Context
There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.
The lemm.ee federation policy states that it’s not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it’s likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.
However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.
Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse
- As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the “all” page of federated servers.
- Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don’t apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the “all” page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
- Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
- In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don’t have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can’t even imagine yet.
By the way, we’re not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation
- Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
- Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
- We don’t really know what to defederate from - it’s completely possible that “threads.net” will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.
So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.
Update:
By now, it’s clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):
- lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
- Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads
While it seems to be a minority, it’s still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.
A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.
The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:
- The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
- Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
- We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook
Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option
In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:
- There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
- Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
- There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)
Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.
Again, I realize this approach won’t please everybody, but I really believe it’s the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.
I don’t understand why anyone wants to have Facebook of all companies here. Really? Why is this even a question.
Same. There really couldn’t be a worse potential company to be involved with.
If the “wait and see” folks want to interact with Threads people, just make a Threads account.
All that will come of federating with them is the fediverse drowning in a deluge of their awfulness. We have a nice thing here - allow it to grow organically and it’ll hopefully remain a nice place.
Exactly. Just go to threads if you want threads.
I was going to add “That would be like having X on Lemmy” and the only example I could think of was Facebook
That misses the entire point of federation.
Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the entire point of federation was to turn it into Instagram.
My mistake.
No the entire point of federation is that you don’t have to have an account on every single social media site in order to be able to have their content.
You make your account on the site of your preference and you can still connect and follow with the people who are posting to other sites.
There is no need to have an account on all of these different platforms when federation allows for an individual user to decide that they want to follow a different user on a the different platform.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. At all.
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.
Please explain to me, exactly how it would result in
Like I’m actually struggling to understand how federating is going to do that. Individual users can still control what shows up on their feeds through the things they follow subscribe and block personally. Why does the instance as a whole have to defederate? Why block and prevent users of the instance from being able to engage with parts of the Fediverse?
Because most of us have friends and family who we want to keep in contact with that aren’t nerds.
The fediverse is only ever going to be a playground for nerds until it has mainstream appeal or the very least is compatible with the mainstream. I want to be able to migrate completely away from having a Facebook account, but I can’t because there are people who I want to and have to stay in contact with on those platforms.
If meta added fediverse support to Facebook, that would mean that I could completely get rid of my Facebook account move to a fediverse instance somewhere, or even self host my own, and still be able to keep in contact with those people who are never going to leave the mainstream site like Facebook, X, Threads, etc.
I’ve been saying it for years that it needs to be a legal mandate that any social media platform above a certain size should be required to support ActivityPub as a way to prevent them from having such a monopolistic hold that prevents netizens from being forced to have an account on their platform.
Maybe it’s because I’m being short sighted, but I think the Fediverse is best when the individual users on the platform are the ones who get to choose who they connect with. Not the hosts of the instances.
Why are you coming in hot making multiple long ass replies in a post that’s
a. Two months old.
b. About a subject that ended all relevance two months ago?
I’ll answer both of your questions with one answer,
Because I only just now saw it and had things to say about it.
(also, the update post clearly says to continue commenting, that the admins are still interested in different POVs)