Defed every corporation. McDonald’s starts an instance? Fuck off and fix your ice cream machine. Gabe Newell starts a Steam instance? No Gabe, go make half life 3. Make all these suits federate each other and see if anyone wants to talk on their shit.

We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.

However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.

He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.

Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.

The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.

Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.

Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.

If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.

Wait… FB/Meta is going to create instances? Somehow I missed this news and I’ll be trying to look this up after by post.

Anyway, yes they should not be allowed. They have a vested interest to destroy the Fediverse. How would they do this? Well, Microsoft has pioneered this strategy known as Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish. It’s much harder to apply these things to opensource, but we’ve all seen how much Microsoft has been Embracing Linux in the past 6-7 years.

Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn’t matter whether you’re on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.

Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.

While lemmy.world is not my main instance, so I have no say in whether you defederate or not, I would like to bring this arugment into the discussion, because it’s applicable for all instances, and make de-federation an absolute must for every instance.

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.

The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.

Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
• Meta’s algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-“paid”/“verified” Threads users.
• It’s already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta

Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

Note on This Post

I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p

My gut tells me we should defed all corporate instances as a matter of policy. Our uniqueness is at jeopardy , think of threads like the borg.

If I start seeing meta on here, I’ll leave. I left facebook over a decade ago, and want nothing to do with it. This seems like an obvious no brainer.

I know tonfuck of reasons why we shouldn’t have them here. Are there any advantages?

There must never be a single dominant instance. If one instance becomes too large, they end up having too much influential power. And with all that power, big corporations or power tripping admins will use that power to coerce other instances to do certain things. “Don’t want to follow our unilaterally-imposed rule? We’re gonna cut off your entire instance and your users will lose access to our communities.”

If Meta doesn’t get defederated, they will become the dominant instance. They already have the most amount of users since I’m assuming you can use your Facebook/Instagram account, they’ll have the most amount of user activity, and of course the most amount of power.

A problem I haven’t seen anyone discuss: What of server costs?

When even just 1% of the still growing 30 MILLION Threads users (300k) are interacting with an average Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. instance every day, just how much data do you think that will generate? As Threads scales and users are posting content that users on smaller instances try to interact with, the hosts of these smaller instances bear the brunt of the costs.

Threads need only exist, and as everything scales upward and more people join the Fediverse, their sheer mass will wipe out all the smaller players just by virtue of the smaller servers being unable to cover growing server costs. 300k users creating 1kb of content each, per day, comes out to 292 megabytes of data. (But that’s not realistic. The OP contains 5,171 characters, or roughly 5kb of data.) This does not account for images, or videos, which also cost money to store. If 1% of those 300k users (1% of the 1%, 3,000 people out of 30 million) are posting images, if we assume the maximum file size Mastodon can store (8mb per image) and arbitrarily set the file size at 1mb to try to be conservative, we’re still adding an additional 3,000 megabytes of data per day in addition to the original 292, or 3.21 gigabytes of data. We’re not even yet accounting for the additional data to store the database references for all of this either, keep in mind.

Those numbers are small. They don’t include videos, and they vastly underestimate the amount of users interacting with any of our smaller instances. Every time a reply containing an image or video is posted to Threads, if smaller instances want to keep a copy for their own users to reply to or interact with, they have to store that data.

Server owners will be buried under the server costs – costs which Meta can easily subsidize with Instagram and Facebook revenue, not unlike Walmart intentionally under-pricing everything in a new branch in a small town right up until every local store ceases to exist, at which point they jack up the prices and put another new store somewhere else.

The corpos ruined everything, don’t let them do it again.

We have a moral and ethical obligation as humans to exclude any participation from Facebook or Meta. Facebook knew their algorithm increased suicide rates among it’s users, but actively suppressed this information because they also knew their algorithm made them more money. The more depressed and addicted Facebook users became, the more money Facebook made. And when they went before Congress to answer for this, Zuckerberg just did nothing, took no accountability, and nothing changed.

This isn’t about boycotting and trying to do some kind of ethical capitalism, it’s about not letting Hitler submit changes to your git repo regardless of what those changes technically are. They could be the most technically brilliant changes ever made to an open source project, but they would still be Hitler’s changes.

Fuck me I only just got here and it’s already cracking off.