I feel strongly against corporate involvement with the Fediverse so I'm going to have a pronounced reaction to it.

Hell no to federating with Threads. Yeah they're a different platform and they have not joined the Fediverse yet, but they're using ActivityPub and they could do all kinds of nasty things with it (as evil profit mongering corporations always do).

For future reference, say no to any kind of corporate influence.

Facebook, aka Meta, is cancer. The best way of dealing with cancer is eliminating them at their roots.

Failing that, excising cancerous tissue before it metatasizes is common sense. Even if it's ultimately benign (which I doubt, given their track record), given the dangers that inaction would cause, it's best to preemptively exorcise it out of the Fediverse.

Apps and website that are basically performing mass surveillance (incl. voice) should be blocked in my opinion. It's already insane they are legally allowed. I am all for an open Internet, but I choose not to use Facebook, Threads and all kind of apps which do the same. They should not be able to use or index my responses on other platforms. Besides ignoring my personal space making money of it as well whilst I get nothing. I know that's already difficult to prevent, but we can make it harder for them to do so.

noooo....this is my happy place...thats a hard pass on anything meta

Defederation. BIG NO to corporations in the federation 🙂

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Also threads.net should be the ActivityPub domain, when they show you how you will be able to view user profiles on other instances it's using threads.net domain name.

You had me at Zuckerberg

Please defederate

Defederate! For many people migrating from reddit was, in part, to get away from big tech, this would ruin lemmy imo

I already left Lemmy.world because those assholes refused to defederate, don't make me have to set up my own instance 🤦

All I want is a free internet, of the people, by the people, that bans corporate dystopian bullshit. I am not asking much.

I’m happy to manage my own subscriptions and block settings to hide any content from Threads or other instances I may not enjoy. I don’t need my instance doing that for me.

My understanding of the argument for defederation is basically “but they might monetise all our social graphs”, but our content is publicly available on the Internet, so they can do that regardless.

Not a lemm.ee user but I think we should all defederate from threads. The fediverse is supposed to provide a safe space from these corporations, not welcome them with open arms, especially Facebook.

Given that pretty much every instance that I know of is hell-bent on never federating with commercial entities, are there any that don't have an issue with it?

It looks like I'll have to move and I don't even know where to.

Thanks for posting this and sharing your thoughts on this big topic. I voted up as I think it’s best to stay away from anything Meta related. It would ruin Lemmy. I like that you’re taking a logical view of the whole situation.

Good decision to have people heard. I'm genuinely curious about why somebody would want to side with Meta on this.

I certainly have no love for Meta, so I don't really mind just defederating from them on principle. Plus it won't matter much since, as you said, Threads is more of a Mastodon adjacent thing. There wouldn't make much difference even if you did federate with them, at least at first.

That being said though, if you do want to consider federating with them in the future a thing that would be important to me is that they would have to not be the only big corporate instance. I do not like the power imbalance between Meta and the current fediverse. If ActivityPub becomes a standard protocol that lots of companies start using and Meta keeps their spy garbage on their own instance then maybe it would turn out alright to federate with them. If it's just Meta then I have absolutely zero trust that they won't abuse their power to make our lives worse no matter how innocent they seem at the time.

Why don’t we wait to see if they send out ads to other instances before we judge them for that behavior.

I can only see negative on this topic. What are the pro's of letting lemm.ee federate?

This is a community of individuals escaping from corporate manipulation and abuse. As a new platform, we need to support our own and grow a healthy foundation.

If we give this parasite access to our community, others trapped on meta platforms will never leave their comfort zone to try something new and potentially better(to them).

When were big and strong like ox and with a name more recognizable than reddit, we can federate and show off our strong community. Or move on due to fading interest in threads like most meta platforms

I would like the fediverse to grow organically at a steady pace. Just from a pure logistical view alone Threads could overwhelm our instance, let alone moderating. I don't see anything +ves from federating with Threads.

Upvoting for visibility and content usefulness counteracting downvotes for interest in federation 🤷

Not my instance ~~(so I didn't vote)~~, but I must say this is a very reasonable approach. I wish other instances would also consider these points.

I agree that we should defederate from meta. We moved over here because of the shitty corporations so we shouldn't let them in now that we are actually creating a community away from them

I am personally against defederaring from Threads.

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.

If Facebook goes out of their way to push ads like that then yes, defederation is perfectly justified and invalidates everything else. However, there's no way to know what they will actually do until they do it. While at the moment it doesn't have ads, it obviously will in the future. But will those ads be actual posts, or just shown in the Threads UI? Can the users interact with them? What if they are posts, but without artificially inflated counts, so they'll have less interaction than regular posts anyway.

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.

If other fediverse users can see posts on Threads, it works the other way around too. Threads users will be able to interact with posts outside of it. "But they'll only show posts from other Threads users!!", until a user wants to follow someone not on Threads. Yes, that number is shrinking, but it doesn't have to once they federate. You can simply not make an account on Threads, users on Threads will follow you just fine, and you will show up next to everyone else. Threads may be a majority, but it won't be all of it.

Hell, having a Threads majority might not be a good thing. What if the content is good? What if it's stuff you actually want to see?

Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.

...i don't really see how that's the case. Since using Threads requires an Instagram account, that's already an okay protection against bots. As for trolls, you can use the federation to your advantage, to make tools on non-Threads platforms like bots to handle it. If anything, the main Threads instance itself will be way less moderated than smaller ones. Also the only difference between trolls/bots on Threads and other platforms is the amount, you can do bad shit here too.

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.

Then don't use Threads itself. That's the entire fucking point of the Fediverse. You can use whatdver instance you want. If you don't use Meta's instance, all they can collect is publically available data they could get without the existence of Threads no issue. They cant shove in ads that aren't actual posts which likely won't get interactions and can be blocked, and if they put ads as actual posts with inflated numbers then it's perfectly fair to defederate. Assuming they go the EEE route, you can still enjoy Threads while it's at the first E, and then not follow with them when they go for the 2nd.

However

By defederating, you're locking out everyone on Threads. While that might sound like a good thing to some, that's still thousands if not millions of people that would be interested in the content here and would post. There's a good chance they won't know they can just make an account somewhere else, and just miss out. Why punish the user for what the company did?

You should at least give Threads a chance, at least as an early bird before they look into ads. When they start turning it profitable, then is the actual discussion for whether you should defederate, which will likely go through. We could even take this as an occasion to get Threads users off of Threads, off of Facebook.

Or I could just be a clown for giving Meta a chance. Only the future will tell

Edit: I have since changed my mind on this, and I want to explain why

I forgot we're talking about Meta here. Obviously they won't make this in a way that's mutually beneficial. They want to make money off of it. So when time comes to ad adds, they'll obviously make sure everyone sees them. And if we keep them for now, when we inevitability have to federate because Threads becomes profit driven, things will suck way more than if we never federated, because users from over here will lose access to content they were interested in on Threads, and vice versa. By embracing the first E, all we're doing is welcoming Facebook in the one place meant to keep distance from them.

I completely forgot the point of the fediverse is for it to not be controlled by a single entity. And while Threads can't replace the fediverse, they can definitely conquer it, and since we're talking about Meta, if they can they will, and Mark "they trust me, dumb fucks" Zuckerberk will obviously find a way to monetize users on non-Threads fediverse if given the chance.

Defederate

I don’t trust anything about them. Any virtuous incentive people have to grow and maintain and moderate the fediverse is lost on anyone with any affiliation to Facebook. They have one goal and that’s money. Anything and everything they do and can do will always be for that.

For this reason, I would never want to be connected to their services and any federated service like Lemmy that I’m enjoying being a part of - if it should ever connect with Facebook in any way - would be my signal to abandon ship.

Direct democracy in action.. I love this shit...

Let’s just tell ZUCC he’s not invited, guy ruins everything he touches.

I’m not saying lemm.ee shouldn’t defederate but I think we should take a wait and see what happens approach. As you mentioned they aren’t even supported by Activity Pub yet. Let’s see where it goes.

I downvoted but I’m not opposed to defense rating in the future should they prove to be as evil as we suspect.

I really like it here. I came here to interact with other people without the greedy exploitation and manipulation of huge companies that try to inject themselves into every aspect of users' lives just for the privilege of socializing online. The business model of every single large player in social media is disgusting and antisocial. This forum is perfect the way it is and interacting with any large corporation can't do anything positive, but can definitely contribute to ruining what you've got here. Thanks again for running this instance.