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Lemmy.world Should Defederate with Threads
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
846 points (82.9% liked)
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The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:
Buddy i am here to avoid the lizardman and dont want him anywhere near me. Free software always has been an alternative to corprates and never a replacement. In the name of evangalic fediverse we should not give up our freedom. And above all this whill become like the trade agreement between Hati and the US.
As far as free software goes, how does running free software on your own server that you allow others to communicate with using established standard protocols violate your freedom? Not saying you shouldn’t be able to be selective about federation, but why would Facebook specifically being one of the peers violate your freedom?
I know that facebook will not rip you off your freedom just as windows wont stop you from removing or uing your computer. None the the less they will have significamt impact on the fediverse for good or bad and their influence might affect in someway we cannot predict.
I mean, the last point is weird. They'd never say that, and do not care about the illusion of being open.
Point 1 is true.
Point 2, what makes you think federation will make millions of users want to move away, or even know folk are on another service. They'll probably censor the word lemmy and every lemmy address to avoid folk advertising away. The fediverse will just be filled with nonsense data and they'll pull the stuff that helps their platforms and keeps people hooked on the teet. Without that data, they may not be at critical mass to sustain Threads and it might eventually die. With that and Twitter going to pot, avoiding federation actually helps Mastodon as it provides a distinguishable separate entity that has reached critical mass and has significant good will with the user base that motivates them to keep sharing content.
They'll try to dominate the way the protocols evolve. Try to push more and more crap into it because they're too big to ignore. Insert becoming ad, bot, corporate friendlier stuff. Fediverse doesn't need meta. It's nice and cosy and rather friendly here, I'ld like it to stay that way. It's like Google dominates some "open source" and pushes browsers towards more and more DRM friendly etc. We don't need that.
And absolutely irrelevant in terms of impact. We have at best a few hundred MAU on a good month. Facebook/Google/TikTok are controlling billions of people.
If we truly believe in the superiority of the Fediverse and that it is possible to have an alternative social media for everyone, we need to go and fight Big Tech. Defederating on the grounds of "I like it the way it is" is coward, selfish and completely lacking ambition.
Fight them by...doing exactly what they want?
Do they want us to let them federate so that their users can use Threads as a stepping stone out of the walled gardens?
Why would that happen?
People who used Google Talk didn't use it as a stepping stone to XMPP. They stayed on Google Talk.
Google was not charging people to talk on their network, and they didn't make it harder to reach someone once they got it. So there was no reason for people to jump out. Facebook, on the other hand...
When the internet was in its infancy, companies and small businesses first established their online presence by getting a aol.com or hotmail.com. Running your own email or website was still expensive and not something easy to do. Today, having "your own" social media and being in control of your brand is almost as easy as having your website and your domain. I am not saying that everyone will jump out of Threads, but if Threads ever gets successful enough to replace Twitter and if we don't shut them out of the Fediverse before it happens, at least there will be an opportunity for small businesses/media orgs/influencers that want to keep reaching their audiences (like they do today on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube/etc) and also want to take control of their own presence.
That's not dependent on federating at all. Meta is a member of W3C, they can be a part of developing and evolving ActivityPub at any point without actively running a service with it.
yes, very misguided. I always loved the idea of browsing "All" and see all top brands with millions of engagement promoting their products
I thought users could block instances now?
So yes but not exactly. It's not as effective as you would think that an instance block would be if it doesn't block the users. That's not even addressing the fact that Lemmy's blocking isn't even really blocking it's more along the lines of muting, it's just named blocking.
AP does not allow for the pushing of ads.
that's irrelevant. Nothing prevents the influencers to promote their products as they do in all the popular platforms. You're thinking only in terms of ads as coming from an ad server but this is not necessarily the case.
You're complaining about ads that are being pushed on you by an algorithm from ad companies. I'm telling you there are no ad companies. Seems relevant.
Nothing prevents them from doing that right now.
I never typed the word "ad". I specifically said post of top brands. How can this be achieved in ActivityPub? Easy. When you are using lets say Threads, their proprietary system treats differently ads and normal posts. However, anything their system is pushing on the federated network (ActivityPub) is disguised as a normal post. A post that is having millions of engagement will be visible in "All".
You act like you're new to internet. What prevents them is that their audience is not here and companies are not paying them for that. However companies will pay them to promote their products in Threads. With the current numbers, Threads has the potential to dominate the "All" page.
Doesn't defederating just mean they can see our content but won't see theirs? At least it was like this few months before. Now if this is true we would lock ourselves out of the discussion while they could still do anything they wan't with our content.
am get off old place without federation
when were you supposed to be responsible for others independent actions
That's the thing: actions from other users and from the key players are not "independent". It is a social network, actions and reactions depend on the context and the relationships of everyone involved.