How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
ploum.net
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.

I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta.

They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:

  • Helping enhance genocides in countries
  • Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
  • Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
  • Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
  • Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
  • Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.

Yes, I know one of the Mastodon folks have said they’re not worried. Frankly, I think they’re being laughably naive >.<. Facebook/Meta - and Instagram’s CEO - might say pretty words - but words are cheap and from a known-hostile entity like Meta/Facebook they are almost certainly just a manipulation strategy.

In my view, they should be discarded as entirely irrelevant, or viewed as deliberate lies, given their continued atrocious behaviour and open manipulation of vast swathes of the population.

Facebook have large amounts of experience on how to attack and astroturf social media communities - hell I would be very unsurprised if they are already doing it, but it’s difficult to say without solid evidence ^.^

Why should we believe anything they say, ever? Why should we believe they aren’t just trying to destroy a competitor before it gets going properly, or worse, turn it into yet another arm of their sprawling network of services, via Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - or perhaps Embrace, Extend, Consume would be a better term in this case?

When will we ever learn that openly-manipulative, openly-assimilationist corporations need to be shoved out before they can gain any foothold and subsume our network and relegate it to the annals of history?

I’ve seen plenty of arguments claiming that it’s “anti-open-source” to defederate, or that it means we aren’t “resilient”, which is wrong ^.^:

  • Open source isn’t about blindly trusting every organisation that participates in a network, especially not one which is known-hostile. Threads can start their own ActivityPub network if they really want or implement the protocol for themselves. It doesn’t mean we lose the right to kick them out of most - or all - of our instances ^.^.
  • Defederation is part of how the fediverse is resilient. It is the immune system of the network against hostile actors (it can be used in other ways, too, of course). Facebook, I think, is a textbook example of a hostile actor, and has such an unimaginably bad record that anything they say should be treated as a form of manipulation.

Edit 1 - Some More Arguments

In this thread, I’ve seen some more arguments about Meta/FB federation:

  • Defederation doesn’t stop them from receiving our public content:
    • This is true, but very incomplete. The content you post is public, but what Meta/Facebook is really after is having their users interact with content. Defederation prevents this.
  • Federation will attract more users:
    • Only if Threads makes it trivial to move/make accounts on other instances, and makes the fact it’s a federation clear to the users, and doesn’t end up hosting most communities by sheer mass or outright manipulation.
    • Given that Threads as a platform is not open source - you can’t host your own “Threads Server” instance - and presumably their app only works with the Threads Server that they run - this is very unlikely. Unless they also make Threads a Mastodon/Calckey/KBin/etc. client.
    • Therefore, their app is probably intending to make itself their user’s primary interaction method for the Fediverse, while also making sure that any attempt to migrate off is met with unfamiliar interfaces because no-one else can host a server that can interface with it.
    • Ergo, they want to strongly incentivize people to stay within their walled garden version of the Fediverse by ensuring the rest remains unfamiliar - breaking the momentum of the current movement towards it. ^.^
  • We just need to create “better” front ends:
    • This is a good long-term strategy, because of the cycle of enshittification.
    • Facebook/Meta has far more resources than us to improve the “slickness” of their clients at this time. Until the fediverse grows more, and while they aren’t yet under immediate pressure to make their app profitable via enshittification and advertising, we won’t manage >.<
    • This also assumes that Facebook/Meta won’t engage in efforts to make this harder e.g. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Consume, or social manipulation attempts.
    • Therefore we should defederate and still keep working on making improvements. This strategy of “better clients” is only viable in combination with defederation.

PART 2 (post got too long!)

  • masterspace
    36·
    1 year ago

    Hey man, Threads is that way if you want to use it, but I came here because I very specifically do not have any interest. You can sign up there, use it all you want! But don’t fuck the rest of us over because you want to use both platforms at the same time.

    Hey man, this thing called the fediverse is based around subscribing to the communities you want to and seeing content from those. You’re screwing over the people who want content from both when you could just, not go out of your way to subscribe to threads communities. Problem solved.

    And by the way, your cloning analogy changes nothing. The original dog is not in the house, he’s fucking off somewhere else.

    Well this is why it was a piss poor analogy to begin with. Because the real, non-analogous, facts of the situation mean that the bear, the original dog, and the cloned chihuahua are all only kept alive by the same thing, users and their content.

    And again, let’s back up for a moment and point out that that’s still not an argument based on any plausible reality. It’s just fear of the unknown. You have yet to articulate any technical ways that method could kill the fediverse, but are just scared of some random X that Meta might do to steal the half dozen mastodon users away.