There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Were lemmy.word admins invited by Meta to the P92/Threads "off the record" meeting?

So I saw a recent post on lemmy from admins of another instance, forgive me for not remembering which, where they posted a full transparency update on Meta requesting a meeting with the admins of that instance. The admins declined, and then shared the correspondence with their community via screenshots of the original email from meta and their response.

My question is did @ruud or any other lemmy.world admins get a similar invite, and if so, did you accept/attend?

I’m curious, because as far as I know lemmy.world has not made their stance on defederation from meta/threads very clear, not even to say that they weren’t sure or didn’t have a stance yet.

So, lemmy.world admins, If you did attend this off the record meeting, I’m sure they have some sort of agreement with you that the discussion stays off the record… But could you at least confirm or deny if you were invited to and/or attended such a meeting?

Edit: it was mastodon instance admins for Fosstodon here’s a link: fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836 but my question still stands and I think the lemmy.world community deserves an answer.

MyOpinion ,

Yeah so you can attack them. You make me sick.

booty_flexx OP , (edited )

Quite the assumption. I’m sorry for making you sick, though.

trifictional ,

Given their post on mastodon saying they won’t defederate, I would bet money they took that meeting and signed an NDA.

Maybe they even are getting some funding out of it.

This is all speculation of course, but if they don’t deny it then I think it’s pretty likely.

booty_flexx OP ,

Yeah, it’s a valid concern (echoed by many others on this instance) that I feel should be addressed, to say the least.

can ,

Well, luckily there’s no shortage of alternatives if it comes to that.

kabe , (edited )
@kabe@lemmy.world avatar

I’m sorry, when did everyone start taking conspiracy pills?

The Mastodon admin team said they’ll wait and see what happens, not that they are committed to not defederating no matter what happens.

Ruud is a busy guy - his “silence” is most likely because Threads hasn’t even federated yet (and possibly won’t anyway) and he has other shit to deal with - and people are already conjuring up scenarios involving clandestine NDAs and kickbacks based on no evidence whatsoever? Sheesh.

Zpiritual ,

Indeed. Ruud has stated he has hundreds of unread notifications that he may never have time to get around to. Tagging him in threads does nothing and you really can’t hold his “silence” as proof of anything.

Better of trying to poke one of the other admins.

nekat_emanresu ,

Sometimes silence is deafening. If Ruud signed an NDA would he be able to say that he didn’t sign an NDA? We could strongly request that he states he has no contracts or agreements with facebook/meta. But deep down we know the answer.

Coelacanth ,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

I’m not sure any Lemmy-specific admin would have been invited since I’m still of the opinion that Zuckerberg barely knows or cares what Lemmy is and is mainly concerned with Twitter and Mastodon.

However, if Fosstodon admins were contacted then it’s likely Ruud/his team were too seeing as his Mastodon instance is significantly larger than Fosstodon.

booty_flexx OP ,

Good point! I’m sure Zuckerberg knows what lemmy is, social media is his bread and butter. It would be silly if at the very least his team did not make him aware of its existence. But they are developing an app that will work with the fediverse, so even doubly weird if he wasn’t aware of lemmy and any other significant fediverse apps.

I didn’t even know about ruud running a mastodon instance, but your second point has me doubling down on my question, whereas before I had my doubts because the meta letter was mastodon focused, but you’ve kind of brought that full circle for me with the info you’ve shared. Thanks!

Coelacanth ,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

Ruud runs mastodon.world which is the sixth biggest instance as far as I know.https://feddit.nu/pictrs/image/c9dfebd6-660e-44dc-bf0c-fb96deb098f6.jpeg

I’m sure Zuckerberg knows what lemmy is, social media is his bread and butter. It would be silly if at the very least his team did not make him aware of its existence.

In the grand scheme of things Lemmy is small potatoes for the scale Meta operates on. I’m sure it was mentioned as convenient that ActivityPub could support link aggregation so they can put out another connected app in the future to compete with Reddit, though.

can ,

That’s a pretty fun idea actually. Facebook could more successfully make what the reddit board tried to turn their app into.

Marsupial ,
@Marsupial@quokk.au avatar

Facebook could more successfully make what the reddit board tried to turn their app into.

Shit?

WhatASave ,

Why don’t you message him and ask? He’s not going to come in to this thread and answer you. And that’s the nice thing, you just make an account on another instance that you agree with on everything.

booty_flexx OP ,

I saw other lemmy.world members wondering why they were silent, I would consider this post an open letter and I tagged him to essentially ask him directly.

Is there a reason you thought this post tagging his account wasn’t sufficient and recommend sending a message instead? I could always reconsider my approach. Thanks.

Edit: I’m aware about being able to choose other instances if I dont agree, but that’s the thing… what is there for me to make that determination? Lemmy is popping off with posts about Meta (de)federation, and the biggest lemmy instance has been silent. I’m curious on what their stance may be, and whether or not they obliged a meeting w/ meta.

WhatASave ,

I just think it’s silly some of the other comments saying “sometimes silence is deafening” “they could reply or choose not to respond” (assuming they even see this and other comments).

But this just feels very witch hunt and feels like a classic reddit-type post. I don’t know how much you truly care about his stance or if you’re just bored on the internet, it just feels like it would be exhausting going around to different figures of services you use to get their stance on things.

Candelestine ,

I would also be interested in hearing what ruud’s position is these days. Opinions on the topic can certainly change over time, as arguments are hashed and refined. But it would be negligent to fail to acknowledge that if Zuck wanted to buy anyone, he’d be high on the list.

Though I also understand his reluctance to wade into the debate personally. Shitstorms are not particularly fun when you’re the one in the middle, and there is no answer that would completely avoid one.

booty_flexx OP ,

Agreed, I could absolutely understand ruuds trepidation, if there is any.

The thing is, just say that. Say, “hey I’m afraid you guys are gonna eat me alive if I make the wrong call, and for that reason, I’m taking care to abstain from any call.” We would absolutely understand.

But at this point I also want to know, did you or anyone representing lemmy.world take that meeting?

TheVampireSaga ,

The admins are very hands off when it comes to World so I personally doubt they’d make that big of a decision unless it’s something important like they’re discussing with the recent big android debate with that community.

the instance owners only real statement on it was just curious why people didn’t think it was a good idea, so I really doubt they came to a decision that quickly.

booty_flexx OP ,

Fair enough, I can’t argue with being careful.

I’m still curious if they took a meeting. And for admins who have an open support thread and are responsive to support questions, I’d expect they can handle showing up to a post and answer some questions their community has.

That said, I’m just one person and there’s no obligation to answer to little old me. Thankfully this post can be upvoted or downvoted, so the community can choose to support this inquiry or bury it. And I suppose, lemmy.world admins can choose to respond or simply ignore it.

dnvtr ,
@dnvtr@lemmy.world avatar

The admin(s) of mastodon.world have made a post about their official stance, and since (to my knowledge) the same folks also run lemmy.world, it’s probably reasonable to assume a similar stance applies here as well.

mastodon.world/@mwadmin/110654590632768079

Candelestine ,

I’ve read it, and I do find the position concerning. They focus heavily on technical threats to the system, but nobody discusses how a skilled businessman can outmaneuver them it what is fundamentally a competitive commercial environment.

nekat_emanresu ,

Exactly! Almost every time I’ve tried to talk with people they only bring up those same technical aspects and ignore the other aspects, like cultural destruction and manufactured outrage and hatred against LGBTQs etc that comes with meta/facebook. The whole internet doesn’t need to be a homogenized mess :(

Political and business maneuvers will catch IT focused security people by surprise. They are fish in a barrel

jocanib ,

How much have you read because, believe it or not, they’ve thought about that.

Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web

Candelestine ,

Those are all more techy stuff. Let me know when someone addresses bribery, using their legal system as a weapon or countering marketing campaigns.

jocanib ,

You didn’t read it then. Cool, cool.

Candelestine ,

I’ve read it twice now. Bribery? Not once. Lawsuits? Not in there. Marketing strategy? Also not in there.

You want to actually explain what I’m supposed to be seeing? EEE is just more techy bullshit.

jocanib ,

The 3rd argument for defederation:

➡️ To defend against being “Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished.”

This is a real risk, and others point to Google and Facebook and XMPP, or Google and RSS Google reader. Where a big entity takes over, then rug pulls or extends an open standard slowly into a non-standard, non-interoperable functionally siloed service.

This is a real risk. But you don’t - and can’t - defend against this by defederation.

Why not? Because even if the entire existing Fedi pre-blocked them. Instagram has 1.6 BILLION users. If they push this, in one day just on their own they will be the size of the current Fedi’s monthly user base, and then grow from there.

Virtually Instantly, they become the biggest ActivityPub entity on the planet. With or without a mass block.

Some instances defederating is precisely what should happen. But all instances defederating is committing suicide to avoid being murdered.

Candelestine ,

… that is not one of the three things I was describing.

And how does everyone pre-emptively defederating lead to our death anyway? How does it kill us?

jocanib ,

By making the huge network available only by handing your data to Zuckerberg.

Candelestine ,

I still don’t see where suicide enters the picture. How does our death happen?

jocanib ,

XMPP, famously, died when Google dominated the network and then defederated. Leaving XMPP users no choice but to sign up with Google to keep in touch with the bulk of google users who were no longer there.

Threads does not need to embrace to extinguish, it has 1.6b accounts ready to activate and now over 100m activated in the first three days. Universal defederation will drive a lot of Fedi-users to Threads simply because, if you’ve come from sites with hundreds of millions of users (Twitter and Reddit), it’s going to be very difficult for many to recreate the breadth and depth of content here, and certainly not as quickly.

The Fediverse would technically survive, as XMPP did. But it would likely shrink, not grow.

Candelestine ,

Bout time someone engaged with intelligent arguments. Thank you, I was starting to worry we were going downhill faster than I thought.

Where I disagree is that mass defederation will drive our users away. I draw a line in the sand between quality work and average work. Most of Zuck’s offerings are the garbage of the planet. Same appeal as McDonalds and reality television and Trump. Simple, quick, cheap.

We are, frankly, better than that. I think our quality will protect us from heavy loss of users so long as we maintain enough independent identity to actually be something different.

jocanib ,

I don’t disagree with that. Threads’ biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: we’ve never seen a huge network establish overnight before and it will struggle to define a culture outside of what Meta serves up via algorithm.

But my niche subs on Reddit had a few thousand users, still only just enough to keep them useful. And it required Reddit’s 50 million (daily) users to provide that many.

There will be a lot of people who want the smaller network. But many of the Twitter/Reddit refugees don’t, really. And that’s where Fedi-growth is coming from right now.

Candelestine ,

Our best actual growth strategy from here on out is something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to. I think we need to rely on how niche, but also how connected we are.

Once the Federation is more interoperable, which should improve as we develop and scale up, we can pull steady, but small, numbers of users from a broad range of services.

Mastodon can’t compete with Twitter. What we need is basically the Fediverse to become a competitor of the whole internet, in a manner of speaking.

jocanib ,

There are several potentially very large corporate instances in the works. My hope is that they can hold each other hostage because it’ll be so easy for their users to jump ship. They can embrace but they might not be able to extinguish.

Candelestine ,

I’m mainly worried about basically being slandered and suppressed. If I was Zuck, my main focus would be on controlling public opinion.

Doing SEO, running ads, doing whatever he can to make the popular perception of the Fediverse as a thing only virgin tech nerds should like. “Cool” people need to use his product.

Marketing, he’s going to beat us with marketing.

jocanib ,

Well, that’s my other hope. That the Fediverse will steal a steady trickle of Threads users (and Twitter->Threads users) when they find out that they can have better control on an independent instance.

But it’s up to us to make sure that’s both true and that it happens.

Candelestine ,

If we’re actually separate. If it’s all one big Federation, there’ll be no incentive for them to come here from there. They gain nothing from doing so.

jocanib ,

Being part of one big Federation doesn’t prevent Zuckerberg from making their feeds shit.

I want to get Meta’s data without Meta getting my data and also deciding what I see. That’s a proposition a lot of people will like the sound of. But only if we’re around to tell them.

Candelestine ,

They get our data either way though. If they stay there, and they federate, they’re no different from us.

The only way to create difference is to defederate. Unless I misunderstand something?

jocanib ,

The Fediverse does not have any of my data.

Candelestine ,

Okay, I see. I’m talking with regards to content, not personal data. I think the vast, vast majority of people, over 95%, do not really care about their personal data. They say they do sometimes, when it comes time to make any kind of sacrifice or take any kind of action, that sentiment disappears. This is why I don’t personally consider it very relevant when contemplating how we’ll scale to the masses.

Content is king though, and where we need to create a differentiation. While they’ll always get our posts, defederating will cut off their engagement, they won’t be able to converse with us. I think that’s the key that defederation leverages.

jocanib ,

If I put content out there, I’m usually going to want an audience for it. Obviously there are exceptions to this where people need a small, reliable, defederated instance. But it being data someone can scrape is not an issue.

Having access to my phone, my real name, my internet use, my health data, my financial records. No thanks.

Candelestine ,

You and I are in the 5%, not the 95%. They’re all on major corporate properties, they don’t care.

We can’t “educate” them either, because we’re not necessarily “better”, objectively speaking. We’re just different.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • [email protected]
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •