I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.
In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.
Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^
Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?
When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?
I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:
- Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
- Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.
Edit 1 - Some More Arguments
In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:
- Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
- This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
- Federation will attract more users:
- Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
- Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
- Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
- Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
- We just need to create “better” front ends:
- This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
- Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
- This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
- Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.
PART 2 (post got too long!)
I’m still getting used to this platform, so this might be a stupid question. Are we able to see their content/can they see ours?
If we defederate, they can technically pull our content because it’s public, but it’s difficult, and their users won’t be able to interact with it.
We would not be able to see theirs unless you manually went to their site.
Right now, they still haven’t turned federation on, so we can’t do that. If we do federate, we will be able to (easily) see and interact with their content, and they will be able to (easily) see and interact with our content. If we defederate, we can technically see each other’s content by visiting their site (or them visiting ours), but we wouldn’t be able to usefully interact with them and vice-versa without making an account on their site (or vice-versa) ^.^
Why wouldn’t they be able to interact with it, at least within their own ecosystem? The way I understand, if I defederate with them on my instance they can still see my content but I can’t see theirs. There’s nothing stopping Metta from taking that public data anyways and allow only their users to interact with it in their own sealed space. With how many users they have, it’s possible it wouldn’t even be noticed by the average threads user
Well, theoretically we could do the same. Host shadow-Threads content. That’s essentially what’s going on with reddit repost-bots, after all. But if you look at those they usually have no comments and for Facebook in particular, I would argue that enabling their ability to spread their content to the Fediverse is dangerous even if we don’t interact with it.
And the same is true for Threads - they could actually do that kind of re-posting, in theory, but then it’s pretty much just them reposting a link to some post on the Fediverse with their own silo. We wouldn’t see any of them at that point. I’m arguing for defederating on the basis that it protects us from Meta/Facebook, not on the basis that it would stop Threads users from seeing some parts of Fediverse content (essentially posted as links) ^.^.
But theyve got the numbers to support their own echo chambers. I’m not saying what meta is doing isn’t a threat, but isn’t it better to be in the same room as their users to have a conversation with them than have them exist in their own echo chamber thinking the fediverse is only what meta wants them to think it is?
I don’t think the average threads user would even notice if it’s a repost. They’d see the content, and have the interaction. From what I know, if I defederate with threads, a user subed to one of my communities would still have the meta server pull in content from mine. I’m fairly certain their engineers can make it look more organic and allow seamless interaction between the 30 million threads users.
It still seems to me because of this, we would be doing ourselves more harm by defederating. At least right now. Even in light of embrace, extend, extinguish.
In a room where Facebook/Meta controls the entire algorithm, who gets to see what, and any astroturfing efforts they make? And where the fraction of people who will ever see your post is so tiny as to be insignificant? No. Facebook have over a decade of brazen, malicious psychological manipulation experience - as well as lots of money - that they have used to attempt to agglomerate more and more control over the way people communicate and engage in horrific behaviour (like the stuff listed in my Original Post).
Trying to play the game on their field is a losing proposition in every case, when it’s with a company that has much more than a decade of information warfare and manipulation capabilities and hundreds of times more users (plus probably 100s of thousands of times the financial resources). The Fediverse is far too small to compete with that at the moment.
If you really need to sell the idea of the Fediverse to Threads users, you can still make a Threads account, or spin up an instance for yourself to do that. Exposing the Fediverse as a whole to the metastatic organism known as Facebook/Meta is a losing proposition.
If it’s either that or Im not in the space at all I’m going to take the option to try and expose the unwashed masses to the light of the fediverse.
By nature the fediverse is open. While I may not agree with exchanging my personal data to be sold to advertisersers in exchange for a fast browsing experience, if that’s how people want to engage with the fediverse how is that bad? Would it be the same if a large pay for access instance arose that required members pay a fee but gave a browsing experience similar to what a large company like meta could provide?
It seems to me, unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding the concept, that defederation is a tool of last resort. It does more harm to the individual instance by nature unless the instance is proven to be disruptful or full or bad actors. I get the company meta itself meets that category, but I’m not convinced it’s users or communities do. Defederation to spite an instance admin is only harmful to the instance doing the defederation.
Idk if you noticed but I am on a private instance. There is no way in hell I’d create an account on a meta server. I’d prefer to interact with them from mine and that’s what I’ll do. It’s what makes the fediverse so great. And it’s why unless there’s a unified defederation camp again making it’s reasons and statements known, individual instances defederating with meta will have little effect. Basically we need to unionize and I don’t see that realistically happening at this stage, for better or worse.
How is it dangerous?
Meta/Facebook has 100s of times the number of users, many more times the amount of resources, the constant desire to consume other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp (or destroy the a-la Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), and well over a decade of experience in engaging in manipulation and essentially, information warfare, to get what they want and commit hienous behaviour.
Even just the quantity of users on a single, difficult to exit instance is a risk, but the continuous and long history of Facebook engaging in largescale psychological manipulation makes them many times more dangerous ^.^
In particular, you looking at their algorithmically curated posts enables them to manipulate you with their decades of refined, algorithmic experience in doing so, as they have repeatedly done in the past.
So basically their content is dangerous. Even if it’s user-generated, it can be machine-curated for psychological manipulation. What seems like a natural flow of conversation could be a signal used to hack our minds.
I’m not trying to make it sound crazy by wording it that way. There are people in my life I just had to cut out because their speech was toxic to my mental health in a way I couldn’t rationally object to. I just had to stop listening to them.
Is that because federation involves actively pushing content, versus “pulling” meaning polling/scraping? How much of a barrier is it?
This makes sense to me: it’s just they’re unauthorized to POST/PUT/PATCH data right?
Yep! ^.^
It’s not super difficult to pull content, but you ofc can’t push back content.