Please follow lemmy.ml and stand up to the big guys and defederate in whatever form it comes. This is a chance to finally stand alone from the Mega corps and have some peace and quiet.

If you don’t defederate we might as well go back to reddit. I don’t want to see posts from instagram accounts

Hell no. I came to Lemmy to get AWAY from the corporate overlords.

Fuck Zuck and fuck Meta

Always remember.

"I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg

EDITED: After initially misreading the post, I'm actually very glad that I just joined an instance where the majority of people is so against Facebook and their scummy business.

I’m excited by the potential of the fediverse, and I want the fediverse to grow. That means more users. However, the noncommercial nature of the fediverse is why I’m excited by it in the first place. I couldn’t care less if there’s yet another gigantic social network full of ads.

Allowing any profit-driven interest to influence the fediverse risks destroying what makes the fediverse interesting and special. I’m not willing to risk the fediverse in order to grow it.

Considering Meta mines as much data from as many people as possible just to advertise to them and also they can’t even launch Threads in the EU right now because of how aggressively it tracks literally everything about their users and Threads’ only purpose is to gather more data to sell to more people, I think that alone is worth not letting them play.

Staying as far away from Meta has been my goal since leaving Facebook 8 years ago. I really like this instance, it meets all of my needs for my Reddit replacement.

I don’t see a reason to federate with a corporation unless they were able to deliver something I’m not currently getting and their corporate support would greatly improve performance/sustainability for this instance. But based on previous experience, a company entering a space usually makes it worse.

This is a community of individuals escaping from corporate manipulation and abuse. As a new platform, we need to support our own and grow a healthy foundation.

If we give this parasite access to our community, others trapped on meta platforms will never leave their comfort zone to try something new and potentially better(to them).

When were big and strong like ox and with a name more recognizable than reddit, we can federate and show off our strong community. Or move on due to fading interest in threads like most meta platforms

I don’t trust anything about them. Any virtuous incentive people have to grow and maintain and moderate the fediverse is lost on anyone with any affiliation to Facebook. They have one goal and that’s money. Anything and everything they do and can do will always be for that.

For this reason, I would never want to be connected to their services and any federated service like Lemmy that I’m enjoying being a part of - if it should ever connect with Facebook in any way - would be my signal to abandon ship.

If I want to see threads content, I will just make an account on threads...which I doubt I'll ever do, but who knows.

If we federate with threads I'm deleting my account

Thank you for staying with the decision to defederate, and keeping lemm.ee a safer place when Threads arrives.

No Federation with Corporations.

I knew it was right decision on my part to start using lemm.ee and stop using .world

Fuck Facebook and the horse it rode in on.

I read this post and have been pondering this question for a good chunk of the day. I had a thought that may or may not have any impact. I hope I can convey this correctly.

Say Lemme.ee defederates fromThreads. But we are federated to Lemmy.world. Because we are federated with them, and they are federated with Threads, is there going to be some...Threads posts leaking though to our all. Or does the all feed only extend one..."hop"?

My brain keeps going to something akin to six degrees of Kevin Bacon. I know it's not the same, but wasn't sure how the fediverse handles the "all feed". One hop.. two hop....etc.

Thanks for any insights from people who actually know how this works.

Personal feelings: If I ever want to view Meta content, I'll go to a Meta owned app. I'm enjoying this new frontier and want it to thrive as safe haven away from massive corporate sponsorship.

DEFEDERATE!

Yo I didn't come here to get down with Facebook ya know what I'm saying?

I think like a lot of people the reason I'm putting up with the growing pains of a decentralized network, the fragmentation of communities that come with it, and sync issues across instances is because we want to try something that isn't run by corporations that views users as something to sell off to the highest bidder. If I wanted to deal with a centralized large user base why wouldn't I just skip this whole fediverse thing and go straight to Meta or reddit or Twitter or tiktok that is way more user friendly? I'm not here because I want another reddit clone that ends up being run or is influenced by another billionaire asshole down the line.

we can federate whenever we want, when they gain our trust, so no need for urgent, defederate please don't make into an instagram clone while it is shaping

Strongly in favour of defederating. Firstly because I don't want advertising or big businesses taking over feeds, but the point you made about moderation is critical. The sheer amount of content that instance admins will have to deal with will be unmanageable.

Fuck facebook and fuck everything that has to do with it! Defederate!

Permanently Deleted

Remembering what Facebook did with XMPP (initially allowed their users to speak to other messengers' users, then got sloppy with compatibility, causing great workload to unrelated app developers, and finally, having accumulated enough mass for Messenger, stopped supporting XMPP) - Facebook should be avoided like fire.

Facebook is also bad for society, allowing manipulation (targeted advertizing), aggregating great amounts of user data (harming privacy) and prioritizing user engagement regardless of the social cost (a hateful conflict generates more clicks than cat photos).

Defederate! For many people migrating from reddit was, in part, to get away from big tech, this would ruin lemmy imo

You know, we've already got an app to go to deal with Zucks' social media hole. It would be nice to have a space that wasn't connected to it. Then we all get the best of both worlds.

Permanently Deleted

I don't understand why anyone wants to have Facebook of all companies here. Really? Why is this even a question.

As someone who deleted Facebook in 2012 and has zero intention of going back to any of Meta’s products… I don’t see a need to defederate and would prefer not to.

Hear me out… maybe i just am still figuring this whole fediverse thing out but I don’t see how it can be bad.

1. If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts. Like I still have trouble finding/following content across federated instances, basically going there, getting the name of a community, coming back here, and plugging it in.

2. Any data they could mine about me they could get anyway since it’s either publicly available or not. They could just stave the fediverse under some other domain/IP that doesn’t even need to federate.

3. In the event they try to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, they would just change the activity pub protocol in some way, at which point we would have two competing standards. Open source ActivityPub, as used by Mastadon, Lemmy, and the like… and Meta’s ActivityPub… if we don’t use theirs their extended (bad) version of the protocol, they essentially fork and we don’t get to see their content. So we’re just going to defederate now so they don’t have that carrot to dangle over us? Why not just know if they starts fundamentally changing the protocol we just let them break themselves back off from us? We don’t lose anything we aren’t giving up already by defederating.

The ONLY thing that fundamentally changes for me is I don’t get to follow any Threads accounts from the relative safety of the fediverse. At which point I probably have to bite the bullet and spin up my own dedicated instance so I can chose to not defederate. All that said I’m more concerned about this on the Mastadon side of things, as like you said it probably wouldn’t even integrate well with the Reddit style fediverse.

The Title:

For real guys, we need a better way to debate, propose and vote on de-federation.

I’m happy to manage my own subscriptions and block settings to hide any content from Threads or other instances I may not enjoy. I don’t need my instance doing that for me.

My understanding of the argument for defederation is basically “but they might monetise all our social graphs”, but our content is publicly available on the Internet, so they can do that regardless.

Threads, Facebook, Meta, ZucctheSucc can go pound sand.

If Lemm.ee doesn't defederate I'll need to move to anther instance or host my own. I'm not willing to feed them data to enrich the evil shits that run that company.

Updoot from me. Fuck the zuck suck.

I agree with this approach, defederate first then federate later if the good outweighs the bad. I'm glad to be on this instance for sure.

I have a lot of friends on Twitter who are now migrating to Threads. They are not going to come to the Fediverse no matter how much I annoy them. Federating with Threads will allow me to interact with them.

Also if the Fediverse works with Threads, a few of those people might come over.

I'm for federating with any instance that doesn't exist explicitly to break this community rules. I turned blind eye to not defederating Exploding Heads because Lemm.ee is a small server that doesn't host any big communities they could interfere with. I thought it was an indication that it's an instance that would allow me to curate my experience.

This is a European server, it's fair to assume most of the users here are protected by GDPR. The talk of scraping data seems like a nonsense, Meta can do it without federating. And as Elon learned, closing your APIs means other entities will do web scraping which puts more stress on your infrastructure.

I don't understand how most people here are for open standards, interoperability and the moment their protocol of choice gets traction they drop everything and opt to create their walled garden, except with 5 dozens of people. This is it, you've literally won. I guess some people will keep fighting big corporations for any reason on principle. That's ok but not something most people are interested in.

There's a lot of talk about how XMPP was killed by Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I'm convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven't actually lived through it. XMPP was embraced, then Google and Facebook got bored, dropped it and moved on. They did not poison the protocol in any way.

If Meta tries to extend Activity Pub in a malicious way then that's the point you defederate. If they get bored of Activity Pub and move on you have lost nothing, you probably gained more users than you would if you didn't federate. I don't believe it will come to this, EU Digital Markets Act means more platforms will have to open up, other commercial platforms will join in to capitalize on that and we'll end up with consortiums coming up with reasonable changes to standards. If not they'll get bonked by EU regulators with even more laws.

Finally, it's a shame that we've done this vote via Lemmy post. It has hit "All" view for a lot of people who are not part of this instance and probably irreversibly poisoned this discussion.

Not a lemm.ee user but I think we should all defederate from threads. The fediverse is supposed to provide a safe space from these corporations, not welcome them with open arms, especially Facebook.

I have some questions about federation. Is this an ok thread to ask in?

Basically... The model of federation I have in mind is an opt-in, mutually agreed one. Is this not the case? In other words, I assumed that federation with Threads would require both Threads and lemme.ee to agree to federate.

If that's the case, then the question being posed should be whether we should opt in to federation with Threads, no? So I feel I must be misunderstanding something. Can someone help me understand how content from Threads could wind up in my feed through not specifically degenerating from Threads or through some kind of mod inaction?

fwiw, I am against federation for reasons I've seen posted commonly among other respondents, so I won't bother to list them out. That is as unlikely to change as Meta's reputation for user data collection.

I already left Lemmy.world because those assholes refused to defederate, don't make me have to set up my own instance 🤦

All I want is a free internet, of the people, by the people, that bans corporate dystopian bullshit. I am not asking much.

I don't know what difference it makes at all, but I know this is a real shit way of deciding! 👍

best way is wait and see because Facebook does not implement the policy yet

I can only see negative on this topic. What are the pro's of letting lemm.ee federate?

I don't believe that federating with Threads will be completely apocalyptic, and I actually believe that the commercialization of the Fediverse is the way it will take over the internet. You can't run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all. The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it'll be to simply take your activity somewhere else, meaning that companies like Meta won't be able to do the type of things they're known for.

That being said, I believe that for technical reasons, as well as the fact that it'd be very easy for Meta to strangle their competition in the cradle if we (Referring to the Fediverse as a whole, as this isn't even my instance) cooperated with them, nobody should federate with Threads until the Fediverse is large, resilient, and technologically matured enough to survive a hostile takeover attempt by a corporation like Meta. Basically, defederate from them for now, and reconsider at a later date when the Fediverse has had time to establish itself. I think in the future, the Fediverse will be able to easily deal with Threads being popular and enshittifying itself, but I simply don't think we're there yet.

I changed my instance yesterday to a Meta defederated one. An absolute no brainer. And people who think, that you shouldn't defederate from Meta, can just install and use Threads along with all other Meta crap. Meta will never change. Lemmy is a fresh breath of air, the idea behind is great. Don't burn it.

Firstly, I am anti-Meta. If someone on lemmy/mastodon wants to use Threads and their instance blocks it then they are free to get a Threads account. Likewise if someone is using Threads and see what they feel is an incomplete experience, they are free to find a lemmy instance and sign up. Here's my question, and it's one I haven't seen anyone else ask. Is refederating possible? Difficult? If we assume the worst and are wrong have we cut off our noses to spite our faces?

One of the biggest problems with Facebook has been it's monopolistic control over social media.

People can't migrate away from it because of the effective monopoly. I've tried to move social platforms dozens of times and the thing that makes me come back is the fact that there are certain people that are on Facebook that refuse to migrate. They are happy with the status quo over there. And the only way for me to communicate with them is for me to maintain my Facebook account.

Federation allows me to move off of Facebook and still keep in contact with those who refuse to move off of Facebook. I've always wanted Facebook to support federation for this big reason.

All of this translates to threads, there are some people who just aren't nerds, people who aren't like us and aren't willing to deal with the growing pains of something like lemme or mastodon or other federated platforms.

There really is no benefit to de-federating with them that outweighs that as far as I can tell.

D-Federation X.

Federate with threads. More exposure and more people

I don't want to block them over the bad stuff they are probably going to do. Why not just wait and see what they do then block if needed? Defederation now is clearly taking a curation stance on what we all see.

I'm actually hoping it takes off. There is content on Facebook I would like to read but I cannot agree to their TOS. If they let it federate out that's great. I would never be willing to make an account on there.

I don't see any sensitive content they get from us that's not publicly posted anyway.

Does it even matter? Interacting with Lemmy from Mastodon is wonky and borderline useless. If Threads is the same, I doubt federating or defederating with them will make any difference.

Stick to your rules. Defederate if you have to. Otherwise let the users decide if they want threads content in their feed.

I am personally against defederaring from Threads.

Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.

If Facebook goes out of their way to push ads like that then yes, defederation is perfectly justified and invalidates everything else. However, there's no way to know what they will actually do until they do it. While at the moment it doesn't have ads, it obviously will in the future. But will those ads be actual posts, or just shown in the Threads UI? Can the users interact with them? What if they are posts, but without artificially inflated counts, so they'll have less interaction than regular posts anyway.

Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.

If other fediverse users can see posts on Threads, it works the other way around too. Threads users will be able to interact with posts outside of it. "But they'll only show posts from other Threads users!!", until a user wants to follow someone not on Threads. Yes, that number is shrinking, but it doesn't have to once they federate. You can simply not make an account on Threads, users on Threads will follow you just fine, and you will show up next to everyone else. Threads may be a majority, but it won't be all of it.

Hell, having a Threads majority might not be a good thing. What if the content is good? What if it's stuff you actually want to see?

Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.

...i don't really see how that's the case. Since using Threads requires an Instagram account, that's already an okay protection against bots. As for trolls, you can use the federation to your advantage, to make tools on non-Threads platforms like bots to handle it. If anything, the main Threads instance itself will be way less moderated than smaller ones. Also the only difference between trolls/bots on Threads and other platforms is the amount, you can do bad shit here too.

In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

Then don't use Threads itself. That's the entire fucking point of the Fediverse. You can use whatdver instance you want. If you don't use Meta's instance, all they can collect is publically available data they could get without the existence of Threads no issue. They cant shove in ads that aren't actual posts which likely won't get interactions and can be blocked, and if they put ads as actual posts with inflated numbers then it's perfectly fair to defederate. Assuming they go the EEE route, you can still enjoy Threads while it's at the first E, and then not follow with them when they go for the 2nd.

However

By defederating, you're locking out everyone on Threads. While that might sound like a good thing to some, that's still thousands if not millions of people that would be interested in the content here and would post. There's a good chance they won't know they can just make an account somewhere else, and just miss out. Why punish the user for what the company did?

You should at least give Threads a chance, at least as an early bird before they look into ads. When they start turning it profitable, then is the actual discussion for whether you should defederate, which will likely go through. We could even take this as an occasion to get Threads users off of Threads, off of Facebook.

Or I could just be a clown for giving Meta a chance. Only the future will tell

Edit: I have since changed my mind on this, and I want to explain why

I forgot we're talking about Meta here. Obviously they won't make this in a way that's mutually beneficial. They want to make money off of it. So when time comes to ad adds, they'll obviously make sure everyone sees them. And if we keep them for now, when we inevitability have to federate because Threads becomes profit driven, things will suck way more than if we never federated, because users from over here will lose access to content they were interested in on Threads, and vice versa. By embracing the first E, all we're doing is welcoming Facebook in the one place meant to keep distance from them.

I completely forgot the point of the fediverse is for it to not be controlled by a single entity. And while Threads can't replace the fediverse, they can definitely conquer it, and since we're talking about Meta, if they can they will, and Mark "they trust me, dumb fucks" Zuckerberk will obviously find a way to monetize users on non-Threads fediverse if given the chance.

I downvoted.

I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don't think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.

Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.

If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.

Why don’t we wait to see if they send out ads to other instances before we judge them for that behavior.

I think that if we lord the fact that our platform is open for everyone, we need to walk the talk.

Also, when people realise that there is a way to enjoy the same content as Threads but ad-free, they'll switch over.

Also, what's the issue with remaining federated with Meta? The app privacy concerns don't apply to us if we use Lemmy apps. They can't push ads to us. Our entire userbase is a rounding error for them. At least give it a chance, and don't be pretentious.

I’m not saying lemm.ee shouldn’t defederate but I think we should take a wait and see what happens approach. As you mentioned they aren’t even supported by Activity Pub yet. Let’s see where it goes.

I downvoted but I’m not opposed to defense rating in the future should they prove to be as evil as we suspect.

My personal opinion is that I think large instances should "take one for the team" and suffer through federation with threads, at least in the beginning.

It's no secret that the fediverse still has a (shrinking) content gap with the centralized alternatives. Exposing potential users to our content is really the only way to get a critical mass of users. While there has been an explosion of content, a quick perusal of niche communities demonstrates that we have not yet reached the critical point.

So ultimately, I think that at least one of the large instances, i.e. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or Lemm.ee, should be tasked to suffer for the greater community, for a while.

Begging for upvotes

I think this is a psychotic overreaction to something that hasn't even happened yet. How about discussing it, setting plans and then blocking it if they cross a line?

Yall need to grow up.