Seeing as this conversation is going on everywhere right now, what’s the approach to Meta going to be here on UK? Personally I’m all for defederation as soon as possible, what does everyone else think?
Say no to Meta! They inevitably will want to Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish!
My fear is that they’re going to go at it Chrome/IE style: Get big enough that their interpretation of the standards becomes the standard.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I’m against it.
First, I fear it’s an attempt to embrace, extend, extinguish the fediverse, but I dont know what blocking Threads is going to do to stop that…
Second, I want Meta to have as little data on me as possible, so if they are storing my comments and profile data, I’m not happy. Call me crazy, but I worry what big data algorithms they have behind the scenes can do to tie things together.
Third, I’m huge advocate for digital privacy, and against these large social media companies. What demand in exchange for what they provide is massively unbalanced in my opinion. I dont want to support them by giving them content I havent actually agreed to give them!
Honestly, I see no upside to them federating, other than content that I’m not desperate for.
embrace, extend, extinguish
Ayyy this again. A catchy sound bite goes a long way on the internet I suppose? Never mind that the examples are a good twenty years old and the recent MS Linux one isn’t even correct. But that’s cool. It sounds edgy I suppose.
I’m not arguing for Meta (they can go fuck themselves) but give people the choice and they will choose wisely for themselves. Block Meta if you want, or don’t if you don’t want.
I don’t think that having a realistic concern that Meta may be using a well documented business tactic that is used to snuff out competitors, to snuff out a competitor.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is associated with MS, but they’re not the only company to use.
I think many will see Meta entering the fediverse space as a threat to something nice that’s separate from corporate greed.
The Mastodon developers have posted their thoughts on Threads.
They seem quite welcoming about the whole thing, as they have been advocating greater adoption of federation by the big social media firms. However, they mention XMPP and we’ve been burnt by them before - once bitten twice shy?
Interesting stance. I hope they are right. Maybe it is a win for open protocols. I just feel like federating with Facebook is like getting into bed with your drunk uncle who has a history of molesting people.
Worth noting that it is also a pretty controversial stance in some quarters? I appreciate the utopian/optimistic stance and, if you feel all social media should federate and give their users the option to move, then this development should be welcomed.
However, Meta is an all-consuming amoeba and you play nice with them at your peril.
I personally don’t see them as any different than any other large instance and should be treated precisely as such: default federate until they give reason to defederate with them, which should be based on concerns of content/moderation and the like.
Meta is a privacy-hostile company and for that reason I’d certainly not wish to sign up with their service. With that said, the only data they’d be seeing from other instances is what people put out there in the public domain anyway and nothing is stopping them from obtaining that data if they truly wanted it without having to create their own instance to do so.
With that said, I love the fact that individual instance admins have the choice to federate or not and that’s the beauty of the fediverse. There’s going to be some instances that defederate instantly and that’s okay, much like there is going to be instances who take an approach similar to what I think should happen. As a user, I’ll have the choice to use whichever instance suits my philosophy and that’s awesome.
Additionally, to be honest I don’t really think Threads federating is even that relevant for platforms like Lemmy. Threads is a microblogging platform and Lemmy is a link aggregation system. To even post to Lemmy in the first place, federated Threads users will have to explicitly go out of their way to direct their status posts to a Lemmy community. How many people on Threads are realistically going to do that? It’s awkward and most people wouldn’t even know there’s a wider “fediverse” being more used to centralized services like Meta. People already don’t do this particularly often from Mastodon instances which are federated.
The whole thing is a storm in a teacup as far as Lemmy is concerned. It’s a more relevant discussion for Mastodon instances, tbh.
Given the success of Threads, and Reddit’s current problems, I think there is a good chance that Meta are already working on a Reddit killer, based on ActivityPub. Threads membership could easily be extended to this new app, and all of a sudden there is a lemmy instance with 100 of millions of users, spewing forth all their unmoderated content to anything that is federated. The rest of the fediverse would be absolutely swamped. Gone will be lemmy as we know and love it.
