Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

It doesn’t start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren’t evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.

The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren’t really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.

They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There’s outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn’t come to pass, and looks like it never will.

Facebook doesn’t need malicious intent for what’s going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what’s wrong with them trying to build an audience?

Thread’s improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.

After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It’s not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don’t turn the heat up too many degrees at once.

It’s wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn’t 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.

Facebook needs to make money, and they won’t do so by directly charging users. There’s only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.

Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet’s monomyth. You don’t have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.

If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don’t have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say “your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you.”

I appreciate the thoughtful response and agree - no need for a knee jerk reaction when there is still some time until a decision needs to be made, and there are still quite a few unanswered questions.

As long as you maintain this level of transparency I trust that you make the right decision for lemmy.world.

As usual, thank you!

I didn’t realize that defederation only breaks the link in one direction. I don’t like the idea of my posts being exported to Threads where they’ll have an entirely different discussion on them.

Please don’t give Meta even an inch.

They wouldn’t be stepping into the Frediverse if they didn’t have a plan to either monetize the user base or destroy their competition.

Don’t let them take a pound and then some.

We kindly ask everyone to engage in civil discourse and remember that not everyone will share the same opinions, which is perfectly acceptable.

It’s really actually not acceptable to ignore what a bad actor Facebook/Meta has been. Catch up on the news if you need to. Cambridge Analytica scandal, unwitting social experiments, and the insane amount of intrusive permissions required just to use threads etc. They’ve been anti-consumer in an almost dystopian way and failing to call that out is an immoral stance. There’s really no polite way to say, “that’s a hell no, fix your attitude, or I’m out.” That people have characterized folks telling you this is a deal-breaker as “blackmail” is the absurd stance here. We’re asking you to stay true to the anti-corporate “power to the people” spirit that created Lemmy in the first place and call out Meta for being an obviously bad actor in this space, as a bunch of Reddit refugees… You actually arguing against this and acting like “both sides are fine” about it is being completely tone-deaf and is 100% antithetical to the purpose of the fediverse.

“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” You’ve already committed to doing nothing during an important time with a “wait and see” attitude. Meta is still a face-eating leopard, a frog-stinging scorpion, or whatever analogy does it for ya. It’s not a tough choice and there IS a right and wrong answer.

It’s so bizarre to see people complaining about “kneejerk” reactions as if it’s the user’s fault and not Meta’s.

Have you people just forgotten everything about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook?

You’re goddamn right the reactions are kneejerk, that’s the point.

After over a decade of abuse, controversy, and horrendous practices that have defaced the very idea of social media and caused actual, real damage throughout the world, people have rightfully identified Meta as a monster.

And when a monster is coming for you, the kneejerk reaction is turn around and run.

It’s very telling that all the arguments for allowing them in are basically “well, we can survive it”. Like, everyone seems to be on the same page, here: Meta is terrible and wants to monopolize everything. Yet rather than the sensible thing and just get away from them, people are arguing we should fuck around and find out?

Instance Blocking - Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet).

This is the real problem.

I want to stay federated with threads and oppose defederation. Just putting it out there.

I would prefer lemmy.world defederate from Threads and any other major social media giant’s attempt at federation. My reasons for doing so have been covered really well in other comments in this post.

I just want to remind everyone this is a direct quote from Zuckerberg regarding people handing over their data to Facebook: “They trust me. Dumb fucks.”

Defederating from Threads in a preemptive fashion is nothing more than reactionary nonsense based on bad history. It literally makes no sense. Who the fuck cares what Meta does? All of the “consequences” I’ve read so far come across like bad fanfic at best. The analogies to Microsoft are false equivalencies.

I’ll make it simple: I’ll leave if lemmy.world defederates things preemptively. People need to understand that this idea has been around forever and has worked forever. Looking a gift horse like Threads choosing to join up (if it actually does federate - I highly doubt it) in the mouth is absolutely insane.

Why are the doomers not talking about how best to steal users from Threads instead of just assuming this entire thing collapses the second a company with capital joins? How can this be considered a sustainable (again, looong-ago proven) system if a single company can pop in and ruin it?

Let’s defederate

I’ll move to a different instance the day Lemmy.World federates with Threads. I came here to avoid corporate influence over my social media, especially from Facebook.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

Regardless if we know the method in which they will attempt it, we know what they are and what their ultimate goal is. Just because you can’t see the fangs doesn’t mean you invite the menacing stranger in black into your home in the middle of the night.

Also, “Lemmy will survive” is a bit like saying “technically the earth will survive after climate change”. We’re not just interested in continued existence, but in the manner that existence takes. If Meta is allowed to set-up shop in the fediverse, they will come to define it, and new users will see it as the fediverse. By the time Lemmy.world defederates, it will be like cutting off its own arm and no one will want to leave Threads anyway.

Basically, let the fediverse grow without this snake in the garden. Let it form its own identity without Meta so it can serve as the counterpoint to it and refuge from it.

Ribbit

I came to the fediverse to be rid of big social media companies, not join them