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Polls on reactions to Threads

As you’ve probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook’s parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it’s a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!

Back in May and June, when Threads’ first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people’s reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?

ieightpi ,

I’m so disappointed that it isn’t an overwhelming majority of votes against federating with Meta. How do most people not realize this is just their chance to take advantage of the fediverse? And like haven’t we heard enough bad things about Meta to avoid them?

I am extremely against federating with Threads.

dumpsterlid , (edited )

People in support of federating with threads keep saying we don’t need to worry about meta trying to extend, embrace and extinguish the fediverse because the software and architecture of the fediverse makes it impervious. In other words, technology will defend us from politics, money and power.

It is a categorical error in logic to think that a technology can solve problems of the type: politics, money or power.

WE have to solve those problems by understanding how history repeats itself and how large corporations fundamentally relate to publicly shared resources irrespective of what the CEOs say or even think themselves. We have to realize you can’t write a computer function that will stop a massive corporation from corrupting a collective human endeavor. Only humans can do that by organizing to collectively reject the membership of the massive corporation from the community around the collective human endeavor. As soon as you let meta in the door, you have lost a very important ideological power struggle over the fediverse’s identity.

To those of you who argue that being against federating with meta/threads is elitist and comes from a desire of not wanting to let “normies” in who will dilute fediverse culture… I don’t want to let massive corporations in precisely because I think it fosters an environment where a diversity of people, specifically minorities, are not made to feel safe or welcome. Most of the cool people worth actually talking to on the fediverse came here because they didn’t feel safe or welcome on a corporate social network owned by a massive corporation.

If your response to that is well but what about all the normies that the massive corporation could rope into the fediverse that the tiny, pathetic fediverse will never reach? I return to my original point. This isn’t a struggle over programs, code, software… it is a struggle of politics, money and power and we have to relate to it that way. To let a massive corporation into the fediverse that basically has the resources of an entire rich nation and think it won’t utterly exploit and derail the future of the fediverse is absurd. If a company is publicly traded on the stockmarket, it is essentially obligated legally to do so in the pursuit of potential profit for its investors. We can’t get the reach a massive corporation could give us without also fundamentally giving up what makes the fediverse a better alternative than corporate social media. It is a deal with the devil no matter what way you spin it.

ieightpi ,

Great write up. I really hope that we can pull this off and keep Meta out of the majority of the Fediverse

jacktherippah ,

Does anyone know a decently sized mastodon instance that’s defederated from Threads? I need to move from mastodon.world which wants to wait and see what Threads does. I moved to mastodon to get away from mainstream social media and I don’t want any of Threads content in my feed. So please suggest some instances!

infinitepcg ,

You can simply not follow people on Threads and you will have no Threads content in your feed

jacktherippah ,

Doesn’t posts that people I follow boost that’s on Threads also show up?

kpw ,

You can block the entire domain.

Lucia ,
@Lucia@eviltoast.org avatar

Lots of them actually

fedipact.online

jacktherippah ,

Was no and still no. BTW, here’s me viewing a Threads profile from mastodon.world on Moshidon1000000977

dallo ,

More awareness is always good to take. That’s said my own personal instance will defederate because damn meta

Scrollone ,

Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.

I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It’s not inherently bad per se.

DLSantini ,

Their goal is pretty standard affair.

  1. Claim to be simply making yourself part of the group for the benefit of everyone. We’re all gonna be friends, this is good for you, you’ll see.
  2. Use your position and resources to make yourself the defacto way to use the tech. Bonus points of you can make the average person see you and said tech as being one in the same.
  3. Once you have gathered a high enough percentage of the users, simply make changes or take other actions that will cut yourself off from everywhere else, effectively cutting off those users from anywhere that is not you. Since most of them are already “your” users, barely any of them will even notice anything change, let alone care.
  4. Repeat previous steps for any new competing service that covers along to threaten you.
farcaller ,

isn’t threads already several times larger than the whole of the “fediverse”?

Lucia ,
@Lucia@eviltoast.org avatar

100 millions users of Threads against ~1.5M users of the whole Fedi. It won’t be a toxic relationship for sure.

newcockroach ,
@newcockroach@lemmy.world avatar

The fediverse isnt a competition and nor we we should try to replace gaint companies(even tho that it would be great) rather stay as a free alternative to those platforms.

ttmrichter ,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

Meta are war criminals. Period.

If you support Meta attaching to the fediverse, you are welcoming war criminals and their quislings to becoming part of the fediverse.

I sincerely hope most of us in the fediverse are better than that or I’m going to have to search for a new social media home.

Marsupial ,
@Marsupial@quokk.au avatar

Meta has been a willing tool for enabling war crimes, genocide, political manipulation/propaganda, and brutal authoritarianism all across the globe.

sour ,
@sour@kbin.social avatar

was no

still is no

dbilitated ,
@dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

the whole point of federation is networks being able to connect to each other. it will hopefully be a matter of course in the future.

sour ,
@sour@kbin.social avatar

is also decentralization

threads have 141 million users ._.

pelespirit ,
@pelespirit@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’m pretty sure they don’t have that many, Threads too, a steep hit:

Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent, report says

Do you have independent numbers to back up your statement?

sour ,
@sour@kbin.social avatar

is still disproportionate amount

pelespirit ,
@pelespirit@sh.itjust.works avatar

20 million compared to 1.5 million per day isn’t that huge of a jump considering threads probably has a shit ton more bots.

sour ,
@sour@kbin.social avatar

yes is

20 million for only one node

Donjuanme ,

I don’t care either way, but I hope they’d be welcome as long as they kept their instance cleaned of the kind of things other instances have been defederated for.

If meta wants all the data there are plenty of other ways to get it, pretending the fediverse is an impenetrable shield is silly. And maybe more people will learn about the fediverse in this way.

Maalus ,

People are scared because they don’t know what will happen. It’s basically conservatism at play and “the others” getting into a platform. Reality is - nothing of substance will happen, other than more users being able to communicate.

Contramuffin ,

Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don’t trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse

donuts , (edited )
@donuts@kbin.social avatar

For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

  1. I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don't use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
  2. Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it's a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

I don't really know for sure, but I'd have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We'd be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it'd also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it...

So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

I'm perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I'm willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

From a cultural standpoint, I'm also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc.. Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase--and that's the Fediverse working as intended, imo.

ttmrichter ,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.

Let’s not forget war crimes and genocide.

donuts , (edited )
@donuts@kbin.social avatar

I can see from your other post that you're talking about Facebook's role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:

The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar's relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar's residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. "Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users."[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]

Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don't use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don't you agree?

So what's my point? Why is any of that relevant?

As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.

There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I'm saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it's actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta's staff would probably agree to that.

So what's the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?

Frankly I'm not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.

I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that's why we're talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that's simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.

As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.

ttmrichter ,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

The issue with Facebook and the Rohingya isn’t just that they “didn’t moderate properly”. It’s that they knew for a long time that it was a problem and chose to ignore it. Note those last four words: chose to ignore it. In that other thing I posted I linked to someone who brought the receipts. The higher-ups at Facebook at the time knew this was happening and chose to put their corporate goals over literally tens of thousands of lives. This is inexcusable.

The simple solution is to keep Meta contained. To shun those who support it with their labour, their money, or their personal information (indirectly money). I don’t want to interact with quislings and I won’t. Nor should anybody else repelled at their complete and utter apathy in the face of mass murder and genocide.

(Note: Twitter was no better. Fucking Jack “Dipshit” Dorsey was in Myanmar meditating with the very same Buddhist fucks that were behind the Rohingya genocide, singing out their praises all while this was going on.)

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I don’t see how it’s a threat. They can’t take over the whole federation.

rikudou ,

Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.

SamXavia ,
@SamXavia@kbin.run avatar

So how would they take PixelFed, Mastodon, Lemmy & Kbin / Mbin? They can only try add a feature and if the rest of the Fediverse doesn't like it, they won't add it to there own platforms,

thenexusofprivacy OP ,
@thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world avatar

It’s not so much that they’d take it over, it’s that they’d extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it’s basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum’s got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne… and there are a lot of parallels.

SamXavia ,
@SamXavia@kbin.run avatar

So like I said, if people don't like what they add, we just won't add it. Why should we bend over backwards, also EEE is a Microsoft thing more than anything. It won't kill decentralisation it would just prove that companies like that are shit.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Having read that article earlier in another thread, it sounds much more like the devs working on XMPP killed it themselves by cowtowing to whatever the fuck Google was doing instead of continuing their own forks because they didn’t want to lose the users gained through Google Talk by simply not caring about it. Greed killed it, but the greed wasn’t Google’s alone.

Marsupial ,
@Marsupial@quokk.au avatar

So devs targeting Google users is greed.

Instances targeting Meta users is smart?

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