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app_priori ,

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta’s instance.

Federating with Meta’s servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.

It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don’t federate, things will remain the same. Don’t try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.

kukkurovaca ,
@kukkurovaca@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

That’s not what gatekeeping means.

app_priori ,

There’s peer pressure going on right now encouraging Mastodon instance owners not to federate with Meta’s Threads. How is that not gatekeeping?

kukkurovaca ,
@kukkurovaca@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Gatekeeping is keeping someone without access/power on the outside. People who are already running instances have by definition passed the gate.

dfyx OP ,
@dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de avatar

I don’t know if gatekeeping is the right word but some people treat you like traitors if you even suggest that federating with Meta might be a valid option. Just look at the upvote/downvote ratio of this post and some comments I got. Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.

kukkurovaca ,
@kukkurovaca@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Indeed, that is not gatekeeping. It’s applying social and moral pressure. Similar to a boycott campaign, protest, etc. Such methods are intended to discomfit and inconvenience. They’re used in situations where being nice and getting along are determined to be nonviable strategies for getting the desired result.

Those methods in themselves are morally neutral; the question is, are they employed for a reason which justifies and necessitates them, i.e., how serious is a thread does Facebook pose to the fediverse. (I think it’s reasonable to take facebook as an evil seriously and to not give them an inch.)

Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.

That’s definitely already happening. This is a normal part of federation, tbh. Instances block instances that federate with bad actors because they want to limit as much as possible their exposure to/involvement with those actors, as well as to place pressure on others to do the same. Obviously not everyone considers facebook to be a bad actor, but it’s not surprising that those who do would act accordingly.

ram ,
@ram@lemmy.ramram.ink avatar

It’s people’s choice to earn the ire of others. It’s their choice to federate with Threads, and it’s my choice to defederate from them as a result.

app_priori ,

And that’s within your right too. It goes both ways.

dbilitated ,
@dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

defederating means that people who want to connect with someone on the platform are forced to install it. fuck that. not defederating gives people an alternative and shows them using the fediverse means they don’t miss out on anything regardless of platform.

if I want to access threads content and I can do it using my existing fed account without installing their app and giving them access to my heartrate, microphone and bowel moton stats then frankly that’s a win for us.

Adanisi ,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Maybe a separate fediverse instance defederated from the rest of them, and the rest of them defederated from Facebook, would be a better way to go about it, if we really must connect to them. Cut them off from the main fediverse, but still interact outside their platform.

TheKingBee ,
@TheKingBee@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s my problem/concern have you read their privacy policy? I want no part of that, would being federated with them mean that they get to siphon up all of my data too? If so I don’t think the defederating goes far enough…

dfyx OP ,
@dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de avatar

They can siphon your data no matter what you do. As I’ve said in other comments, everything on the internet has been crawled and scraped for literal decades. This post is already indexed by a bunch of different search engines and most likely by some other scrapers that harvest our data for AI or ad profiles. And you can do nothing about it without hurting your legitimate audience. Nothing at all. There’s robots.txt as a mechanism to tell a crawler what it should or shouldn’t index but that’s just asking nicely (mostly to prevent search engines from indexing pages that don’t contain actual content). You could in theory block certain IP ranges or user agents but those change faster than you can identify them. This dilemma is the whole reason why Twitter implemented rate limiting. They wanted to protect their stuff from scrapers. See where it got them.

Most important rule of the internet: if you don’t want something archived forever, don’t post it!

UniDestroyer ,

Thanks for laying this out. You persuaded me.

dfyx OP ,
@dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de avatar

Not my original intention but glad you liked it.

Flax_vert ,

It’s a shame it isn’t starting off federated. We should have taken hold of all of the discourse and aggressively maintained control from the outset

Tiffany , (edited )

This is a good take, imo.

I never understood the privacy concerns. Well, I do insofar as it’s safe to assume Meta is privacy-hostile. But many seem to think using Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. are some how “private” corners of the internet when they’re anything but. It is very trivial for someone to access public data on fediverse sites as you’ve pointed out, and if they want that data they’re going to get it.

The beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose who we trust with our core data, sign as sign-up details, IP addresses, etc. Signing up to the Threads instance/app would be a disaster from a privacy perspective, but just treating them like any other server and taking advantage of the increased engagement from the content their large instance will post will likely increase content available on the fediverse and engagement across the board. Any decision to defederate with their instance(s) should purely be based on content and nothing more, imo. From a cross-server perspective, they’re no different than any other large instance.

Zerlyna ,
@Zerlyna@lemmy.world avatar

As a newbie to the Fediverse, thank you for this!

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