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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

D-Federation X.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Federate with threads. More exposure and more people

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