this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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If you have privacy concerns, you should probably not post here for time being.
It is prototype software. Doesn't remove EXIF geotags from photos, for example and posts here are public (and indexed by webcrawlers). Treat this as "open Internet" for your safety/privacy purposes.
It's not much of privacy I'm concerned about as much as community and visibility.
Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users, meanwhile from what I have seen from kbin and lemmy, there is a lot more nuance and maturity in the communities here (for the most part) that I would hate to see overun by Thread users.
Secondly, it's one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me. The fact that the fediverse is a prototype with vulnerabilities makes the likelihood of a company like Meta, who intentionally exploits vulnerabilities to harvest data, all the more likely.
Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks, and I have no reason to believe Facebook won't do this. If I'm going to invest time and effort into making a community grow, I would rather not waste my time on a platform that is doomed to be consumed.
So. In 1 day, Threads has gotten more users than all of Mastodon combined. My friends are on Threads. They're not coming to Mastodon. I've tried. I couldn't even convince my fiance to join me on Mastodon for longer than a day, and we live together.
How would you suppose I talk to my friends? By joining Meta? Or by staying with FOSS on the fediverse? Because when you say "everywhere needs to defederate from Meta" you're also saying "You shouldn't talk to your friends here, nor should your friends be able to talk to you."
Quite frankly - I really enjoy that I can both be here and still be in contact with my friends. Meta can't track me here (as much, I'm aware they can still siphon data but they could do that regardless). I'd much rather stay here if I can. But if given the chance to choose, I'm going to move to somewhere that federates with Threads. Not because I like Meta - I hate Zuck almost as much as I do Elon, which is quite a lot - but because I'd rather see and talk to my friends than be locked in with a bunch of rando control freaks jumping at shadows.
If the fedipact had it their way, anywhere that federated with Threads would in turn become defederated. This will create 2 separate fediverses. People will have to choose which one they spend time on - even if they have accounts on both sides, one will always be the "primary" account.
I posit that for many people, the "primary" account is going to be the one with their friends and interests. It's going to be the side with the influencers they follow. Simply, it's going to be the one that federates with Threads. The other side will slowly wither and die, as all the content dries up and people move to where the network effect is strongest.
You can argue that we need to defederate because of "embrace, extend, extinguish". Tell me: what is the end result of EEE? A diminished fediverse, where most people use the single app that has all the people and all the content. How is that different than the splintered fediverse caused by the fedipact?
It's really not much different at all. If Meta goes for EEE, there is no stopping them. If the fedipact takes hold and rabidly defederated anywhere that glances at Meta, then the fediverse's network effect will shatter. The fedipact will simply backfire and shoot themselves in the foot as people choose the side with the larger network effect. It's ridiculous that the idea has gotten as much traction as it has; the fedipact's best-case scenario is worse than the worst-case of EEE.
If a bunch of people want to live in small segmented communities, that's on them. Beehaw is right there if you want it; that's what Beehaw aspires for. But large, general-purpose instances shouldn't bow to the whims of a loud minority that don't even realize the repercussions of their agitations.
The fediverse is at its strongest when we federate. That's what makes this place special. We've agreed that walled gardens are bad, and the one time that we have a chance to get a bunch of "normal" users on the fediverse everyone panics because they're afraid of EEE.
The fedipact isn't going to stop EEE. If Meta wants to do EEE, they're going to do it with or without the fedipact. We don't even know for sure that EEE will happen - it's true that Meta is a business, but there are plenty of open protocols you use every day that never got hit by EEE. L
All the fedipact will do is hurt people who want to use free software to see their friends so this loud minority can exercise their control over everyone.
You have the power to block the domain here if that's what you want to do. Please don't let your personal fears ruin the experience of others.
You’ve summed up pretty much exactly how I feel.
The Fediverse solutions are better because of interoperability. While I feel Meta needs to be watched closely as far as their moves and intentions in the space, I’m worried by shutting out any large company projects utilizing the Fediverse, the concept will never “take off”.
And I’ve seen some argue that they don’t want it to take off. That they’d prefer the Fediverse stay niche, and I wholly disagree. The way this is all designed allows each user to choose the experience they’re going for, and shoehorning the entire Fediverse into some vision of a fringe and niche network that no influencers or corporate interests are on at all, is just begging for it to stay irrelevant forever.
Ideally, we wind up in a situation where Meta content can easily be filtered away by any individual user, should they feel that is necessary. But if Threads takes off, I’d rather be able to interact with that content from right here than have to actually become a user of their entire platform.
I'm not against corporations integrating with the fediverse, but I do think that federating with Meta will be a net negative for the fediverse as a whole, atleast in its current state.
First of all, In a purely practical sense, since we're still struggling to keep different instances in sync with the amount of content that is here today. We're going to have a real bad time trying to sync threads content, while they can probably sync the rest of the fediverse without breaking a sweat. I am afraid that we're going to drastically increase the compute necessary to maintain a cohesive fediverse, and that we're just going to hand Meta the keys to the castle as they are the only one able to provide this service at that scale. This is probably less of an issue for Mastodon, where you subscribe to users and not communities.
Furthermore, I'll come out and say that I like that this place is more niche. I've found a lot more joy posting here than i did on reddit or twitter, despite the lower user count. I don't think that access to a large user base is necessarily going to make this a better place for the group that is here now. I think we as a fediverse needs to grow a bit as a community before we can even hope to take in Meta without it warping the entire community to the point that its no longer itself.
People don't get the technicalities of syncing so much data. And I'm not even talking about the costs.
Imagine the face of your sysadmin when you tell him that you're gonna run a carbon copy of Threads on his infrastructure. They haven't seen the size of the archive of reddit.
One day it would be fun to talk about the costs though.