An address to @Ruud and the lemmy.world team:

I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you’ve done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines our community’s sentiment and reservations.

I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the “wait and see” approach.

What’s to say Threads won’t follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?

If I go to a friend’s house and their child spits in my face every time, I don’t want to go to my friend’s house. I tell them this. The friend says, “Well this time just might be different, let’s just wait and see!” Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.

Why should I believe this kid won’t spit in my face all of a sudden, when they’ve taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein.

Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users’ well-being. There’s no reason to wait and see. It’s not logical to believe this time will be different.

Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.

Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta’s practices as a company.

This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads… That alone should tell you there’s no reason to “wait and see.” Just look right now. They haven’t changed…

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government…

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?

I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.

However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.

Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.

We kindly ask everyone to engage in civil discourse and remember that not everyone will share the same opinions, which is perfectly acceptable.

It’s really actually not acceptable to ignore what a bad actor Facebook/Meta has been. Catch up on the news if you need to. Cambridge Analytica scandal, unwitting social experiments, and the insane amount of intrusive permissions required just to use threads etc. They’ve been anti-consumer in an almost dystopian way and failing to call that out is an immoral stance. There’s really no polite way to say, “that’s a hell no, fix your attitude, or I’m out.” That people have characterized folks telling you this is a deal-breaker as “blackmail” is the absurd stance here. We’re asking you to stay true to the anti-corporate “power to the people” spirit that created Lemmy in the first place and call out Meta for being an obviously bad actor in this space, as a bunch of Reddit refugees… You actually arguing against this and acting like “both sides are fine” about it is being completely tone-deaf and is 100% antithetical to the purpose of the fediverse.

“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” You’ve already committed to doing nothing during an important time with a “wait and see” attitude. Meta is still a face-eating leopard, a frog-stinging scorpion, or whatever analogy does it for ya. It’s not a tough choice and there IS a right and wrong answer.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

It doesn’t start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren’t evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.

The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren’t really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.

They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There’s outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn’t come to pass, and looks like it never will.

Facebook doesn’t need malicious intent for what’s going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what’s wrong with them trying to build an audience?

Thread’s improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.

After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It’s not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don’t turn the heat up too many degrees at once.

It’s wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn’t 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.

Facebook needs to make money, and they won’t do so by directly charging users. There’s only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.

Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet’s monomyth. You don’t have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.

If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don’t have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say “your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you.”

While I typically subscribe strongly to a stance of “Innocent until proven guilty,” in the case of Facebook, that doesn’t seem prudent. I would much prefer to stand back and watch, for a long time, how they behave in the community before opening the door to federation with them. If they conduct and moderate their users well and show no signs of EEE, it may be worth considering connection to Threads in a few years’ time. Until then, I would very much prefer to hold them much further away than arms’ length.

Was this considered? https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Google essentially destroyed Jabber this way.

I was there and Jabber at the time also looked promising and Google adding its GTalk was the push everyone thought Jabber needed and everyone was welcoming it.

Meta will join Fediverse only if it will be still a threat to them, once users will switch to it (let’s be honest, majority of users on Fediverse aren’t purists, and if metra will have some unique features they will switch) they will defederate and Fediverse will lose meta users as well as old users. Just exactly as it happened with Jabber. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

I would prefer lemmy.world defederate from Threads and any other major social media giant’s attempt at federation. My reasons for doing so have been covered really well in other comments in this post.

I just want to remind everyone this is a direct quote from Zuckerberg regarding people handing over their data to Facebook: “They trust me. Dumb fucks.”

While supporting people’s neutrality in moderation team, I gotta say that the best way to settle this would be giving users the choice of their own. Most people here are the ones who came from oppressed platforms that silence their users and they wanted to have a choice.

It could be solved like how lemm.ee did this, by giving poll to their users.

Federating threads would again make some of people to do the same mistake. It will be easy for them to fall in, for convenient posting and reach to Fediverse, most of them wouln’t even know how this works, they would only tap the screen and accept that it just WORKS.

Instead we shouldn’t give even a possibility for convenience to them, they should search for the REAL freedom platforms and know their existence.

People will come here sooner or later, but we shouldn’t give them opportunity to not to.

Please don’t give Meta even an inch.

They wouldn’t be stepping into the Frediverse if they didn’t have a plan to either monetize the user base or destroy their competition.

Don’t let them take a pound and then some.

I appreciate the thoughtful response and agree - no need for a knee jerk reaction when there is still some time until a decision needs to be made, and there are still quite a few unanswered questions.

As long as you maintain this level of transparency I trust that you make the right decision for lemmy.world.

As usual, thank you!

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

Regardless if we know the method in which they will attempt it, we know what they are and what their ultimate goal is. Just because you can’t see the fangs doesn’t mean you invite the menacing stranger in black into your home in the middle of the night.

Also, “Lemmy will survive” is a bit like saying “technically the earth will survive after climate change”. We’re not just interested in continued existence, but in the manner that existence takes. If Meta is allowed to set-up shop in the fediverse, they will come to define it, and new users will see it as the fediverse. By the time Lemmy.world defederates, it will be like cutting off its own arm and no one will want to leave Threads anyway.

Basically, let the fediverse grow without this snake in the garden. Let it form its own identity without Meta so it can serve as the counterpoint to it and refuge from it.

Ribbit

I didn’t realize that defederation only breaks the link in one direction. I don’t like the idea of my posts being exported to Threads where they’ll have an entirely different discussion on them.

Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I’m of the opinion that it’s better to defederate, mainly for the reasons your post already covers, but I’d stress the quality of content is/will be Lemmy’s biggest asset. I think many users (myself included) are on Lemmy to get away from the existing social media experience. Lemmy/fediverse is refreshing because it isn’t governed by a mandate to grow quarterly profits at its users’ expense; it feels like the internet in the late 90s and early 00s where people made content because it interested them rather than trying to garner views or promoting the most polarizing/inciting content (or even just downright trolling). I hope the admins can see what the risks are and take proactive steps in the interest of the community.

I want to stay federated with threads and oppose defederation. Just putting it out there.

While I think that we should rightly be very wary of Threads/Meta, I do also think that it is still too early to judge. It’s hard to accurately predict what will happen in the future given the relative youth of Lemmy and the Fediverse. (Admittedly, I’m also relatively new to the Fediverse, so what do I know?) Given Meta’s track record, we should be very aware of the possible red flags and make plans for possible future malicious actions, but for now I’m okay with waiting and watching.