they met sign adds to the suspicion.

I don't view fediverse as this magic armor that would protect users in instances that choose to federate with meta. It's something I see people have to be just as deliberate in when it comes to making a meta account or not.

If I had a say, I would vote to defederate from Threads. In the past, I would tend to lurk around social media sites instead of contributing all that much. I never really posted to Reddit, but my recent experience seeing how large corporations can ruin a good thing in pursuit of profits has caused me to loose trust in these kinds of entities. I do not trust Zuckerberg. I do not trust Meta. If there is no defedration, my plan would be to migrate to an instance that blocks Threads.

Thanks for highlighting the real issues.

People that keep mindlessly talking about EEE are doing more disservice than Meta itself.

Most people don't have a clear grasp of the technical concepts, keep talking about defederating something that doesn't exist yet, keep copy-pasting the same things over and over, and this slows the conversation about the fediverse philosophy, the real problems and the possible solutions.

The fediverse is it's in infancy, this could be a great chance to find some of its underlying issues and make it more resilient and healthy.

I despise seeing it wasted with mindless or disonformed copy-paste.

Ironically, even that's exactly the kind of behavior people here hate in Meta's platforms, but they keep perpetuating it here themselves.

I do not wish to have any sort of connection with Threads / Meta. Absolutely note. Defederate.

I think it's important to defederate from threads as soon as humanly possible, their presence here will only bring us problems in the future, as has been shown by what happens when Big companies enter federated Spaces in the past (many people have already brought up Embrace Extend Extinguish already). Also like I've said before Meta has a really bad track record when it comes to their privacy and ethics policies, might not be in our best interest to welcome them into this family.

Thanks for commenting on the issue, I appreciate the communication and it seems the community feels the same.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] can you let us know if you or any admins of lemmy.world took a meeting with meta or representatives of meta?

@[email protected] runs the 6th largest mastodon instance, and fosstodon instance admins (a smaller mastodon instance), were invited to an "off the record" meeting with Meta. The fosstodon admin, Kev, declined the meeting and notified their community about the correspondence going as far as to share screenshots.

In the correspondence, the meta rep said they were reaching out to mastodon admins, so if fosstodon got an invite, logic would figure they'd invite the admin(s) of a larger instance whom also happen to admin the largest lemmy instance in the world (lemmy.world)

I would love if the same level of transparency could occur here on lemmy.world

Were you folks invited, did you take it? I would really appreciate knowing if the people who run this instance have any relationships, formal or otherwise, with meta. A lot of lemmy users are here on the fediverse to escape the reach of companies like Meta when it comes to their social media.

Obviously no one is obligated to defederate from meta/threads when the time comes. But I would like to be informed.

I think it's important to know. I personally would like to know, I would like to make informed decisions on which instance is my home on lemmy - but without all of the info, our decisions aren't fully informed, so I have low confidence making any decision at this point.

Finally, I've posed similar questions before and have been accused by other users of wanting to attack lemmy admins if they did take a meeting, or for any reason at all. That could not be further from the truth. Online harassment is harassment, and is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don't wish any harm or ill towards anyone, including those who have different values or opinions than mine. Finally, I've always been cordial in my submissions on lemmy, I don't know what would make anyone think I'd start behaving differently now.

I think these questions are important, and I intend to continue asking them until we have an answer, so that I can make a decision with confidence that I had sufficient information to do so.

I hope that seems as reasonable as I feel it is, though I could be wrong, please feel free to respond with your thoughts. I appreciate the discourse.

Thanks yall.

I'd prefer to nuke Threads from orbit; the very least we can do is defederate them.

Ribbit

I'm here for Lemmy, not Facebook/Instagram/Threads. If that community integrates with this one, I will move to an instance that doesn't. It's not about ads or EEE or privacy for me, it's about belonging to a social media platform that isn't toxic. FB and Twitter are. Integration with these or other communities like them are harmful to this one.