I will probably be harassed for this but I feel like I need to act.
The recent debate and decision by world to federate with threads seems to have sparked massive pro meta propaganda. Some accounts post completely one sided articles nearly every day, using carefully crafted language to shape meta as the „facilitator“ of the fediverse and some beligerent benevolent god. You dont have to scroll far in this community to find the posts I‘m talking about.
Please consider reporting these posts for the propaganda they are and asking your admins to defederate from threads.net.
To show you why meta is not welcome in the fediverse, here is a quote from the fedipact which is the reason I have defederated threads in my own instance.
THEIR LONG TRACK RECORD OF PURE EVIL
i’m just gonna paste some links here because there’s no point in paraphrasing what others have already said more eloquently
(if you’re wondering why i’m using archive.org it’s to break the fucking paywalls on these articles because fuck that, information wants to be free)
that time they helped facilitate a genocide
that time they helped try to rig an election
that time they did creepy behavioral experimentation on their users
so, yeah. there’s legiterally shitloads of precedent here. not to mention all the privacy concerns. which brings us to the need many feel to protect ourselves from this insidious megacorp…
Against one thing meta-shills often try to ascribe: we dont have a problem with the people on there but it is literally everything else.
Admins and Mods who read this, please consider signing the fedipact on https://fedipact.online
Thank you very much for reading and have a nice day.
Edit: wording, crossed out
Can you give examples of what you’re referring to as propaganda? I haven’t seen anything but people bitching about Threads.
https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/329846 this for example
The Fediverse will soon have power on the social web to shape its future, but only through and in the interaction with Meta. This is the reality the Fediverse has to start arranging itself with.
First sentence literally.
Meta and the Fediverse are heavily intertwined: both are dependent on one another for their success.
Uncompromising idealists of a non-corporate social web, potentially origin of radicalisation and toxicity.
And so on and so forth. The language is shaping the story in one direction as if nobody has a chance to change something about it.
That’s all fair.
But it’s also heavily down voted and refuted.
Some people are gonna be shills and some are gonna be naive. But I’m not going to be a part of any platform Meta is trying to subvert.
Me too.
I think it is part of a long term strategy.
They saw all the negative feedback that was given when the first announcement came and there were a lot of users saying its not so bad or that we should give them a chance then.
Eventually everything became quiet and things moved on now there is a steady rise of pro Meta comments again and this time it will lead to a less violent reaction because it has already happened once before.
Rinse and repeat until they become the norm.
Thats why I report these posts as the propaganda they are and always try to counter them in the comments. Just doing my part as much as I can. I’m already on my own instance so I cant just be banned for it if someone gets bought by meta (its not the only reason but one of them).
I appreciate it.
Wait, what?
I mean, the OP already sounds… kinda paranoid. I’ve been on the record saying that preemptively defederating Threads is a bad idea. That doesn’t make me my opinion propaganda. I’m also on the record saying all social media is a mistake and Meta should be heavily regulated and broken apart.
But hey, whatever, maybe you don’t mean people like me and instead someone else.
But who is Meta buying? Who’s banning posts opposing Meta? Who said that was a thing or could be a thing? Why would it be a thing? There are legitimate concerns about Meta using AP, but I haven’t seen any of them listed in this thread and some of the language here is getting really weird.
To elaborate a little bit on this: Imho, opinions are not propaganda. I dont agree that defederating threads is a bad idea because I am very experienced in strategy. I built several successful companies and my job was to see stuff coming and prepare for it. Its my forte.
What I call propaganda is writing multiple articles which call meta „the only reason the fediverse exists because they said they‘d federate“. Such a braindead take and complete bs.
I‘m on lemmy for roughly a year (this account is younger though) and have been on reddit before. It is evident that there have been campaigns on both platforms to influence the public.
Maybe you didnt know but in that case I suggest you read up about it. Public opinion is a very powerful tool and very valuable. Literally the OP shows that meta has helped such campaigns in the american elections. Which is treason imo (although I‘m not from the US - my mother is - so my definition might diverge).
Anyway, I value your opinion and input. Thanks for asking. Have a good one.
I assume my not noticing any meta shills is due to them being downvoted to hell. If so, excellent work everyone on keeping their propaganda in check!
I agree. That is a positive thing.
I don’t like Meta at all, trying to cut out Meta as much as possible myself.
Meta’s going to do what Meta’s going to do. They don’t have the good intentions for the Fediverse at heart. They will use it and the concept of federation to seek their ends, and when it’s no longer useful to them they will cut it off.
I’ll leave it up to server operators and users to decide. While I think it’s nice that Meta gives the Fediverse attention, I also the Fediverse is better off generally not hooking into Meta’s feed. If your server is part of Fedipact then it’s fair game to report disinformation biased towards Meta.
thanks for your response. I’m going through them one by one. This is a group effort and by voicing your support you are helping to keep the fediverse clean from corporate abuse.
Thanks for shedding light on this!
Thanks for the support! This means a lot. Have a nice day.
decision by world to federate with threads
…anyone know if I can block threads so I won’t have to abandon the instance or be subjected to Meta poison?
You can block any posts coming from threads.net by going to settings and doing instance blocking but long term it probably is better to just move to a different instance that better aligns with your values.
Haha I took your advice and went to my settings to block it only to find out I already had done it. 😂
I believe you that Meta is a bad company with a clear track record of perpetrating harms any time there’s profit to be made. I am not, however convinced that small independent services blocking communication with them is a net positive for the world. Instead, I think there’s an opportunity to get their users to migrate away.
That’s not to say that some servers shouldn’t block them. For a tightly-moderated server, the scale of moderation problems it could bring is argument enough. There are good options for those who are looking for that sort of thing.
I don’t want my Lemmy server to block Threads unless it actually does become a moderation nightmare. I don’t intend to block it from my self-hosted Mastodon server either. In fact, I haven’t blocked anything there yet. I will if I run into anybody being a jerk, but it seems like bird photos and flashlight reviews don’t attract that sort of thing.
I get your point and that is your right. I still dont agree and that is my right. There have been countless examples of underestimating a bad actor until they were already in the space.
That’s why there are many servers with different federation policies.
Exactly. And that is also why posts like mine exist. Have a good day.
You don’t defeat meta by calling out shills.
You can’t stop data collection by keeping the fediverse “pure blooded”.
That involves a digital bill of rights. Positive rights legislation.
That won’t come until we introduce competition into our voting system by making third parties viable by switching away from First past the post voting.
We can change how we vote at a state level (for now), so we don’t need to pass something federally. We don’t need to beg for representation, we can just reach our and take it. Alaska and Maine have already done away with first past the post voting, so why not yours?
If you are not convinced this is the way, Republicans are moving to ban alternative voting systems in states they control. Do you really want to use the voting system republicans prefer?
What’s the excuse blue states?
What is “the people” in context of this post? Like… Meta employees?
No, the users. I get a lot of people claiming we’re just hating the people and cutting them off. Typical facebook logic. Learned helplessness if you will.
So… Facebook users? Dude like… are you alright? A massive percentage of the population uses Facebook in some capacity. It borders on being genuinely insane to ascribe any kind of singular identity to them.
I dont know what you‘re talking about but I dont like your tone.
You asked what „people“ meant. I thought you meant my next to last sentence where I said we dont hate the people on meta‘s social networks but everything else like the mechanics, the policy and the company behind it.
Does it make more sense now?
I think you’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for far too long
Probably 3 days on and off, since the recent wave of pro meta propaganda has started to spike again.
mark Zuckerberg is a robot coded by a lizard
Stop spreading rumors; he himself is the lizard.
Provide proof! I call BS. I see why more anti-Meta posts and pushing it on people. Anywhere here can search and you’ll find it. It dominates any conversations about Meta
Nope. I‘m entitled to my opinion without providing proof. But good luck with that attitude.
Sometimes people have different opinions on tech stuff so I’m hesitant to block people for opinions I disagree with…
But I also saw some posts that you’re talking about OP. You linked one up thread that had come to mind. That user’s post history is super suspect. With people pointing out their shill-like qualities 6 months ago in response to Meta propaganda links.
Years ago, back before it was totally shitty, someone on reddit posted a gigantic, comprehensive, well-sourced list of all the horrible shit Zuck / Meta have done over the years.
It’s unfortunate that long lists of damning facts can’t seem to move the needle very much. People don’t seem to care unless directly impacted.
I hate seeing Meta dig its tentacles in. Thanks for posting this.
I literally show my wife articles of Meta/Tik Tok data breaches and other shit, and she just shrugs and keeps using it. I have a friend who works in fucking CYBER SECURITY and he still has social media apps on his phone. It’s unreal.
But… you’re on social media right now.
Much like Reddit, user data here is worth little outside of LLM utility. Moreover, most of your data is freely available to anyone with a bit of patience and the ability to spin up an instance. Everything is open here, but what’s open isn’t meticulously indexed information about your hopes and dreams… I hope.
Yeah, no, that’s my exact point. It’s not like data in the “fediverse” is particularly secure, beyond the fact that you can opt out of some parts of it in some applications. And it’s not like it’s not social media doing social media things.
I see a lot of this performative outrage or pride on being on the “open” version of social media, but social media is social media. A lot of its problems are design problems that are replicated in the federated versions, and a lot of the privacy concerns remain on paper or haven’t surfaced just because this version of it is so small by comparison.
I don’t think a lot of people who have made this crusade a key part of their online persona fully understand what the underlying issues are and how they work. “How can cybersecurity experts have a TikTok account” kinda reads like the “we need to ban plastic straws” of Internet dysfunction.
I’m going to be honest, I’m kind of of this mindset.
I haven’t yet had a decent argument made to me regarding why I should personally care if TikTok or whatever has like… my age gender and what types of books I read and what apps I have on my phone.
The concern is what other pieces of information are they collecting, and when and who do they share that information with. Does it also collect data on what places you visit, or what kind of potentially controversial information you look up. People are concerned about things like visits to a hospital making its way to their employer and insurance against their will, or a trans person being outed by the ads they are served in front of their family, or maybe that the police will knock down their door because their GPS falsely placed them at the scene of a crime. Or what if they live in an actual fascist regime, and that government comes knocking because they searched for something verboten. Even aside from all that, all this data is inherently your’s, and yet all these companies collecting it are just taking it from you without your explicit knowledge or consent and without you seeing even a dime or what a quick search tells me is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Are things like that happening though? With the insurance?
I mean if the police want to come to my door and shoot me in the head or find a reason to brand me as a felon any day they can basically already do that. That goes for about anyone. It doesn’t really seem to matter if any data brokering company also happens to tag me as maybe being gay or having a 90% chance of supporting Palestine over Israel or similar
I dunno. I just feel like a lot of the argument are contingent on envisioning some imminent future wherein every Western country turns into a completely fascist police state with like concentration camps - but also they can only get their information on local demographics based off of data sold by social media companies? And foreign ones at that? And even in this situation you’re not really doing anything about it but just trying to lie low and hope no one discovers you’re an atheist or whatever until you die of old age?
It kind of reminds me of Pascals Wager. You know that one? Where it goes “ooo you have to believe in god because what if you don’t and the Christian god is real… you go to hell!?”. Like. Yeah, sure. I guess that could happen. But most people will shrug their shoulders at it, not really convinced. It requires a lot of assumptions
To answer your question about the insurance thing, yes. Yes, that is a thing that is happening today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
I think this is generally a valid point of view. However, what I don’t like is to frame it as a easy-to-make-point, something that is basically obvious. Because it isn’t, mainly, because of network effects.
Not opening up to Meta means prevent the Fediverse from becoming a global thing. Not opening up to Meta means not to shape the future of the social web.
If you have this opinion, you implicitly say that you want the Fediverse to stay small. However, I think we can all agree that it would be good if the Fediverse became big. And the only possibility to achieve that is through the growth through Meta, which doesn’t mean working together with it, but profiting from it and cutting in its growth (which admittedly, will not be easy as well and, as you pointed out, also comes with its own moral drawbacks, which have to be thought of, too).
Meta is not cool. But it won’t help to hide away in a shelter until the whole thing has blown over. Because it won’t. All that will happen is that the part that opened up to Meta will grow rapidly and the other part will stay small and become less relevant. In this sense, now is the best time to drive change in the social web, until it is again dominated by Meta. Now we still have the choice to join and work against Meta in the social web.
Just because you federate doesn’t necessarily mean that you work together with it. But if you hide away, you leave the whole field of action up to Meta without even trying. Apart from the fact that it’s barely explainable to anyone outside the Fediverse. They will and already do blame us of double-standards: why create an open protocoll if the ecosystem wants to stay small anyways?
I strongly disagree meta’s involvement is necessary for the fediverse to grow and become big. Snowballing is a very real thing and as long as growth continues to happen, that will encourage more growth.
The threat of meta is a huge jump in growth, and communities that then centralize around those users. Once popular communities are established on meta servers, they have control. If they choose to split or defederate those communities on the non-meta side of the fence would be back to square one building from scratch. That is the problem and if we don’t see it for what it is we will be left with nothing.
I strongly disagree meta’s involvement is necessary for the fediverse to grow and become big.
To a certain degree, yes. But that growth has its limits because of network effects. Most people want to be where their friends are.
If they choose to split or defederate those communities on the non-meta side of the fence would be back to square one building from scratch.
But they are already there. Also, companies like Flipboard and Medium will continue to join the whole thing. It will be nearly impossible to convince ALL of them to leave this big growth potential behind and instead join the old Fediverse, which is much smaller.
I think in any case, there will be three new big factions on the Fediverse: Meta, non-Meta which federates with Meta and the Fedi-Pact-Fediverse. I think there is not much either of us can do about it. But I’m more symphatizing with the second group because I think ActivityPub was developed as an open protocoll and its the only way to make the Fediverse big (doesn’t mean btw that the federation-policy regarding Meta cannot dynamically change over time, this way it becomes a tool against Meta; just permanently defederating doesn’t make sense in my opinion).
Ecosystem doesn’t want to stay small - it doesn’t want to have moderation, among other things, dictated by facebook.
You’re manipulating, but you probably know that. You’re telling me what I’m saying instead of taking what I said. You’re putting a lot of effort in excusing them and it shows. It is very obvious.
