Lemmy.world Should Defederate with Threads
Lemmy.world Should Defederate with Threads
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.
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I'm in favor of federation. The point of federated networks isn't that there are no evil corporations, but rather that they can't cause damage.
What Facebook can do:
- read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
- let their users publish content to other Fediverse users
What they can't do:
- serve you ads
- serve you an algorithmic feed
- impose their ToS or rules
- collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
- force you to use a certain client
- make changes to the protocol or design
I think this is mostly relevant for Mastodon servers due to the format of the content, but the arguments are the same.
read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
It's going for actor-based federation. It's perfectly possible to create a watertight federated network excluding both federation and scraping from Threads/Meta on Mastodon using authorized fetch and whitelisting.
serve you ads
Easily incorporated into the posts themselves.
serve you an algorithmic feed
Easily incorporated, at least what Threads would server us. I can envision several scenarios.
impose their ToS or rules
Not now... But they can easily do it if they get a majority market share. Don't behave like they want? Defederated from the majority of the content.
collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
I can do that on instances that federates with me. I can't do it on instances that have blocked me. This is why I think it's important to defederate Threads.
make changes to the protocol or design
Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP? If not, I'd say that's pretty much what Google did to one of the first big federated chat networks.
Easily incorporated into the posts themselves
We should definitely block instances who insert ads into the content. However there is no evidence of threads.net doing something like this.
Not now… But they can easily do it if they get a majority market share. Don’t behave like they want? Defederated from the majority of the content.
They could threaten to defederate from us so we should defederate from them? It makes no sense.
Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP?
XMPP works great, I use it everyday. It doesn't have to be popular, you only need to convince some of your friends to use it.
So is the fediverse a service that should allow Threads/Meta or is it like XMPP and doesn't have to be popular?
I'm not sure I understand your question or why you think of those statements as being exclusive. I will try to answer separately.
is the fediverse a service that should allow Threads/Meta
The good thing about the Fediverse is that it isn't a single service, but many federated ones. For any single instance, I think not defederating maximizes user freedom: A user who wants to interact with Threads can do so while a user that doesn't want to see any content from Threads can block their domain.
is it like XMPP and doesn’t have to be popular
I think it's a little bit different from XMPP, in a sense that the Fediverse is a public space where I communicate with strangers, so I would like it to be popular at least among people with shared interests. For instant messaging I just need my friends there, but sure it would be easier if I didn't have to show everyone how to create an XMPP address and what client to use.
Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP? If not, I'd say that's pretty much what Google did to one of the first big federated chat networks.
No one is. Not even you. It's not a thing beyond it being a thing uninformed people repeat.
XMPP literally just finished their 2023 GOOGLE summer of code. Go check it out. The info is on the workgroup blog.
I personally started to use jabber about 2000-2001. The bridges/transports were ultimately great idea, but flakey as hell. Being purposefully broken constantly by AOL and Microsoft. Beeper anyone ? Not something reliable enough to pull people away from those official clients. Nor a service that could gain a critical mass in its own right. Also keep in mind back then, there was no jabber.social or jabber.world equivalent. And not just because those TLD didn't exist. There were a ton of different small servers, generally run by strangers you had no real clue about or real trust in. There was no official or semi official flagship servers, professionally run. That the average person could place any trust in. There was hope with Google chat that they would be that flagship server. They weren't. Google "defederated" and shot themselves in the foot several times. XMPP kept on trucking. What really happened to XMPP, besides me being logged in 24/7 365 for the last 20 years. To this very minute. Was they pursued a standardization path. They now compromise 10 to 12 IETF RFC. The standardization path meant slowing the speed of development WAY down. This is what killed the BUZZ behind jabber/XMPP. Not jabber/XMPP itself. Burdened with the requirements of standardization XMPP developed much slower in comparison to Skype discord etc all.
Truth is, these days tons of people use it without even knowing. It's in IOT an SIP systems outside it's original scope of personal IMs.
It’s perfectly possible to create a watertight federated network excluding both federation and scraping from Threads/Meta on Mastodon using authorized fetch and whitelisting.
Authorised Fetch is not supported yet by /kbin
This is exactly the case. There are so many more users than threads that even though we aren't directly being fed their algorithm, what makes it to the top of our posts will be content that are at the top of their algorithm.
It's Facebook's algorithm with extra steps.