We kindly ask everyone to engage in civil discourse and remember that not everyone will share the same opinions, which is perfectly acceptable.

It’s really actually not acceptable to ignore what a bad actor Facebook/Meta has been. Catch up on the news if you need to. Cambridge Analytica scandal, unwitting social experiments, and the insane amount of intrusive permissions required just to use threads etc. They’ve been anti-consumer in an almost dystopian way and failing to call that out is an immoral stance. There’s really no polite way to say, “that’s a hell no, fix your attitude, or I’m out.” That people have characterized folks telling you this is a deal-breaker as “blackmail” is the absurd stance here. We’re asking you to stay true to the anti-corporate “power to the people” spirit that created Lemmy in the first place and call out Meta for being an obviously bad actor in this space, as a bunch of Reddit refugees… You actually arguing against this and acting like “both sides are fine” about it is being completely tone-deaf and is 100% antithetical to the purpose of the fediverse.

“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” You’ve already committed to doing nothing during an important time with a “wait and see” attitude. Meta is still a face-eating leopard, a frog-stinging scorpion, or whatever analogy does it for ya. It’s not a tough choice and there IS a right and wrong answer.

An address to @Ruud and the lemmy.world team:

I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you’ve done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines our community’s sentiment and reservations.

I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the “wait and see” approach.

What’s to say Threads won’t follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?

If I go to a friend’s house and their child spits in my face every time, I don’t want to go to my friend’s house. I tell them this. The friend says, “Well this time just might be different, let’s just wait and see!” Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.

Why should I believe this kid won’t spit in my face all of a sudden, when they’ve taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein.

Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users’ well-being. There’s no reason to wait and see. It’s not logical to believe this time will be different.

Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.

Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta’s practices as a company.

This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads… That alone should tell you there’s no reason to “wait and see.” Just look right now. They haven’t changed…

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government…

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?

I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.

However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.

Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.

While I typically subscribe strongly to a stance of “Innocent until proven guilty,” in the case of Facebook, that doesn’t seem prudent. I would much prefer to stand back and watch, for a long time, how they behave in the community before opening the door to federation with them. If they conduct and moderate their users well and show no signs of EEE, it may be worth considering connection to Threads in a few years’ time. Until then, I would very much prefer to hold them much further away than arms’ length.

Was this considered? https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Google essentially destroyed Jabber this way.

I was there and Jabber at the time also looked promising and Google adding its GTalk was the push everyone thought Jabber needed and everyone was welcoming it.

Meta will join Fediverse only if it will be still a threat to them, once users will switch to it (let’s be honest, majority of users on Fediverse aren’t purists, and if metra will have some unique features they will switch) they will defederate and Fediverse will lose meta users as well as old users. Just exactly as it happened with Jabber. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - We don’t think they can. If anyone can explain how they technically would, please let us know. Even if Meta forks Lemmy and gets rid of the original software, Lemmy will survive.

It doesn’t start out with maliciousness. The rank and file technical staff at Facebook aren’t evil. Facebook understands the value of top tier tech talent and top dollar buys you smart people.

The initial federation is rough, but the problems are resolved surprisingly quick. None of the doom and gloom comes to pass, and Facebook consistently acts as a trustworthy actor. Their employees aren’t really different than their open source counterparts. They make good faith contributions to open source codebases. Their collective experience with distributed systems proves useful in solving growing pains as the Federation grows.

They eventually start to make proposals to ActivityPub. There’s outrage but no one can come up with good technical objections, so they are approved. The doom and gloom didn’t come to pass, and looks like it never will.

Facebook doesn’t need malicious intent for what’s going down. It slowly, maybe quickly, becomes the dominate actor in the space. Facebook is pouring money into making Threads the best it can be, and what’s wrong with them trying to build an audience?

Thread’s improvements set an increasingly high standard for what people expect. More uptime, cleaner UI, more responsive API calls, more personalized frontpage algorithms, higher resolution videos - more and more features. More and more cost. Even people who kneejerk reject Facebook recognize how much better their site is. There are still important reasons to go with Lemmy or Kbin over Threads, but FOSS projects have never been good at making their case in ways random-not-technical people can understand, let alone why they should care about them.

After a while, Facebook starts walling people into their platform. Starts with little things like how Reddit added video and picture hosting to replace Imgur et al. It’s not malicious, but rather from TPMs who are under pressure to increase engagement. After a while what else is there? Just don’t turn the heat up too many degrees at once.

It’s wrong to think of Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. This isn’t 90s/2000s Microsoft with blatantly transparent EEE aims. There have always been bad actors. There will always be bad actors. There are bad actors with us right now.

Facebook needs to make money, and they won’t do so by directly charging users. There’s only one path forward for Facebook in this, and it will come at the expense of its users and everyone else in the Fediverse.

Build something useful, then put up walls around it, and then exploit it for profit; the internet’s monomyth. You don’t have to read the writing on the wall, but it is there. Federating with Threads is signing your own death warrant.

If the Fediverse experiment is going to survive, it needs to be able to withstand these bad actors. One of the ways it can do so is to recognize and reject them. Facebook has so many resources and so much power and we don’t have to run the experiment to know where this will go. It is important to explicitly say “your goals do not align with what we are trying to build, and therefore we will not voluntarily interact with you.”

@[email protected]

If Lemmy.world federates with Meta/Threads, I will delete my accounts and ditch Lemmy altogether.

It’s shameful that this is even up for discussion.

What an embarrassment.

Thanks for commenting on the issue, I appreciate the communication and it seems the community feels the same.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] can you let us know if you or any admins of lemmy.world took a meeting with meta or representatives of meta?

@[email protected] runs the 6th largest mastodon instance, and fosstodon instance admins (a smaller mastodon instance), were invited to an “off the record” meeting with Meta. The fosstodon admin, Kev, declined the meeting and notified their community about the correspondence going as far as to share screenshots.

In the correspondence, the meta rep said they were reaching out to mastodon admins, so if fosstodon got an invite, logic would figure they’d invite the admin(s) of a larger instance whom also happen to admin the largest lemmy instance in the world (lemmy.world)

I would love if the same level of transparency could occur here on lemmy.world

Were you folks invited, did you take it? I would really appreciate knowing if the people who run this instance have any relationships, formal or otherwise, with meta. A lot of lemmy users are here on the fediverse to escape the reach of companies like Meta when it comes to their social media.

Obviously no one is obligated to defederate from meta/threads when the time comes. But I would like to be informed.

I think it’s important to know. I personally would like to know, I would like to make informed decisions on which instance is my home on lemmy - but without all of the info, our decisions aren’t fully informed, so I have low confidence making any decision at this point.

Finally, I’ve posed similar questions before and have been accused by other users of wanting to attack lemmy admins if they did take a meeting, or for any reason at all. That could not be further from the truth. Online harassment is harassment, and is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don’t wish any harm or ill towards anyone, including those who have different values or opinions than mine. Finally, I’ve always been cordial in my submissions on lemmy, I don’t know what would make anyone think I’d start behaving differently now.

I think these questions are important, and I intend to continue asking them until we have an answer, so that I can make a decision with confidence that I had sufficient information to do so.

I hope that seems as reasonable as I feel it is, though I could be wrong, please feel free to respond with your thoughts. I appreciate the discourse.

Thanks yall.

It’s so bizarre to see people complaining about “kneejerk” reactions as if it’s the user’s fault and not Meta’s.

Have you people just forgotten everything about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook?

You’re goddamn right the reactions are kneejerk, that’s the point.

After over a decade of abuse, controversy, and horrendous practices that have defaced the very idea of social media and caused actual, real damage throughout the world, people have rightfully identified Meta as a monster.

And when a monster is coming for you, the kneejerk reaction is turn around and run.

It’s very telling that all the arguments for allowing them in are basically “well, we can survive it”. Like, everyone seems to be on the same page, here: Meta is terrible and wants to monopolize everything. Yet rather than the sensible thing and just get away from them, people are arguing we should fuck around and find out?

While supporting people’s neutrality in moderation team, I gotta say that the best way to settle this would be giving users the choice of their own. Most people here are the ones who came from oppressed platforms that silence their users and they wanted to have a choice.

It could be solved like how lemm.ee did this, by giving poll to their users.

Federating threads would again make some of people to do the same mistake. It will be easy for them to fall in, for convenient posting and reach to Fediverse, most of them wouln’t even know how this works, they would only tap the screen and accept that it just WORKS.

Instead we shouldn’t give even a possibility for convenience to them, they should search for the REAL freedom platforms and know their existence.

People will come here sooner or later, but we shouldn’t give them opportunity to not to.

disappointing those who desire interaction with Threads

Maybe those rare few (deranged) people should just go create a Threads account? This is a very unconvincing attempt at appearing “objective”.

Ribbit

Please don’t give Meta even an inch.

They wouldn’t be stepping into the Frediverse if they didn’t have a plan to either monetize the user base or destroy their competition.

Don’t let them take a pound and then some.

Thanks for posting your thoughts; they seem completely reasonable to me. However, my personal choice if the decision was in my hands would be to take the same wait-and-see approach, but with the default switched: I would start defederating with Threads until we see how it seems to go with instances who don’t.

If there was a guy standing in my driveway who I didn’t know, I’d probably keep an eye on him a bit, but wouldn’t worry much unless he started doing something threatening. But if the guy was the same one who beat the family next door to death, I’m calling the cops and making sure the doors are locked. Meta gets no benefit of a doubt me; we don’t need their interaction and it’s hard to believe much good can come from it.

I don’t fault you for your opinion though; it’s a grey area and I’m at a different spot than you in it.

Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I’m of the opinion that it’s better to defederate, mainly for the reasons your post already covers, but I’d stress the quality of content is/will be Lemmy’s biggest asset. I think many users (myself included) are on Lemmy to get away from the existing social media experience. Lemmy/fediverse is refreshing because it isn’t governed by a mandate to grow quarterly profits at its users’ expense; it feels like the internet in the late 90s and early 00s where people made content because it interested them rather than trying to garner views or promoting the most polarizing/inciting content (or even just downright trolling). I hope the admins can see what the risks are and take proactive steps in the interest of the community.

I appreciate the thoughtful response and agree - no need for a knee jerk reaction when there is still some time until a decision needs to be made, and there are still quite a few unanswered questions.

As long as you maintain this level of transparency I trust that you make the right decision for lemmy.world.

As usual, thank you!