• IWriteDaCode@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’m already a day late and I haven’t actually read all the comments because they’re surprisingly a lot here. But here is my two cents, hopefully I’m not just repeating someone else.

    Do you want the fediverse to be as big as possible? Or do you want it to grow in a steady manner in a healthy way with healthy discussion?

    Letting on the garbage that is popular social media giants like meta, will completely and utterly overwhelm this community. They have millions of users, we have thousands. Every single one of our posts will be drowned out by them. Say goodbye to high quality discourse, we will just become what Twitter and Facebook turned into, the same way that Reddit is going.

    I do not care if we have millions of users, our higher bar of Discovery and usability means that we get people who are self-motivated to learn, learn about technology, learn about our culture, learn about our rules.

    Would it be nice if it was easier to discover/join the fediverse? Sure. Would it be nice if we had millions of users? Sure. But I want to grow carefully and sustainably. I would rather have a small or medium-sized community with healthy discourse, than a worldwide gigantic social media community where conspiracy theories reign supreme, and the less techy people don’t understand how threads are different from Lemmy, and are constantly cross posting and are confused about what they’re looking at.

    I can block meta communities myself, but I can’t block all the hordes of people that will jump on our threads. This is a scalability problem waiting to happen, this is a social discourse problem waiting to happen.

    Lastly the only reason that I could possibly imagine that Zuckerberg wants to federate is to keep the only viable alternative to monopolistic social media conglomerates in check. The more people that can talk to us through his platform, the less people will look into and join us. If they can assert their monopolistic practices on the fediverse, they could use the EEE model to make it irrelevant. He is trying to destroy the federated social networks before they are big enough to be a real threat.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’ve already made my view on the issue known in other comments, but I’ve just stumbled upon an argument that I think is really important to consider, and should make de-federation an absolute must.

    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.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Yes, I think we should defederate. Don’t give them free content, and don’t let them monetize Fediverse.

    Also, I’m not really interested in having the millions of Facebook and Instagram users here, it’s one of the worst and most bland people and content internet can offer, right behind Tik-Tokers. I don’t see how it would add any value, other than moderation issues.

    • Lee Duna@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      YSK : Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.

      Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

      https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/

      • Mikina@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        That’s exactly what I was worried about, and I’m really really not comfortable with. Especially because it’s the most valuable data for training ML models to manipulate with people, or to keep them interacting with a website they want, which is something that I fear the most from the current advances in AI. I know it’s already happening for a long time, but I don’t want to help them with making it even better.

        So, definitely defederate. I’d even say that there should be an option implemented that would allow the users to defederate on their own, which would not allow their posts or comments to show on other instances they’ve defederated with, while also not showing them any content from said instances.

    • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      You make a good point. My initial Reddit interactions, for example, consisted of involvement. Before the API thing it had become the same thing as 9Gag: a place to just doom scroll for the entire time spent.

      The content becomes samey, or repost central.

  • 𝕊𝕚𝕤𝕪𝕡𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕟@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

    Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy’s recent popularity is that people are fed up with the “if something is free, you aren’t the user, you are the product” situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).

    Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy - I’m surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the “chicken and egg” problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don’t care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.

    I personally like this instance very much, and I’ve been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn’t hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.

    EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse

  • VaxHacker@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Yes, because we already know exactly how this is going to go. Their need to constantly make more and more money means that we know TODAY what is going to happen: EEE. We know this because of Fark, Digg, now Reddit, and to a lesser extent Slashdot and StackOverflow. The profiteers aren’t interested in federating, or having well-run communities; they’re interested in money and nothing else. We know for an absolute fact that Meta needs to make money and they’re only interested in the Fediverse because they see money in it (quite simply: because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be).

    I completely get “we shouldn’t strike pre-emptively” but if you wait until the third E it’s too late. But we already know it’s not pre-emptive because they’ve already enshittified their own communities. Ever tried scrolling through Arsebook recently without FBP and uBlock Origin? Article - article - ad. Article - article - ad. One item in fucking THREE is crap you’re not interested in. That’s what they want to force onto the Fediverse. We know it today. We have seen what they have done to their own stuff. So when they come sniffing round here we are completely justified in slamming the door in their face even if they promise to be nice this time, because we already know what they want.

    “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” and you don’t have to look far. The influx of people into the Fediverse is directly caused by the profit-motivated enshittification of Reddit. If we don’t draw the line here then we have to retreat back from Lemmy and invent something else, which they will then want to enshittify.

  • iaamp@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Yes! This way who wants to interact with programming.dev just has to make an account on this or any of the federated servers. Nothing prevents them from having a second account on threads to view all of that ‘content’ as well.

  • choroalp@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    TLDR; YES.

    They are just trying to pull an EEE(Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) on fediverse. Federating with Thr*ads is just putting a shotgun at the mount. Just see how Google killed XMPP

    • dukk@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      If they start to pull some EEE bullshit I’m sure 90% of the Fediverse will just nope the fuck out. I’d say give them a chance, but don’t let them start to control the Fediverse protocols.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      XMPP is alive and well, you can use it, many do.

      When Google and Facebook embraced it back then, the community was small and fresh, so their adoption of XMPP was quite the boost.

      When Google quit and took its users there was a significant user base that disappeared.

      The fediverse exists for almost a decade and it has a stronger user base. Meta can try to extend ActivityPub and we can only hope the devs don’t cater to their needs above anyone else’s (maybe we can learn from Mastodon’s influence). When Meta tries to extinguish it’ll only take their users with it.

      They can already fetch all the public data they want without federating.

      I dislike preemptiveness but everyone would have to be on their toes to react to any ill intent (like trying to change ActivityPub although that’s not really a well-defined protocol to begin with).

      I’m still on the fence but leaning towards block.

    • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      It really helps to hear a historical perspective on this. The issue is not a matter of, “let’s give them a chance and see how it goes.” It’s more like, “we know this has gone very badly in the past and the incentives are clear for Meta to sabotage us.”

      • u_tamtam@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        yep. And as an XMPP networks op, I wish we had figured-out the technical measures to avoid it in the meantime. Practically, it boils down to preventing a single actor from consolidating a “greater than X” share of the network, while retaining the desirable aspects like “promoting the better services for the most users”.

    • erez@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Really good write-up!

      It persuaded me that federating with any corporation is not a good move at such early stages.

  • jeff 👨‍💻@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’m unsure. A lot of people are saying yes, but they are also implying to do so preemptively which I don’t agree with. I would rather wait a few weeks and see what effect it has on this instance before making a decision.

      • Feyter@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Actually there are quite talented game Devs and Artist posting on Instagram. (But threads is not Instagram)

        I find it very alerting how preoccupied people here are. How does this makes us any better?