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Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/meta@programming.dev
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I'm not suggesting anything, just want to know what do you think.

Here is a link if someone don't know what Meta's Threads is: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

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[–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

I'd be interested to hear how Facebook would seek to alleviate those concern, regardless of weather such concerns are realisticly founded or not, as social networks inherently deal with humans and public opinions.

  • What kind of technical solution from Facebook do you think would best help appease concerned users in the Fediverse?
  • Could there be a technical solution to resolve the social dilemma of (real or appearance of) power imbalance between Facebook and the rest of the Fediverse?

I'm trying to think of how Facebook could gracefully relinquish control over its platform while guaranteeing Facebook could not later subvert those concessions. Would that ever be in Facebook's best interests? I guess improved user trust and positive PR could help abate the calls for regulation and monopoly busting.

There are skeptic rumours that Facebook is hoping to leverage the Fediverse as a relief valve for regulatory pressure due to EU's DMA:

  • Theory: the only reason Meta cares about the fediverse / ActivityPub is so that threads isn’t labeled a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act”
  • https://lemmy.world/post/1105955
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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so.

    Hmm, that sounds fairly applicable to the Paradox of Tolerance, where the we are beholden to be inclusive to an industry that has a repeated history of running afoul in society.

    The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
    https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    Well, Meta has a history of bad behavior in terms of how they treat users on their own systems, but no history at all for how they treat federated systems. You could even go the other way a bit and say that Meta has contributed meaningfully to the open source community with projects like React. (Obviously this is short on parallels as it doesn't involve their main income streams.)

    I would absolutely say that users should not join Threads directly. Meta is already hoovering everything they possibly can about their users. But the mechanism for that hoovering is the app, not the protocol. Any data they get about users that are not on Threads directly is data they were going to get anyway because that's the design of the protocol; anyone can get that data.

    It seems that members of a federated system can't decide how to treat an entity until that entity interacts with other members. You assess the nature of those interactions, and if they turn out to be bad, you defederate.

    What the Mastodon community is doing now looks a bit like "this person drives over the speed limit all the time, so they're obviously going to steal food if we let them volunteer at the homeless shelter!" But we have no evidence for such unwanted behavior whatsoever.

    edit: I saw on another thread that apparently Meta reached out to some Mastodon instances to try to get them to sign NDAs. If true, that's inexcusable and signals intent pretty clearly. Public protocols must be developed publicly.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.

    My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:

    1. Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
    2. Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

    I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.

    The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Honestly you sound really naive. You seem to be under this delusion that people who hold intolerant ideas are only doing so out of honest ignorance and they can simply be convinced otherwise. Have you ever interacted with an anti-vaxxer? A covid-denier? A religious fanatic? A slavery apologist? The world is absolutely filled to the brim with incredibly unreasonable people who will ignore all evidence for things that don't fit their world view. They aren't looking to be convinced otherwise.

    How do you plan on "respectfully asking" a homophobe to stop hating gay people, for instance? What if they just want to post about how much they wish gay people would die, what argument do you think would sway someone dedicated to their religion? Since its just speech and not action, they should be free to hate as much as they want according to you.

    Your whole point doesn't make any sense either, the idea that people would jump ship to make threads accounts if they were defederated is absurd. The fediverse is an incredibly niche corner of social media, the only reason you would specifically search out for communities here is if you were disatisfied with corporate social media (like threads) to begin with.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    You’re positing we not try to convince people who hold wrong worldviews?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    No, I'm saying some people won't let themselves be convinced either way and that should be taken into account. You didn't respond with how you would convince homophobic people not to hate gays for instance, it sounds like you want people to waste their breaths arguing with the unreasonable just so you can maintain some moral high ground of being oh-so-much-more tolerant than the rest.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.

    Indeed, such ideas are often baseless, but the people who hold them can still be resolute against rationale, as per Karl Popper's quote in the wiki article above:

    ... for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive ...

    Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

    I'll preface this with my personal opinion here, that corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation's historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it's future actions.

    I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

    • Twitter
    • Reddit
    • WeChat
    • TikTok
    • LinkedIn
    • YouTube
    • etc
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  • [–] -4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    … for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …

    If we can't convince people of our point of view, then that's our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we're saying "we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to". That doesn't seem appropriate.

    corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.

    If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it's hosted. If we don't do that, we're not really a fediverse.

    I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

    That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they'd all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become "too big". The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    I don't agree that defederating with Meta is against the definition of Fediverse.

    This is the header on fediverse.to:

    The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks. Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics. Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.

    Meta-owned instances go directly against every one of those points. For me, Fediverse should always be run by people not doing it for monetary gains. The main advantage of fediverse is not that you can and should connect with anyone, but that it's a community that is not ran for profit, and the servers are run for the people with good and self-less intentions, instead of users being heavily monetized and their behavior fed into algorithms to manipulate them even further with the content they are shown. And the federation is there mostly to alleviate a problem that usually happens in such comunities - people move on, servers die, admins can't run an instance any more. With fediverse, this is not that big of an issue, thanks to the way it's designed.

    Allowing Meta, or any large company in that regard, in will destroy this idea of community run and privacy-centric social network for everyone, and only result in Meta profiting from it and the content the users create.

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