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.
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 more discussion around Mastodon instances staying federated with Threads, because there are tangible benefits and drawbacks to that decision.
It's not as simple as "that instance is a traitor", and attacking other users/admins over this without considering the nuance is silly. For example, lemmy.ca has blocked Threads, but I'm not going to go around attacking others over a decision that's based on how each of us is predicting the future of the Fediverse to play out.
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.
Yikes! That's not great, if true, but it seems like no evidence was provided.
I wouldn't want to be in the business of refuting baseless allegations hurled at me either, so I don't regard their silence as incriminating.
At the same time, where there's smoke there's usually fire so I'll be paying more attention now. I would hate to have to leave the instance after all the time I've spent here, but if any evidence pops up showing that lemmy.world wants to play nice with Meta then that's what I'll have to do.
If you block the road so someone doesn't drive off the end then you would not use a green sign. I understand the thought process, I just don't agree with it.
On the road you’d use red to indicate that it’s blocked.
But on an issue tracker where blocked is the desired, or in the road scenario – safe, outcome, green would be resolved/safe, and red would be unresolved/unsafe.
Do you have any understanding of what fedipact is about? Obviously this not about software security dangers and rather about the danger that large commercial entities like meta bring to the longevity of a free fediverse.
Which is to say - not unsafe for individual users or from a day-to-day operations perspective, but unsafe in a platform survival way.
Major companies start working with open source projects until they’ve added a significant amount to them, then they start rolling out proprietary parts that work with their additions, then they move away from the open source project, leaving the original project incompatible with a bulk of its users and platform. The project finds itself both quite big and lacking support, with adopters moving to the closed-source implementation(s). This is often called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, and it’s been used to harm Open Office formats, messaging platforms, and is currently being used by Google with Chrome to strip away user privacy and redo how the internet works, for the sake of their advertising empire.
Facebook and BlueSky activity pub integration efforts should not and can not be seen as an altruistic gesture.
It’s not the protocol, it’s the users. There’s a vocal group that would rather stay small, niche, and remain in obscurity away from the rest of the world. They fear that they’re going to lose their pedestal and megaphone because their quirky skewed view of the world will be drowned out by mainstream worldviews. They’ll then mask it with claims of “privacy”, “EEE”, or “anti-blahblahblah_that_I_dont_like”.
Big companies did wonders for Mastadon’s adoption, and will likely do the same here. The lack of users and content will be resolved when it happens, and I just hope I can hold out long enough until that happens.
Green means good and red bad as well, stop/go is another way to describe it, but colored statuses are super common in software stuff. All my monitoring systems I use are green=good, yellow=warning, red=error/bad
the main idea behind the blockade is that Facebook implementing ActivityPub can easily overwhelm any instance small enough in infrastructure through the sheer amount of traffic that such connection would have on the rest of the Fediverse (case and point, the occasional waves of Twitter users moving to Mastodon), and with fewer instances it can get easier for the company to take advantage of that to take over the network and make it monopolized again.
edit: i didn't read your comment properly, i thought that was lacking context. sorry x.x
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.
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 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Just because it's open in another tab, anyone who wants to see what threads does can read this aggressive view on insta, mosseri and other tech industry managers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🎉
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.
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.
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.
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.