this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
236 points (99.6% liked)
Programming.dev Meta
2474 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!
This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.
Links
Credits
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's kinda easy to jump on the obvious "Yes, fuck facebook" bandwagon...
But I'm curious on how they intent to implement this. How are the communities grouped? Would we have to federate with the entire Meta Instance?
If Meta would have some "Programmers group" community that actually has high quality content and comments (And not default Facebook comment quality) with informed/informative members it could be interesting to federate with those...
It seems a little early to completely reject the idea before knowing more about the implementation details.
Also, it does seem like a great way to get a lot of expose. Lemmy is still pretty obscure. If meta connects with Lemmy, that's an influx of a potential 3.74 billion people... A bunch of those people might click through to smaller communities of their interests (like programming) and discover instances like that.
I've been following the Meta drama on Mastodon for a while now, and while I don't think Threads is designed exclusively for EEE - I can help but feel that may become the unintentional result.
☝️ Because of that right there ☝️
The moderation tools on Lemmy and Mastodon are getting better, but short of defederation - a nuclear option - I worry that the influx of people will bring along the worst of the internet. The trolls, the astroturfers, the literal state sponsored hacking groups/rage farmers.
I don't think Meta is going to come to the Fediverse to take it over, I think it's coming to get a short term win by accessing the community of people who purposefully abandoned it years ago.
I disabled my Facebook account over 10 years ago, but by federation with my Mastodon instance mean Meta can claim me as "a Threads connected user" ? Probably - it's technically true.
That sounds like it could be really hard for us to moderate. All those users would be coming from the same domain(s), so we'd have fewer options to protect ourselves from brigading, bots, and bad actors. Our moderation tooling and FOSS infrastructure is still in it's infancy.
I fear it would quickly grow into something "to big to ~fail~ban", as too much of our community's users would inevitably be centralised on Facebook's instance. Our instance, and users not Facebook, could lose a lot of autonomy if they couldn't partake here without realisticly opening their floodgates to every actor behind Thread's domains.
Yea, though I don't know about the implementation details, which is why I meantioned "It seems a little early to completely reject the idea before knowing more about the implementation details."
I don't really know how facebook intends to implement this. If it's an "All or nothing" kind of situation, or if they're are going to separate the instances and groups a bit.
I also don't know about the options for "federating" - if we could do something like a "readonly" mode for specific (facebook) instances. That way this instance would get exposure to facebook, and if people see that the community is interesting they could make an actual account or something.
Of course there's no value if we just get a horde of 12 year old trolls and their grandmas as shitposting users
Read only mode might not be too bad, as long as Facebook is diligent in minimizing their environmental impact. If they cached heavily, like API calls and content delivery, that could avoid crushing local instances with drive-by or viral traffic.
However, I think that would be counter to Facebook's own monetary incentives in bolstering their own user engagement and account retention. This may also impact our instance's own sustainability outlook, as users hosted on this instance have the greatest incentive to donate to keep the lights on. If the majority of users are remote, then that incentive to donate is one step further removed.