I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.

  • infinitepcg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1610·
    9 months ago

    I’m in favor of federation. The point of federated networks isn’t that there are no evil corporations, but rather that they can’t cause damage.

    What Facebook can do:

    • read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
    • let their users publish content to other Fediverse users

    What they can’t do:

    • serve you ads
    • serve you an algorithmic feed
    • impose their ToS or rules
    • collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
    • force you to use a certain client
    • make changes to the protocol or design

    I think this is mostly relevant for Mastodon servers due to the format of the content, but the arguments are the same.

      • kpw@kbin.social
        6·
        9 months ago

        Easily incorporated into the posts themselves

        We should definitely block instances who insert ads into the content. However there is no evidence of threads.net doing something like this.

        Not now… But they can easily do it if they get a majority market share. Don’t behave like they want? Defederated from the majority of the content.

        They could threaten to defederate from us so we should defederate from them? It makes no sense.

        Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP?

        XMPP works great, I use it everyday. It doesn’t have to be popular, you only need to convince some of your friends to use it.

          • kpw@kbin.social
            4·
            9 months ago

            I’m not sure I understand your question or why you think of those statements as being exclusive. I will try to answer separately.

            is the fediverse a service that should allow Threads/Meta

            The good thing about the Fediverse is that it isn’t a single service, but many federated ones. For any single instance, I think not defederating maximizes user freedom: A user who wants to interact with Threads can do so while a user that doesn’t want to see any content from Threads can block their domain.

            is it like XMPP and doesn’t have to be popular

            I think it’s a little bit different from XMPP, in a sense that the Fediverse is a public space where I communicate with strangers, so I would like it to be popular at least among people with shared interests. For instant messaging I just need my friends there, but sure it would be easier if I didn’t have to show everyone how to create an XMPP address and what client to use.

      • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        45·
        9 months ago

        This is exactly the case. There are so many more users than threads that even though we aren’t directly being fed their algorithm, what makes it to the top of our posts will be content that are at the top of their algorithm.

        It’s Facebook’s algorithm with extra steps.

      • Kierunkowy74@kbin.social
        02·
        9 months ago

        It’s perfectly possible to create a watertight federated network excluding both federation and scraping from Threads/Meta on Mastodon using authorized fetch and whitelisting.

        Authorised Fetch is not supported yet by /kbin