With Meta beginning to test federation, there’s a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don’t think those are the main issues. Imo, Threads presents a serious danger to the long-term viability of the fediverse if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederation.
Let’s start with these three statements, which should hopefully seem pretty reasonable:
- It’s dangerous for one entity to dominate the activity pool. If, say, one person’s instance contributes 95% of the content, then the rest of the fediverse becomes dependent on that instance. Should that instance defederate, everyone else will have to either live with 1/20 of the content or move to that instance, and good luck getting the fediverse to grow after that. By making everyone dependent on their instance for content, that one person gains the power to kill the fediverse by defederating.
- Profit-driven media should not be the primary way people interact with the fediverse. Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances. Furthermore, lots of people went to the fediverse to avoid the influence of these large corporations on social media, and it should still uphold this purpose.
- People should enter the fediverse with an idea of its purpose. If someone’s on the fediverse, they should be aware of that fact and aware of the fediverse’s goal of decentralized media. People should think of the fediverse as every instance contributing to a decentralized pool of content, not other instances tapping in to their instance as the main pool.
Now, let’s apply these to federating with Threads:
- This point alone is more than enough reason to defederate from Threads. Threads has millions more active users than all of the fediverse combined, and it’s in much better of a position to grow its userbase due to its integration with Instagram. If we federate with Threads, it will dominate content. And that’s not mentioning all of the company accounts on Threads that people have expressed an interest in following. While all of this new activity may seem like a good thing, it puts everyone in a position of dependence on Threads. People are going to get used to the massive increase in content from Threads, and if it ever defederates, tons of people on other instances are going to leave with it. Essentially, Zuckerberg will eventually be able to kill the fediverse’s growth prospects when he wishes and nab a bunch of users in the process, both of which he has incentive to do.
- If we federate with Threads, Threads is undoubtedly going to seem like the easiest way to access our pool of content (at least on the microblog side of things). Newcomers already get intimidated by having to choose a Mastodon instance; give them access via essentially just logging into their Instagram account, and they’ll take that over the non-corporate alternatives. Federation with Threads means that most of the people who want to see the content we make are going to go to Threads, meaning platforms like Mastodon & Kbin will be less able to grow.
- When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they’re going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account. I’d bet that when Threads gets federation up and running, most people on Threads won’t have a clue that they’re on the fediverse. Those who do know will probably think of it as all of these small, niche platforms that are kinda offshoots of Threads. That’s not the mentality that should pervade the fediverse.
I think that all of this is makes defederating from Threads a no-brainer. If we don’t, we’ll depend on Meta for activity, platforms that aren’t Threads won’t grow, and the fediverse will be primarily composed of people who don’t have even a vague idea of the purpose behind it. I want more activity as much as the next guy, but that activity being beholden to the corporations most of us want to avoid seems like the worst-case scenario.
“But why not defederate later?”
If we don’t defederate now, I don’t think we’re ever going to defederate. Once the fediverse becomes dependent on Threads for most of its content, there’s no going back. If anything, it’d get worse as Threads outpaces the rest of the fediverse in growth and thus makes up a larger and larger share of activity. Look at how desperate everyone is for activity — even if it means the fediverse being carried by Meta — right now, when we’re not used to it. Trying to get instances to defederate later will be nigh impossible.
“Why not just block Threads yourself?”
Even if that were a feature, it completely ignores the problem. I don’t dislike the people on Threads, and I don’t think their content will necessarily be horrendous. The threat is people on non-corporate fediverse platforms becoming dependent on Daddy Zuck for content, and that’s something that can only be fought with defederation.
To close, imagine if Steve Huffman said that Reddit was going to implement ActivityPub and federate with Lemmy & Kbin. Would you want the fediverse to be dependent on Reddit for activity? Would you trust Huffman, who has all the incentive in the world to pull the plug on federation once everyone on Lemmy & Kbin is hooked to Reddit content? This is the situation we’re in, just with a different untrustworthy corporation. The fediverse should not be at the mercy of Threads, Reddit, The Site Formerly Known as Twitter, or any other corporate platform. It’s better to grow slowly but surely than to put what we have in the hands of these people.
Meta (or any large entity) cannot monopolize or control the fediverse. If their implementation starts drifting from established norms, they will be blocked by most instances or will just be incompatible. The example used to back up this argument is usually XMPP, but people forget that XMPP is still around. It never died; its just a smaller, niche network.
The fediverse is already a small, niche network. So if Meta comes in and tries to control the network, it will then be responsible for maintaining its own “Meta-fediverse” network (that some instances may choose to be a part of) while the remaining instances will remain as a small, niche network. Meta can’t force current fediverse servers to implement any Meta-specific features or to change their software in any way.
The mod workload argument is the only one that I see being a real issue, but the target is wrong. Anyone worried about that should be discussing it with fediverse devs to improve mod tools, not trying to force the entire fediverse to stay at their preferred size
Right now, many are already desperate for activity and thus hesitant to defederate. Do you actually think that you’ll convince people to defederate once everyone’s used to all the content they provide? “Hey guys, Meta’s starting to make changes, so we’re going to cut the content you’re used to seeing by 99%.” That’s an impossible sell. Once content dependence is established, there is no turning back.
Most of us want to see the open fediverse grow into something a bit less small and a bit less niche, but that possibility will be dashed away if we put activity in Meta’s hands and then let them take it away from us. Tons of people will leave platforms like Mastodon to go to Threads or otherwise have to live with most of their content being gone and no longer seeing the posts of most of whom they follow. That’s lots of people who would have been sold on the fediverse but now see it as dead because of the massive activity drop. Threads coming and going takes the view of our situation from “It could grow a lot,” to “It really fell off when Threads left,” and the latter will make it impossible to grow again.
If we want a fediverse with the values we care about to grow, we don’t need Meta. It’s insane to start pretending that this is the case just because Meta is offering to control 99% of the content. Patience will help us in the long run, whereas relying on Meta to carry the fediverse will absolutely hurt us.
Everyone who is on the fediverse has already made that choice. They are intentionally on a network with less content because of the other benefits And a huge portion of the discussion of Meta joining the fediverse is made up of ppl who are saying they will block Threads on day 1.
That’s what everyone was saying back when the fediverse was even smaller, or even before it existed. “How can you compete with giants like G+, twitter, and facebook?” There will always be groups of people who will not participate in corporate social media. And there will always be people who like the convenience of corporate social media but get fed up with it and seek alternatives. And there will always be people who bounce between services.
They’re only here because they left corporate social media. If they were going to leave for Threads, why wouldn’t they do it now? They’ve heard all the warnings about some supposed EEE and assume that Threads won’t connect to the fediverse forever so why would Threads adding ActivityPub support suddenly change their mind? Going to threads now puts them in the same state as going to threads later in some hypothetical future where the fediverse is too small to matter.
I don’t care about Meta and I’m not relying on them for anything. When they join the fediverse, individual instance owners will still have all the power. User on the fediverse will still be able to control their own feeds. But there are people who use Threads and being able to communicate with them would be nice. I don’t think any of the fears about Meta on the fediverse are justified and I think the fediverse will continue on just like it has for more than a decade.