I'm skeptical of their intentions. If we do federate I think we should be ready to defederate if the need arises. I also think Lemmy servers should try to come together and agree what the "need to defederate" from them would look like so everyone can defederate together. It is likely some servers will defederate from the start and that's fine, I'm not totally convinced that's not the best course personally, my mind isn't fully made yet.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Defederate, or fediverse will be a niche satellite of Meta and not its own thing.
No please not!
As least I would request to judge Meta by the same standards by we judge other instances.
Just blocking Threads because it is run by Meta will hurt the federation spirit quite hard in the long term. I don't think open source software would have been where it is now if it's use would have been excluded for commercial work. Same I see with Fendiverse.
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.
If meta connects with Lemmy, that’s an influx of a potential 3.74 billion people…
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.
That sounds like it could be really hard for us to moderate. All those users would be coming from the same domain(s)
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
if we could do something like a “readonly” mode for specific (facebook) instances.
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.
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What user data is visible by and admin on a federated server?
Your instance's admin has everything.
Defederate!
Yes.
Their user base is both the problem and the value they provide. The problem can be mitigated if they don't join as just one massive instance. They need to be federated within themselves as well.