Interesting new data on Lemmy instance federation with Threads, ordered by Active Users descending.
Source: https://fedipact.veganism.social. New data gathered on 2024-04-28.
Devils advocate, but I feel like we threads was brigaded in advance before actually doing anything shitty.
Yes they’re a terrible company, and yes, it’s a 99.9% certainty that federation with threads will cause an issue. However…
If we are trying to encourage companies in general to use more FOSS and change to FOSS, then we shouldn’t be preemptively punishing them before they even join.
Its going to turn companies off moving to FOSS and frankly it comes across as kind of dickish.
Well isn’t that what FOSS provides for us thought? The ability to control everything the software does and we own the content being shown. If we choose to block that content then that’s our right, if threads chooses to allow everything under the sun there’s nothing we can do about it but wait for Facebook to do it for us.
The problem though is when they flip the “enshittify” switch and everyone, even you, then knows they’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing they always were, it’ll be too late, and those of us that don’t want to pay the Zuck tax or have ads shoved in our faces left right and centre is to start over.
But we’re done retreating. They took Fark, they took Digg, they’ve just taken Reddit, and now they want Lemmy. Enough is enough. The line is drawn here and they are NOT crossing it.
If Meta’s other sites were shining examples of the best then you might have a point. The only viable way to prevent Meta killing Lemmy is to nip them in the bud. And yes it seems mean because this is the stage when they’re pretending to be everyone’s best friend and giving us loads of stuff for free. But we know the playbook, we know they’re at step 1, and we know perfectly well that Zuck isn’t sniffing around here out of any kind of altruism but because he’s after more $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
What exactly is the concern that they will do to us?
If the Threads userbase eclipses the non-Threads userbase (which it would), and their dev budget eclipses the public’s (which it would), then Threads would heavily influence the development of the entire platform. Threads-federated instances would be subject to Threads-influenced updates and “upgrades”, leading to eventual enshittification for everyone. To avoid their updates, you would need to defederate from the Threads-verse, where all the users would be.
This strategy to take over, monetize and effectively own the Fediverse is not hyperbole. It is a known strategy used by corporations to take control of FOSS software users. It’s called " Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", if you’d like to read more on it.
To prevent this scenario from happening to the current most active instances of the Fediverse, these instances need to stay defederated with Threads to begin with and therefore remain uninfluenced by the “development” that Threads will be pushing for Activity Pub and Lemmy servers. This is an existential crisis for Lemmy that should be taken serioualy by the current devs and instances.
Doesn’t this have more to do with what git pulls are accepted than the status of federation though?
The Threads threat is a big-picture threat. The specifics can change month to month, but the end goal here is a corporate take-over of a FOSS technology.
Gate-keeping at the dev level right now is a situation that can change over time as the corporation continues to insist itself upon the community. Ultimately, it is the community who will need to prevent this, not just the devs. We will need to stay vigilant against this threat forever.
They are the borg. The defense against them will take stamina, patience and resilience.
BUY SOME SHIT!!! T BUY SOME SHIT!!! h BUY SOME SHIT!!! i BUY SOME SHIT!!! s BUY SOME SHIT!!!
Edit: and if that’s what you want, then may I suggest Reddit as
a chatroomAI bollocks with ads splattered all over them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Not dickish; a learned lesson.
Existing is shitty. There is no desire to “encourage” Facebook to do anything. Everything they touch is malignant and interacting with them in any way is a dumpster fire.
Quarantining Facebook isn’t to affect their behavior in any way. It’s because the mere fact that an instance connects to Facebook makes them toxic.
One of the main reasons I run my own instances (Mastodon and Lemmy). Keep the garbage blocked and out of sight.
People wanted the Fediverse to get more popular. So more popular it gets, more big companies and an like will join the Fediverse. So mission accomplished, everyone. 🎉
Threads is only the beginning.
What you should really take away from these numbers is that lemmy.world should close their registrations. If they dont, they should be seen as a bad actor trying to take majority control of the lemmyverse.
I think that’s just the Tyranny of the Default at work
So you would like a place that preaches choice to deny choice?
Lol
The paradox of tolerance applied to this situation suggests that in order to keep a community where choice is preserved, we need to be intolerant of bad actors with the ultimate goal of killing that choice.
Meta absolutely is a bad actor looking to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse.
They’re pivoting the overwhelming userbase of Facebook/Instagram into a sort of federated Twitter alternative that their users as a whole don’t understand but do generate content for, in an attempt to steer the federation architecture into something they can control and make money off of. It’s not subtle.
Whether it will work or is even possible for meta to do remains to be seen.
But, yes. To answer your question, we need to “deny the choice” of federating with what amounts to a wolf in sheep’s clothing to preserve what we have, because that wolf is looking to destroy it.
This post demonstrates that all of the major instances on lemmy but one understand this concept. If lemmy.world doesn’t want to acknowledge what meta is doing, then they’re also a bad actor in enabling meta to do it.
Mastodon.social had a whole thing a while back where they had NDA meetings with Facebook in regards to threads federation.
It’s later come out that they are censoring Palestine content on their platform.
So yeah people who often push for Federation with bad actors like Facebook are very often bad actors themselves.
Thankfully Lemmy.world hasn’t been pushing any pro-Israel content, or censoring Palestine support, at least not yet (hopefully never).
People can choose what they want, but i want server admins to be aware of the possible negative impacts their own dominance might have.
Any one server should not have an interest in having many users, because there is no commercial benefit. If a server doesnt do anything against becoming a monopoly it either wants to have the ultimate power to moderate peoples speech or has hidden profit motives like selling their userbase to some company or running advertisements.
Large servers are the beginning of the end in a decentralized system that depends on having as much federation as possible.
If you defederate lemmy.world there is a huge drop in posts, but if you dont then the problem gets worse. If lemmy.world admins were to stop federating, half the lemmyverse collapses and even more people will move to an account on lemmy.world to keep their content source.
We dont even need meta/threads for these problems, any regular lemmy server can be the one that splits the userbase.
@nm
Not sure users are aware of the dangers…
@technologythe image doesn’t match at all with the actual website even though the individual entries in the picture are accurate.
the entire list is mixed half-and-half across the board, with slight bias to Federated status. still a long way to go.
I think that’s because it’s filtered to Lemmy software, and sorted from largest to smallest. Once you do that, it looks similar
i see now. thank you
@Wilker You must filter for the Lemmy software and sort by Active descending.
thank you ^^
If you’re curious, here are the numbers added up for all Lemmy instances with 10+ users:
blocked/fedipact
- users: 251442 (~60%)
- active: 24106 (~55%)
federated
- users: 167166 (~40%)
- active: 19558 (~45%)
Have the admins of lemmy.world ever given a reason for this decision?
I would very much like to see Meta kneecapped in the Fediverse. They are a blight on the world that needs to be dealt with.
Have the admins of lemmy.world ever given a reason for this decision?
Yes. This post gives their thoughts around the time Threads started talking about federation and it’s pretty much “let’s wait and see if this results in problems”. They note a high probability of problems leading to defederation if a significant number of Threads users start posting to Lemmy communities.
I am happy with this approach. I want my Lemmy server to federate with every compatible server unless and until that server becomes a source of problems. I do not want it to preemptively or transitively[1] block anything. The great thing about federated systems is that people who are not happy with that approach can join a different server with policies that better match their preferences.
[1] A transitive block is blocking a server because it doesn’t block a third server.
Thanks for posting that. I think I even read through it when it was posted as it seems awfully familiar. I was wondering if the issue had been more recently revisited though.
It does kinda bother me that lemmy.world admins don’t just flat out say “screw Meta”, but it’s their choice.
If Lemmy.world denying Meta potential access to its 18600 monthly active users was likely to have a meaningful impact on Meta’s revenue or even hurt Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings, maybe I’d feel the same way.
That’s where we differ. My feelings aren’t affected by what impact it has on them, hurtful, helpful, or neutral. I just don’t want them around because they ruin everything they touch. Why give them a chance here? You don’t have to wait for a problem to appear before you start working to prevent it.
If they actually gave a shit about their users, they would defederate instances that cause problems and break their ToS. In reality, the admins are just going by the Reddit playbook of “don’t do anything until it makes us look bad.”
I think the issue is in the beginning everyone wanted to federate with world.
So a new instance would get created, and before a so gle post was made, they’d federate with world.
So now a shit ton of zombie instances are federated. Like, the same trolls will make 5-10 accounts a day on a zombie server to post on world. Even if world reaches out to the zombie admin and gets a response, there’s a bunch more for the troll to use.
World admins need to prune their federations. If an instance only has 100 users and most aren’t active, it only helps trolls.
Why even come to Lemmy if you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket. Have we learned nothing?
Federation occurs automatically when a user subscribes or posts to a community.
Admins are unpaid hobbyists like you and me, they don’t think that PRish
lol is this supposed to be some kind of irrefutable evidence lmao even
For what it’s worth, it doesn’t realistically change much since Lemmy (software) doesn’t federate with Threads in any meaningful way. There are some benefits, but my understanding is that the benefits are mostly symbolic. This is also why you might see a lot of Mastodon instances staying federated with Threads, because there are tangible benefits and drawbacks to that decision.
As for WHY an instance might want to stay Federated, see some discussion from this other thread here: https://lemmy.ca/post/11771031
It’s not as simple as “that instance is a traitor”, and attacking other users/admins over this without considering the nuance is silly.
Because they’re traitors.
I don’t want to say “I told you so”, but I told you so.
Yes, lemmy.world is the exception.
What does the Fedipact mean?
