Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
If we could ensure 100% compliance with a meta-blockade then I’d be for it.
However, that isn’t going to happen and any instances that do federate with Meta will be the part of the Fediverse that exists to billions of people. Those instances will become the dominate instances on the Fediverse for people who want to get away from Meta but still access the Fediverse services. Lemmy, as it stands now, is only a few million people at most. We simply do not have the weight to throw around on this issue.
It is inevitable that commercial interests join the Fediverse and the conversation should be around how we deal with that inevitability rather than attempting to use de-federation as a tool to ‘fix’ every issue.
Agreed, defederation seems to currently be used for any instance that doesn’t follow the allowed values that all instances must have. This is absurd and directly counter to the whole point of the fediverse in the first place. It’s supposed to be linked to everything, and every instance can have wildly different rules and styles. At the end of the day all that should be largely transparent to a user who can sub to anything across the fediverse with a single account.
Defederation needs to be reserved for actively harmful instances, which isn’t just memes you don’t like or hosted by a “big” company.
Big companies are actively harmful. Just read the example of xmpp and Google that is posted everywhere.