Being federated can allow us to encourage users to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one (ex. Mastodon, Firefish, etc.)

What you fail to mention here is that this goes both ways; it also allows Facebook to “encourage” users to switch to Threads.

“All your friends are on Threads, why do you keep using that weird Mastodon thing?”
“Oh, Threads has this cool new feature where you can use (insert current NFT AI tech bro grift here) but it doesn’t work with Mastodon.”

But yeah you’re right, the last time a tech giant embraced an open federated protocol, everyone and their mom started using the open platform instead. No wait, XMPP is fucking dead after Google did the third E.

Don’t let them have a monopoly over the use of ActivityPub. Grow the other platforms: The extend stage only works when the platform gets a near monopoly over use of the standard. That brings up the first action. If there are enough users, services and resources on things like Mastodon/Lemmy, then Meta (or any other company) can’t just extend the spec without causing their users to ditch Threads to stay connected to the content they want to see.

How tf do you expect that to work when they will start out with a 98.5% “market share” in the entire AP network?

Might aswell call it “Facebookverse” at that point because the entire rest of the Fediverse as we know it would be a drop in the bucket.

That’s right, in a world where the broader Fediverse federates with Facebook, Facebook’s starting conditions would be market dominance; a monopoly you might call it.

As long as there is a healthy community away from Meta (ex. what we have right now), then they can’t extend & extinguish.

Good luck having a decent conversation with two people when there are hundreds of people screaming about irrelevant trifles in the same room.

Protect the Standards and share why it is important

• Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy (interoperability requirements > etc.), and educate other users about the risks.

Facebook: We will muddy the waters around this upcoming competitor that could destroy our entire business model and drown it in noise. Users: Share posts from experts about strict adherence to standards, support regulatory and legal advocacy
Facebook: Oh no, not the expert posts! Ok, we will stop.

the way that activitypub works, the outgoing data is publicly available. Defederating with Meta doesn’t prevent that, and federating doesn’t give them any more data than they could get otherwise.

It is not. It is only available to federated instances and even to those it’s almost always a subset because not every user/community is followed. Due to Facebook’s sheer size, they would probably receive pretty much everything from any instance federated with them.

If they were defederated, they’d have to scrape every instance’s API to actually export everything. Not a real blocker but much more difficult, expensive and legally questionable. (See the recent popularity in imitative statistical algorithms aka. “”“AI”“” or “Copyright condoms” as I like to call them.)
Additionally, this opens up Fediverse users to Facebook tracking in things like DMs. I’m aware they’re not E2EE and you should therefore not expect secrecy from them but putting them into a known bad actor’s hands is quite a lot worse.

It’s more of an issue when data start coming IN to Lemmy from Mastodon and Meta’s Threads.

…that’s precisely what defederation is about. You can’t stop someone from scraping your API but you can stop their toxic waste from flowing into your healthy platform.

All Fediverse platforms will have to work on content moderation and misinformation. Platforms like Meta, focussed on profit and advertising, will likely moderate in a way that protects their income. Those moderation decisions will be federated around.

Moderation is a problem with our Fediverse platforms already, how tf do you expect us to do the work for Facebook’s platform in addition to that when it’s like 100x the size of the entire Fediverse?

develop USEFUL but safe and open algorithms for the feeds

There is no such thing. The only reason our current feeds aren’t full of shit is because the general signal to noise ratio is still quite high. Refer to the conversation in the room example above.

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IMHO, this is more of a problem for Mastodon, not Lemmy. Right now Threads is about individuals, not community groups.

Agreed that figuring out the right action is important! It’s clear from the conversation so far that a lot of instances are going to defederate, and a lot of instances are going to federate, so any strategy needs to take that into account.

I talked with a lot of people about this when I wrote Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! and don’t think it’s the case that we share the same goals. Some people see increasing the size of the ActivityPub network as a goal in and of itself (and generally support federation); others are in the fediverse because they want nothing to do with Facebook or Meta (so unsurprisingly support defederation). And some people have a goal of communicating with people on Threads – friends, relatives, celebrities, etc; others don’t. So again, these different goals are something to take into account.

Wanting to stay federated DOES NOT mean the user wants to help Meta or thinks that Meta is here for our benefit.

That’s correct, but many of the people I’ve seen arguing in favor of federation do seem to think Meta’s looking for a win/win situation where the fediverse benefits as much or more than Meta. And conversely many would argue that wanting to stay federated means the user is helping Meta whether they want to or not.

People seem to be confusing Google effectively just defederating with XMPP and taking their users elsewhere with them somehow usurping the offering. Their apathy with respect to embracing xmpp and not extending it for reasons I recall being too much work for them and then moving to completely different protocol (hangouts) is not the same as EEE. It is taking your users and going home. It isn’t like XMPP was this giant success that Google then used to steal users from it.

Warning: I have opinions

Normal people are not going to migrate to Lemmy or Mastodon. They had their chance with Reddit and X, formerly known as twitter. If those didn’t provide impetus to leave nothing will.

They are attached to their personal content. They have been “building their lives” on those platforms for decades. If you think that’s an overstatement, consider your average tailgater or gender reveal party attendee. Do you think they are going to leave all of those pictures, and thumbs, and climaxes just before “posting to social media?” Not a chance.

Remember people don’t like choice. Ever had that friend mildy interested in Linux? Ever make that mistake of excitedly telling them about every distro hoping they would enthusiastically want to know more… About absolutely everything? Of course. We all have.

Did they try it? Stick with it? Wonder about the others being better? Give up? Trying to bring folks to The Fediverse ends up being an l x m x n problem. Platform. Instance. App.

You know who makes that a lot easier? Meta. There are no choices. They have development funds and developer power. You are absolutely insane if you think any normal person would trade their normie app’s meaningless animations and bells and whistles for something flat and pragmatic, but lacking their cryptogrift ai deer antler camera filter horse shit. Or whatever kind of fluff we will never be able to provide them.

Keep things in perspective. This post may be largish for here. It may even go viral. Or re-lemmied by an Influencer or Content Creator… like and subscribe. Ring that notification bell. And join our patreon to support the channel and get behind the scenes content.

*We can not change the social media landscape. * Want to change things? Tell people they need to throw their computers away.

Otherwise, defederate.

I’m torn on this. On one hand, I would love to see more content coming into the fediverse from larger content creators. Sure there are plenty of great folks here but I want more adoption. Threads could be the way for a lot of people into the fediverse and if everyone defederates from them it really won’t make a splash. I have seen big tech EEE too many times to really trust them though. ESPECIALLY meta. What I prefer to see is things like flipboard migrating to the fediverse. We need to see more of this!

I personally am on the side of keeping the Fediverse separate from the Metaverse, I’d even concider the defederation of any leaking instance just to avoid the possible connection. Hence, I already went ahead blocking the Threads domain and will do my best to keep Meta out…

That being said, as I was reading one of the longer comments, I did contradictively think of a counter-point too… As was said, the current way of Federation only federates followed items and it has proven to be rather tedious if you want to see posts from an account from before it got Federated (my client now has a 'Load from remote instace" button that kinda solves this seemingly local (in the app), but even there it’s an extra click per profile to a second profile window just to see what I would expect to already be on the first). This is kinda annoying when scouting accounts to follow, as many will have (ex.) 2184 posts, yet after scrolling 7 it says there’s no more. On top it also makes the ability to encounter something or someone interesting to follow (unless somebody locally already follows them) kind of impossible…

Relays are a crooked band-aid solution to this, but are instance-targetted and you’ll have to add any you encounter one by one if you’d want your instance to work like Twitter and Reddit where content can find you (and with constant access to all (or most) content), while filling instances storages exponentially. So relays are more like ducttape than a real viable long-term solution to this.

In comes a big company instance that, if our instances would be busses and trains, has a comparable size of a planet, which technically could be exploited to relay stuff while leaving the attached media linked from their copy, and as a global index. Every account could be connected to any instance without having to store the entirety of it; any content creator could be fully seen at any point in time from any instance (if they wanted to); it would make federation a lot less intensive as it’ll just have to query the giant (if adapted for this use),…

But is that worth giving up my privacy to them again? Is that worth bowing to them as they assume authority over me again (like the power to cut me off from, not only the Metaverse then, but even the whole Fediverse too, should they (wrongly) suspect or misjudge something someone says? (A thing that will be bound to happen eventually, cause social media is probably the easiest place to get misunderstood, misquoted, oversimplified,… and getting a bunch of predispositioned opinions against you…)) And with Meta there isn’t even anyone to explain yourself to or complain to, which makes all that even worse…

So, my answer still remains No on direct interaction,… I’m not yet sure on my position on defederating ActivityPub instances that federate with Meta yet though… I’ll still need some research and input for that before I’ll decide for sure.