this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Why are fediverse admins blocking out threads? (reddthat.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I get meta evil, but aren’t we just blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Threads will immediately be the largest community in the fediverse when they join

As in several times bigger than everyone else combined. Most content and users will be from threads. this has consequences:

  1. while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
  2. users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
  3. whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
  4. existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.

Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it's own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.

Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it's communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.

Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.

I do still think this is a good thing, but it's a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren't starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that’s the situation currently anyway.

They are still the largest fediverse platform.

Like to your points

  1. Sure, but now those people just won’t join the fediverse
  2. How do you figure? What persona of user is there that would have joined an independent instance but join threads instead? The fediverse itself has no draw, besides being more independent.
  3. And that’s different than now, how? Every fediverse platform is essentially implementing features that large social media giants have had for years.
  4. This is true, but what’s the problem with that? Most fediverse users were accustomed to large amounts of content from other platforms and left (or at least also use the fediverse) the only downside would be giving meta more data, but they can just scrape that same data from the fediverse anyway. All they need to do is quietly set up a private instance and set a bot account on that instance to follow everything from every instance it could find.

Someone in another thread mentioned that they would likely display ads near content from independent instances, and that’s a good point imo. They’d be directly making a profit off of private instances, which would be fucked up.

I hear a lot of talk of EEE too, which is a legitimate worry also. there must be a way to accept the first 2 Es without the extinguish. I’m hoping the admin community is thinking about that more than “meta evil” when defederating threads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What I am describing is how EEE would apply in this context. Decenterlized spaces can be undermined by corperate power becoming the supermajority, subsuming the spaces valuable users and content, and then walling themselves off causing people to abandon the original project as their social graph has once again become held hostage to the users the super instance has. We already see this here with Beehave de-federating from Lemmy.World. Lemmy.World holds most of the content, so losing access to that harms the smaller instance tremendously more than the largest instance, because they've become reliant on that content. Arguing that Meta is not a threat to the fedeverse for this reason is suggesting that decentralization isn't necesary, because they are 30 times larger than the entirety of mastodon combined. It will be centralization on a whole nother scale to anything we've seen so far here. And this is literally how EEE works to undermine decenterlized networks strengths, which rests in not having all the power held in one instances hands.

Your counterpoints make just as much sense in the other EEE spaces. Why didn't they just keep doing what they were doing after google walled them off? Why did they largely abandon the decenterlized space and follow the supermajority that held all the users they grew accustomed to interacting with?

The reality is that this is what happened. I can't really debate with you about this because it's not just prediction, this has an existing history of happening. I hope you're right, but the record so far does not agree with you.

Luckily, we’ll find out not too long from now. Hope you’re right.