Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
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I dunno. I just stumbled on a movement to push instance owners to defederate any instance that doesn’t defederate Threads.
This seems very much in the vein of dictatorialism / authoritarianism. It’s honestly just gross. This whole “you’re either with us or against us” tribalism is what has made social media so awful these last several years.
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I have no problem with people making educated decisions or ask for change based on facts. Fully agree about quality over quantity as well. My issue is FUD, having no idea what you’re talking about and still trying to convince everyone of that is harmful. When people working day and night on these protocols say there are no privacy concerns and no one can show you ads etc. and yet someone with literally zero understanding of the matter claims otherwise.
Defederation is a feature, not a weakness.
True! Defederation is great sometimes, if you have a niche community and there is some other instance directly opposing your values or if content there is illegal in your jurisdiction etc.
Nagging about every single instance with a few bad actors on the other hand is problematic in my opinion
Nagging about every single instance with a few bad actors…
Yup. Tells the admins to do their jobs and get rid of bad actors.
Too many of y’all are perfectly fine with hate seeping in through the seams. It needs to be stamped out like a smoldering ember before it grows to an uncontrollable wildfire. They aren’t here to engage in constructive conversations. They want to do two things: spread their bullshit, and recruit edgy teenagers. Neither of these things can happen when admins do their duty and smite the hate. And if a federation isn’t doing their duty, cut em off. They can come back when they straighten their shit out.
Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.
I’m not new to this, though usually not very active poster. so yes I have not experienced much harassment tbh.
Copying this from another comment I made. Defederating would pretty much cut off a lot of potential new users that want to see posts on Threads while also not wanting to have a Meta account and all the issues that come with it. People here need to realize that they are in an echo chamber. Mastodon and Lemmy needs users and content. Cutting a big portion of that would kill it in the long run. There would be nothing to “extinguish” in the first place in their complaints of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I had a minor debate here re: Usenet, where OP said we basically had an “easy to use” internet 30+ years ago, and AOL won by blanketing people with CDs.
I’m a techie who first got online with a 2400baud modem and I am fully aware that nothing I do can be extrapolated to the general population. Now that I work in the field, designing for “normies” is how and why services grow. The winners are the most usable services, not the most ideologically righteous ones.
(Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term, users of lemmy and mastodon are not special or smart…in this moment in time we’re primarily idealists with strong opinions on centralized tech that most people couldn’t care less about lol)
Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term
I just think it acknowledges that we’re abnormal in how we’re approaching all of this.
Exactly, I have a lot of normie friends that use threads, I don’t want to use it but would love to interact with them. Best of both worlds
If an instance you’re in defederates, just start your own. Why complain about what people want to do in their instances? Just find another one.
Yes, that’s exactly how you sound.
But I literally said the opposite!
Defederating “from this and that” is actually sometimes problematic here. It’s about instance admins finding balance between freedom and usability (limiting spam and hate). Beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world defederated from exploding-heads.com etc. These decisions were controversial, but they weren’t bold. On the contrary, much thought and care went into these and that can be seen in communities’ support for them (in case of Beehaw, along with hopeful awaiting of refederation by users and admins alike).
But that seems not to be the main issue you’re presenting. Defederating from Threads specifically is an entirely different matter. And people who advocate for it, including myself, have more arguments for it than just privacy.
Though it's not the main point of my comment, I'm gonna list some such arguments, simply to back my words.
- The EEE. Meta could (and quite probably will) try to federate with its millions of users, then use extended protocols putting pressure on Fediverse to adapt, in order to satisfy Meta’s users. They can make it difficult to keep up (e.g. by providing purposely flawed documentation) and the users will grow tired of stuff not working here but working there. Once users register with Meta (since it’s a part of the Fediverse after all, right?), they’ll cut the rest of us loose.
- Badly moderated content. Facebook is already full of it.
- Meta has a history of terrible actions and should not be supported.
Thanks for this great comment! Yes, I totally agree with your arguments and personally hate meta. My problem is posts like this and misinformation about underlying tech (like privacy and ads). Meta will do anything to be the sole winner, but as I’ve pointed here it’s a dilemma and defederating can actually encourage more users to stop using Fediverse to begin with!
We have a unique opportunity. Hitching ourselves to the same corporate social media we’re trying to avoid is counterproductive.
We don’t need everyone and their cousin to be federated. There’s plenty of other social media if you want that experience.
Part of being free and accessible for everyone is allowing defederation.
This might be what finally drives me to roll my own instance of Mastodon, and potentially Lemmy. I just worry that it’ll pummel my internet bandwidth and/or limited server capacity.
All of this yearning for drama and tribalism is exhausting… I thought I escaped it by leaving Twitter/Reddit, but it’s just bubbling its way back to the surface.
Exactly. Some people are just looking for drama
Glad you said this. People demanding large instances like this one defederate from stuff they don’t personally like are, frankly, very mislead and trying to be little dictators. That’s not their decision to make.
