A case for preemptively defederating with Threads

Very well said and you have captured many of my exact fears.

Personally, if the decentralized fediverse was more developed and mature, I would not be as concerned about federating with Threads. But, Meta is entering at a time when everything is really just starting to develop.

They’ll be the big instance and they’ll have a lot of influence over the others as a result.

Just to give an example, What would happen if Lemmy.world decided to cut off kbin? Kbin would lose a ton of content and access to most of the large communities. Threads, thanks to Meta’s resources and huge Instagram user base, will likely gain more active users and communities than lemmy in no time and they could do the same. The difference is I believe Meta may be more likely to down the line because an open fediverse doesn’t fit super nicely into their business model.

I understand many people disagree and that is fine; nobody knows the future. If we decide to federate with Threads then so be it, and if it turns out I am totally wrong then I will eat my words. All I am trying to articulate is that I think there is reason to be skeptical of Meta.

@ThatOneKirbyMain2568
given the sheer size of threads, most fedi platforms still lack well-developed moderation tools > this is a tough nut to crack, thus preemptive defederation is a must when it comes to threads

You are taking this massive “if” and building a whole policy of preemptive panic around it:

if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederate.

And if we don’t and we defederate, we’ve just cut off potentially interesting conversations with interesting people based on ideology.

I’m glad you said that you don’t think that privacy is the biggest issue. Our posts are already public and can be scraped easily. I’ve stopped reading posts about privacy issues because they seem misinformed to me.

I don’t know what to think about the rest at this stage, but I’m beyond suspicious of Meta, which has proven itself to be a deeply unethical company.

I don’t think it matters that much. The users are very different. Most Threads users will be Threads users, regardless of what the fediverse does.

In the contrary, if a Threads user can interact with the fediverse, he/she could change his/her mind at some point because now he/she will be aware of the fediverse (eg Meta starts to put a lot of ads, many users will migrate towards the fediverse instead of paying Meta a fee).

As a consequence, I think Threads will stay « friendly » with its users in fear everyone migrates somewhere else. Otherwise, no one will leave Threads unless there are major issues (like Twitter or Reddit). Not federating because we fear the fediverse will not grow as much as a consequence is, in my opinion, the exact opposite of what will happen.

Just look at YouTube alternatives. People won’t leave the platform for peertube because they would lost all the content. Now, imagine that YouTube was part of it, do you really believe people would stay and endure as much ads ? I believe they would leave and YouTube would be forced to refrain itself in order to keep its users, and peertube would become much more popular.

TL;DR I don’t say we should federate at any cost tough. But I don’t believe the fediverse will grow because it rejects Threads (in fact, I think it will be the opposite). The question is more something like « Do we want the mass to be part of the fediverse ? » (with all the consequences like brands starting to put ads / communicate here, and a bunch of racists & cie that could possibly be impossible to moderate).

agreed with everything said here and the comments make great additional points. i dont want anything to do with threads

Also fuck Meta

The fediverse is an obvious threat to Facebook and any other corporate social media company. If the fediverse wasn't a threat or has the potential of ever one day becoming a threat ... then companies like Facebook would not want anything to do with the fediverse.

The fact that a major social media company like Facebook even remotely wants anything to do with the fediverse means that this new start up is doing something and has the potential of becoming something some day. Otherwise, Facebook would not want anything to do with it.

Besides, Facebook already has a huge market share of the social media pie ... they literally control over half the social media content on the internet right now. They already have more than enough of a platform to connect to their userbase ... why should we allow them onto our space? We need the content ... they don't.

And like others have said, if you allow a big fish onto your small pond, the big fish will automatically control everything. The big fish will swim around your little pool for a while and kill everything and then leave, leaving an empty pool that nobody wants.

Admit it ... Facebook just wants in to kill the fediverse. They don't want to add it to their service, they don't want to incorporate it ... they want to swallow it whole, let it die and abandon it.

Defederate and don't let them anywhere near our space. Otherwise, we'll be signing our own death warrant.

Lots of people here worried about Meta destroying their space, and rightly so.

But I see this from another lens. This is what success for the fediverse looks like. The fediverse was never going to compete with the big players in social media. But it can influence them to be less shitty.

Is this a threat to the fediverse as we know it? Absolutely. But we have the opportunity to make things better for several orders of magnitude more people than are currently here. To me that is a risk worth taking and fighting for.

I'm not saying everyone should roll over and do whatever Meta wants. There's going to be tension and we are going to need to fight them tooth and nail on many things. But let's at least participate.

Defederate. Meta is as close as you can get to evil actually existing. And they are the antithesis of what the fediverse is about.

Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances.

The issue is, how does defederating not promote leaving for Threads or instances that federate with Threads?

I think it's a good argument against Threads federating at all, but a poor one for defederating from Threads.

If Threads produces 95% of content in the fediverse, and your instance defederates from them, then your instance just doesn't have access to those 95% of content. Threads and its friends will be a lot more attractive then because it has 19x the content of what you have access to on your instance.

I think this will still lead to people leaving for the threads fediverse.

Also, I get the argument for Mastodon, but does /kbin actually have anything at all to fear here? Sure, the user numbers and content would be way higher than the rest of the fediverse. But Threads is a Twitter contender, not Reddit like /kbin and Lemmy. We will only see their content in the microblog tab.

Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it? I honestly don't see it happen, I feel like this is an imported issue from microblogging platforms that's just repeated here despite being a non-issue for us.

When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they're going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account.

This is my main concern.

Personally, I don't care if the fediverse grows. I just care what it grows into. The fediverse has a nice community at the moment because everybody on it made a conscious decision to be here and not somewhere else. Threads users will not have made that decision. Furthermore, they'll outnumber the rest of us enough as to have no incentive to try and fit into the preexisting community here (which isn't helped by the fact that they've already been their own isolated community for awhile).

Threads is the smaller player here compared to twitter/bluesky. and bluesky is a direct compeditor for activitypub with their own federation protocol.

So now Threads has to play nice to have any chance at all. A part of the fediverse pie is better than no pie at all.
I hope Tumblr joins too.

Absolutely agreed. I came here to escape proprietary corpo bullshit, and if we don't defederate, I'll just stop using kbin altogether. I love it here, but that will change if Meta's grimy tentacles are able to take hold of the place.

Defederate.

I’m not worried about dependency on content from threads. I’m primarily concerned with facebook’s data harvesting. I have a Facebook account, but I only touch it when I have to. All other aspects of my social life are pretty much divorced from Facebook. I fear that with federating, my activity will populate on their servers and they will feel completely entitled to all of it to train their AI and create advertising profiles without any consent. All of our activity will be free use for their profit.

I’d actually feel better if the process of federating required an EULA or something where the instance seeking federation must deny any right to use community content without explicit, signed permission from individual users.

Yes, @ernest please defederate kbin.social from Threads. Can we do a poll or something maybe?