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Threads and the Fediverse

Start by reading these two articles:

Ok, now that you've done that (hopefully in the order I posted them), I can begin.

I have always been a strong supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), so much so that all of my projects (yes all) are OSS and fully open for anyone to use. And with that, I knew that things could be used for good... and bad. I took that risk. But I also made sure to build stuff that wasn't, in itself, inherently bad. I didn't build anything unethical to my eyes (I understand the nuance here).

But I've seen what unethical devs can do.

Just take a look at those implementing the ModFascismBot for Reddit (that's not its name, but that's what it is). That is an incredibly unethical thing to build. Not because it's a private company controlling what they want their site to do, no, that's fine by me. Reddit can do whatever they want. But because it's an attempt to lie about reality, to force users to do something through manipulation not through honesty. Even subreddits that voted overwhelmingly to shut down still got messaged by the bot telling them that the users (that voted for it) didn't want it and they had to open back up or they would be removed from mod position. This is not ethical. This is not right. This is not what the internet is about.

Or the unethical devs at Twitter, who:

It's one thing for an organization to have political lean...that is just a part of life, and that will never end. It's another to actually sow disinformation in order to accomplish nefarious things to further your profits. It is what has caused massive addiction to tobacco, the continuation of climate change, death and disfiguration from forever chemicals, ovarian cancer and mesothelioma from undisclosed exposure to asbestos, or selling 'health products' that claim to cure everything under the sun, but can "interfere with clinical lab tests, such as those used to diagnose heart attacks".

Please do not confuse this for saying that companies shouldn't be able to sell things and make a profit. If you want to sell someone something that kills them if they misuse it and you market it as such, you go for it. That's literally how every product in the cleaning aisle of your grocery store works. That's how guns work, that's how fertilizers work, that's why we have labels. But manipulation for profit is unethical, and that's why companies hide it. It hurts their bottom line. They know that their products will not be used if they reveal the truth. Instead of doing something good for humanity, they choose the subterfuge. Profits over people. Profits over Earth honestly. Profits over continuing the human race. Absolutely nothing matters to companies like this. And unethical developers enable this.

Facebook (ok, fine, Meta, still going to refer to them as FB though) is trying to join the Fediverse. We as a community, but honestly each of you as individuals, have a decision to make. Do they stay or do they go? Let's put some information on the table.

Facebook...

  • lies about the amount of misinformation it removes ^1
  • increased censorship of 'anti-state' posts ^1 ^2 ^3
  • lied to Congress about social networks polarizing people, while FB's own researchers found that they do ^2
  • attempted to attract preteens to the platform (huh, wonder where all that "you must be 13" stuff went) ^4
  • rewards outrage and discord ^3

Facebook also...

  • Allows for checking on friends and family in disasters ^6
  • Created and maintained some of the most popular open source software on the planet (including the software that runs the interface you're looking at right now) [7][8]

From my perspective... There's not much good about FB. It has single handedly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people across the planet, if not hundreds of thousands. It continually makes people angrier and angrier. It's a launching pad for scammers, thieves, malevolent malefactors, manipulators, dictators, to push their conquests onto the world through manipulation, lies, tricks, and deceit. Its algorithms foster an echo chamber effect, exacerbating division and animosity, making civil discourse and mutual understanding all but impossible. Instead of being a platform for connection, it often serves as a catalyst for discord and misinformation. FB's propensity for prioritizing user engagement over factual accuracy has resulted in a global maelstrom of confusion and mistrust. Innocent minds are drawn into this vortex, manipulated by fear and falsehoods, consequently promoting harmful actions and beliefs. Despite its potential to be a tool for good, it is more frequently wielded as a weapon, sharpened by unscrupulous entities exploiting its vast reach and influence. The promise of a globally connected community seems to be overshadowed by its darker realities.

As a person, I believe that we need to choose things as a community. I do not believe in the 'BDFL'...the Benevolent Dictator For Life. Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, wrote an article just recently about how things would have been different if they had stayed BDFL of Rust. From my position the BDFLs we currently have on this planet really suck. Not just politically, but even in tech. I don't think that path is good for society. It might work in specific circumstances, but it usually fails, and when it does, people get hurt. Badly.

So, with that in mind, I've been working on a polling feature for Lemmy. I seriously doubt I'll be done with it soon, but hopefully FB takes a while longer to implement federation. I understand there's a desire for me, or the other admins to just make a decision, but I really don't like doing that. If it comes down to it, I will implement defederation to start with, but I will still be holding a vote as soon as I can get this damn feature done.

[^8]: the website actually uses Inferno, but from what I can tell it was forked directly from React, judging from the actually documentation and references in the repo.

21 comments

  • for my vote I'd say that defederating any non-FOSS instance, chat service, community is the way to go.

    To endorse or collaborate with any zero-sum systems seems like a terrible decision for fediverse projects/instances to take

  • FWIW: I see no reason to federate with Threads/Meta/FB. We can always change our minds later.

    My hope will be that users of Threads will end up learning about federation/activity pub in general, then become curious about other instances. I’m the early nineties, many people thought AOL was the internet. It was the intro to the internet, for many, many people who moved on to finding all other kinds of wonderful stuff out there. No reason it couldn’t happen that way.

    • And I'm on the other side thinking I don't see any reason to defederate threads just because it is run by Meta. We always can change our minds later.

      I think we should see threads just as another instance of a new service. If we see that this instance is not playing well we defederate them. So same rules applied to all.

      There are still good people on Facebook/Instagram how just never heard about Lemmy, mastodon and the Fendiverse. And even if Threads or other meta platforms will implement activity pup but no real Fendiverse services will allow federation with them those people will still never get in touch with us because they never interact with us.

      Just knowing about activity pup exists will not change this. Most of those people don't have a tech background like we have and are therefore less interested in finding out what that stuff is. They will probably assume that this is some meta think to connect to other services of Meta.

      I say letting federation open so people can see and find stuff from the Fedivers in meta Services and give people so maybe even the possibility to move from threads to mastodon (or Lemmy although I think this is less comparable to any meta service) will put much more pressure on meta then it will put on us.

      If we defederate a few months after (because of any valid reason) this we'll be seen by much more people even on the meta side and the impact of this will be much greater. So meta will be willing to make fedivers happy (or at least less angry?). This gives the power back to us, the people. They will care about us because they are depending on us, at least to an extent. That's what the fedivers was created for I thought.

  • In reply to an offline discussion:

    I get Facebook is evil and all, but having trouble understanding why it shouldn't be federated. Is the fear that FB content will overwhelm the network/resources? All arguments I see are philosophical or emotional. Thinking users should be able to filter content they don't want and operators should behave more like a DNS service (routing). Thinking FB federation would only increase adoption

    Increase adoption? Probably, but taking a more pragmatic standpoint, setting aside Facebook's notorious history, I'd prefer a more cautious approach by first incentivizing organizations, institutions, and perhaps even individuals to join the FediVerse by not relying on a centralized instance.

    If users can spread out using other federated platforms, diversifying stakeholders in the network, then this could help establish some degree of protocol ossification for ActivityPup.

    In this regard, I shared similar concerns with reddit users who were at first asking app developers to trivialise user onboarding by defaulting everyone to lemmy.world . Given recent security incidents, I think this week has been a notable (if not a thankfully early and forgiving) reminder of the perils of putting all our eggs into one basket/instance. IMHO, sustaining perpetual diversity of our network is key for the Fediverse's survival, and perhaps for the Internet itself in general.

    Instead, we could prioritize federating with more independent stakeholders first, rather than with a single social media instance that is already larger (by several orders of magnitude) than the current Lemmy-verse, let alone the entire Fediverse.

    PlatformTotalActive
    Facebook Threads100,000,000?
    Fediverse10,048,5691,941,542
    Lemmy363,33174,361

    Sources:

    There are defeatists that suggest if ActivityPup can not passively withstand such onslaughts, then it's domize is already assured. Yet I would argue that communities are not passive, and that maintaining a public garden takes proactive efforts and vigilance, lest it be lost and succumb to wild overgrowth or a monoculture of human induced invasive species. Thus we should strategically seek to federate with instances that have self invested communities focused on self preservation, rather than instances that only have fiduciary obligations in monetization.

    If I could stretch this agricultural medafor to its limits, then I'd say we do not yet have the moderation tooling or modern farming equipment to cultivate quality content on an industrial scale. Taking on to much land at once without enough self invested community members, where we'd have to pick up the slack as unpaid moderators (cough-Reddit), could lead to mismanagement of limited (and voluntary) resources. Given the historic issues of content moderation on Facebook's platform, and my impression that Facebook users in general are ambivalent to the self preservation of the company in comparison to its hosted content, I think it safe to say we'd have better success in learning to walk before attempting to run with global scale conglomerates.

    While some may feel this remains a philosophical argument, I'd argue it is more of a pragmatic one, given the current maturity of the Lemmy software, the scale of current stakeholders, and realistic resources at our current disposal, taking on Facebook's level of traffic would be biting off more than we could chew.

21 comments