Fediverse

Defederation is a feature, not a weakness.

Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.

We are trying to prevent a repeat of Google with xmpp.

If an instance you’re in defederates, just start your own. Why complain about what people want to do in their instances? Just find another one.

Yes, that’s exactly how you sound.

Copying this from another comment I made. Defederating would pretty much cut off a lot of potential new users that want to see posts on Threads while also not wanting to have a Meta account and all the issues that come with it. People here need to realize that they are in an echo chamber. Mastodon and Lemmy needs users and content. Cutting a big portion of that would kill it in the long run. There would be nothing to "extinguish" in the first place in their complaints of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

The general public does not understand federation. When Threads makes content that I have created via kbin.social visible on Threads, very many people are going to think that that content was created on Threads. And Meta then takes that content, aggregated with all the other non-Threads initiated fediverse content, and monetizes it. They are using "not their content" to enhance the desirability of their portal, and certainly placing ads in its vicinity. As with any instance, they can also curate that content to promote their chosen agenda, which is surely in part "increasing engagement."

We've seen how "increasing engagement" has been done by Meta and other companies already: ragebaiting and misinformation. While there is no way to completely prevent this, I want to avoid content that I have created from being used in that way. If there was a way for me to individually defederate from Threads, so that Threads could not see my content, I would turn that switch on in an instant. So far as I know, the only way for my content to be excluded from being viewed via Threads is for the instance my account is on to defederate. I'm not in any way asking for kbin.social to defed from Threads, just noting that that is currently the only functional way to accomplish the stated goal.

I do understand that there are already instances that have done that very thing, and I am certainly able to jump over and use one of those instead. I may do that at some point, but I am pleased with the interface at kbin.social, and developer of kbin's work. For the moment, I want to watch and see how things play out, becoming more informed before I make a decision about how I interact with the fediverse.

Defederating "from this and that" is actually sometimes problematic here. It's about instance admins finding balance between freedom and usability (limiting spam and hate). Beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world defederated from exploding-heads.com etc. These decisions were controversial, but they weren't bold. On the contrary, much thought and care went into these and that can be seen in communities' support for them (in case of Beehaw, along with hopeful awaiting of refederation by users and admins alike).

But that seems not to be the main issue you're presenting. Defederating from Threads specifically is an entirely different matter. And people who advocate for it, including myself, have more arguments for it than just privacy.

Aren’t the people demanding that no instance ever defederate for any reason and that defederation shouldn’t be allowed the ones who have an inner dictator that needs to be tamed? I thought the entire point of things being decentralized is that individual instances can operate the way they want, including choosing which other instances to federate with. But for some reason, this freedom shouldn’t be allowed? Am I missing something here?

If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. ... It’s about having options

We can't rely on the illusion of an even playing field to limit the influence of predatory capital like zukerberg's. Big social media products are designed around the chemistry of decision making in the brain - they can win using an inferior, exploitative product with the worst user experience that could possibly bear profits.

I'm not necessarily in favor of defed-ing anything that zuck's claws are in, but I think it's very important to be wary of what opening the door for one of the world's most genocide-encouraging social media companies could mean.

Part of being free and accessible for everyone is allowing defederation.

Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media

Do you?

It certainly doesn't mean "everything from everywhere can reside on the server I pay for". Nor does it mean "we can't vote them off the island if they're negatively impacting us".

It means exactly the opposite, in fact. It means we get to say "no" at whatever level we choose, and that includes at the server level.

If you don't like the choices the admins on your server make, find a new one, or start your own. That is the promise of federation.

This might be what finally drives me to roll my own instance of Mastodon, and potentially Lemmy. I just worry that it'll pummel my internet bandwidth and/or limited server capacity.

All of this yearning for drama and tribalism is exhausting... I thought I escaped it by leaving Twitter/Reddit, but it's just bubbling its way back to the surface.

Glad you said this. People demanding large instances like this one defederate from stuff they don't personally like are, frankly, very mislead and trying to be little dictators. That's not their decision to make.

A lot of it is people wanting to avoid another Eternal September .

If you have a community you've built, and like, a flood of people who don't understand the culture and behavioral expectations swarming in can be viewed as, frankly, an unwanted invasion.

I also think if this was some new startup (say, Bluesky) instead of Meta, there'd be a different tune, but that's because a good portion of the people who run the communities and invest their time and money into building the community they want were burned by the aggressive enshittification that Meta is basically synonymous with at this point.

TLDR: this has happened before, and it's absolutely destroyed communities just due to the sheer volume of people who don't understand how to behave swarming in and drowning out everyone who the community originally belonged to.

But what do you do when a known Dictator walks in?

Meta is going to establish itself, and go back to old habits once it's on top in the fediverse.

people can choose not to interact with things that are bad for them, and bad for the group (the fediverse as a technology platform) sure

… just like people can choose to ignore misinformation
… or vote in their best interests

it’s definitely a fine line! but let’s not kid ourselves: people aren’t always rational actors, and refusing to admit that is dangerous

The argument for defederating is that Meta has an enormous technological and userbase advantage for capturing up all the activity in the fediverse. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the overwhelming majority of future activity on the fediverse happens on Meta controlled instances, if we let them have free reign capturing as much of the fediverse as they can. In that case, with Meta effectively controlling the fediverse, then they don't really need to play nice anymore. They can introduce a breaking API change and hold all of the non-Meta instances ransom saying to upgrade to their new API, or you won't be able to participate with their fediverse communities anymore.

So it's basically a question of do we nip the Meta issue in the bud and preemptively defederate from them, or do we wait until they take over and force us to restart from scratch two years from now.