I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
You must log in or register to comment.
I think the issue being missed here is that Meta will ultimately aim to suck all users into themselves, and then once they feel they’ve done enough of that, they will go completely closed, even potentially forking the protocol itself. If any legal attempt to stop this is made they will bog it down with hordes of lawyers for decades.
Their goal is not to help fediverse, it is recognising fediverse to be a threat and aiming to absorb it. Literally no different to how reddit slowly absorbed all internet forums into itself, killing the distributed internet.
Fediverse is attempting to bring back that distributed internet and they’re trying to find ways to kill it. All corporations seek monopoly, it’s how capitalism works.
Spot on. Anyone cooperating with them is a fool.
Well on the bright side, at least the fediverse is seen as a genuine threat to current social media. Hopefully it will stay that way.
I’m hoping that ALL admins across the Fediverse will defederate from Meta. At least we get to have our own separate platform then.
They shouldn’t just defederate from Meta, they should defederate from any other instances that federate with Meta. Like a firewall against late stage capitalism
But that is a double-edged sword. What if, for example, mastodon.social doesn’t defederate with Meta, but you defederate mastodon.social? Now you’ve just cut yourself off from a huge portion of the fediverse. Admins should defederate from Meta if their community wants to do that, but defederating from other instances that didn’t do that is going a bit too far, in my opinion.
A small price to pay for salvation from Meta.
I’ve already blocked mastodon.social.
Why?
Because the size of it, the sheer centralization around it, it creeps me out.
Why? If you have blocked meta shouldn’t you already be exempt from seeing comments and posts by their users on other instances? Why is this punitive approach needed
Edit: (Alongside downvoting, an explanation might be better suited to change people’s minds, I just eant to know the advantage of this approach since you are excluding yourself from many users and you would have already blocked meta in this scenario)
If you have blocked meta shouldn’t you already be exempt from seeing comments and posts by their users on other instances?
Yes, at least that’s how it is explained in How the beehaw defederation affects us, Back then, beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
Third instance communities
Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.
- https://beehaw.org/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That’s because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the “true” version, and we get all updates from the “true” version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn’t have the most “true” version of this community.
Translated into the current context:
- beehaw.org = your instance, which defederates from Threads
- lemmy.world = Threads (sorry folks, just to eplain the mechanics)
- lemmy.ml = another instance, which is federated with both, your instance and Threads
Conclusions:
- You wont see posts or commens from Threads users in that remote community. You also won’t see reactions to those activities from anyone, anywhere. It’s as if comment chains started by Threads users don’t exist.
- Threads will not see posts and comments from you, even if done in communities from instances which are federated with Threads.
Or what do you think, @amiuhle@feddit.de?
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !asklemmy@beehaw.org, !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
You’d see comments and posts from their users on other instances that don’t block Meta.
It’s unclear how many users you would actually exclude, I think a lot of users who are on the fediverse right now don’t want to have anything to do with Meta.
As the fediverse grows, there will be different bubbles with not much interaction between those, mainly because some instances won’t be moderated while others will try to create discrimination free environments.
That will just drive many Fedi-users to Meta.
Different instances will make different decisions and users will go to the instances that suit their preferences. That’a how it is supposed to work and the only way it hurts the Fediverse is if we get flooded with threads complaining that other people have different preference, dammit.
I feel like this will just hurt us more then help.
I don’t see why this would hurt us. But even if it did, I would rather take the blow than associate with Big Tech again.
Do you really want the Instagram crowd to interact with us…?
Meta willingly under-moderated across large swaths of east Asia and Africa, leading to unchecked rumors and tangible acts of genocide. Zuckerberg has compared himself to Augustus Caesar.
I think it’s acceptable to cut off a wildfire before it spreads.
Gotta love the fact Meta contributed to how my country got a murderer and the son of a dictator as presidents. Real great and trustworthy company there /s
I’m not asking you to trust them, I’m asking how defederating accomplishes anything? They got more users than the entire fediverse in a single day. We are not hurting them by cutting them off, we are merely making the fediverse seem more like a barren hostile place for a bunch of weirdo nerds.
FB is a known source for targeted misinfo campaigns. If I log into those services right now Im pretty much gaurenteed to have misinfo on my landing page.
why federate with that?
The goal is not to hurt meta, but to keep meta from hurting the rest of the federated sites. Like not inviting a known their to the community barbecue because they are known to have stolen tons of food from other community meals. We aren’t keeping them from creating their own dinner or anything by not federating, just keeping them away from ours.
Except in this analogy, Meta hasn’t stolen food before. They run the largest bbq around, and have bought out previous corporate competitor bbqs, and now they’re hosting a giant bbq one way or another, they’re just suggesting you put a gate in the fence so that people can flow back and forth between the small community bbq and their large corporate one.
Is that going to make you nervous since they have such a cool giant bbq that people are inevitably going to want to go there? Yeah, but again, that’s the case regardless of whether or not the gate goes in.
Shilling for Meta is a bad look.
They steal people’s data and don’t follow data privacy laws. They draw people in with unethical business practices, not fair competition like in your example.
People are not worried about people using Meta outside of the fediverse. In your analogy Meta is already easily accessible through the internet in general and people can feel free to use both without needing a special gate.
Defederating means not interacting with the crowd Meta brings in. I have a bunch of other reasons but that’s my main one. And before you suggest blocking, you can’t possibly expect me to block all 10M of their users and the domain block is bugged. I know because I tried.
Besides, this place doesn’t look like much of a barren wasteland since we’re interacting with a bunch of people right now. I don’t mind interacting with only weirdo nerds if they’re nicer people. Quantity doesn’t mean quality after all.
For the people who want to interact with Threads because of family and friends, they should just make an account there. Just don’t let Meta destroy this small part of the internet.
Lemmy is run by a bunch of tankies and the entire fediverse is under-moderated.
Cutting off a ton of users and content from the fediverse is stupid and everyone in here just keeps coming up with vague generalities because they’re scared of Meta rather than have actually thought through what will happen and be able to articulate any actual harms.
i’ll take those “tankies” over completely unaccountable thiel’s buddies any day. actual tankies seem to be contained to lemmygrad where they don’t bother anyone outside of their instance
“Boo hoo tankies bad, but big corpo run by billionaires who spread misinformation and intentionally act to topple legitimate governments in favor of their fascist agenda are akshually good”
Arguing with people like you (corporate shill) is a waste of time, so I’d rather have fun instead.
The reactions you are seeing are based off of Metas history. We will see how it works out.
People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they’re irrelevant.
We know what Meta’s goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t give them the opportunity to try anything.
We should be scared of Meta, and we should keep them as far away as possible. Anything else is reckless and stupid at best.
People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they’re irrelevant.
No, they didn’t. The harm listed was that Meta will make a shinier platform that will syphon away users, that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation, it’s a harm that’s a result of meta having more money to build a better platform.
We know what Meta’s goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t give them the opportunity to try anything.
There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising. Nothing about that conflicts with the fediverse.
Like I said, this thread is filled with a bunch of people shaking in their boots about the company who must not be named rather than actually providing sober rational assessment of what’s likely to happen.
Yeah, you think they give a shit about the fediverse? They’re using ActivityPub because it’s easier for them. They’re not going to want to EEE us, because there’s not enough of us to matter to them.
It’s not easier for them, and once there’s enough people to matter then it’s too late to kill it. The fediverse is growing, and they want to stop that before the fediverse is big enough to matter.
that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation
Yes, it is. Read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising.
They can do that without integrating with the fediverse. The reason they’re going to integrate with the fediverse is to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Yeah, I’ve read that, and it’s not an example of a corporation killing a decentralized network through federation, it’s just a normal example of a corporation killing a decentralized network by having more money to make a better app.
XMPP did not die because Google used that protocol, it died because people preferred using Google Talk over any of the XMPP apps. That would be the case regardless of whether Google used XMPP or not.
Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.
Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.
The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”
And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.
It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.
And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.
Well said.
Exactly. Facebook is a known bad actor. There is absolutely no reason to believe their intentions are anything but evil. Pretending Threads is just another instance is both naive and dangerous. It is a cancer. If allowed to federate, it will metastacize.
Facebook is not evil, advertising is.
The people at Facebook aren’t sitting there plotting to make the world worse, they’re just sitting there figuring out how to make the numbers go up and since they’re an advertising driven business, that means engagement metrics, which leads to the vast majority of their resultant evil. The advertising / engagement driven business model is what is actually evil and what could actually be addressed by legislators.
Everyone is talking about defederating because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I don’t think that FB even knows that lemmy exist, problem is they are so big they will crush us by accident.
Even back than with XMPP, Google didn’t kill it intentionally. No one expected it will be smaller than before google used it. I remember watching empty list where all friends were. But it happened, and I never thought that Google wanted to kill XMPP.
The content I want to have will never be on a meta server. And even if, I will not federate with them and not use them.
For the exact same reasons I also don’t use Facebook.
You won’t necessarily know if the person you are interacting with at say @guy@buddy.net is being hosted by threads.
We will have block list like with ads, if necessary.
Simple as that, of some instances federate with them I will not use them.
I think meta will dominate the space that federates with it. Hopefully none of my instances will do that… And I will be unaffected.
We have to have to remember microblogging is not the only thing that exists in the fediverse. Having access to threads from lemmy will pretty much have no impact.
Big corpos don’t want to take it over, they want it gone.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Damn, that’s a terrifying vision of the future. I was on the fence with defederating, but we probably should.
Your comment should be top.
Absolutely. We’d have to be nuts to think they’re not trying to take it over and ruin it.
I don’t think XMPP comparison is correct.
First, in my personal (subjective!) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers.
As for Google Talk - it just came and went. Because they never had proper MUCs (multi user conferences, think communities), in my own (again, personal, thus subjective - not objective!) experience it was quite the opposite to how the article paints it. Whoever participated in chatrooms I’ve been in, and had used a Google account, hated Google’s decision and moved to XMPP. I’m no fond of Google, but their impact on XMPP was not strictly negative - they contributed some useful XEPs and useful free software libraries after all. Although, of course, for those who used XMPP primarily as a classic messenger system (like MSN, AIM or ICQ) for private 1:1 chats things surely looked differently.
Now, why I think the comparison is not correct. I think Threads’ situation is different because of fundamental differences in how those systems operate. And not in favor of Threads/Meta. If Threads would be Lemmy or XMPP MUC-like system (that is, having communities/groups hosted on particular servers), then it would be a complicated story, where Fediverse could even theoretically score a net win. But as I get it, Threads is Mastodon/Twitter-like thing, and their users’ content will stay with Meta, entirely at Meta’s discretion whenever they let other systems access it, and when they pull the plug. Given that Meta is also not likely to contribute to FLOSS Fediverse projects, their Fediverse presence is of questionable benefits to say the least.
Fantastic read. Thanks for the link.
Is there a list of instances that have defederated (or announced they will) from Threads?
Thank you!
Luckily, they can’t force federated access to be slow. Once you federate with them, their content is copied to your instance. It’s not necessary for every fediverse user to contact Threads, it’ll just be served from each user’s home instance
That’s a bit naive.
They can introduce latency, or server errors.
But more importantly, they can definitely
Yet
There’s no yet about it. The architecture of how federation works makes it impossible. They can potentially make images load slow, but for the rest of the content it is fundamentally impossible
So far.
I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.
They are selling personalized domains, on ActivityPub every domain looks like a different instance. I don’t know that we have the ability to block every single one of the vanity domains they will probably sell for less than a twitter checkmark.
I think this is a good use case for creating white lists for federation as opposed to black listing the blocked ones and I figured one day it might come to that. We’ll have to put together some registry where new strains nstancea can sign up to be included. I know that sounds antithetical to federation, but there are solutions to the problems threads is creating.
Maybe they want to use Activity Pub so that they can influence further development of it. I don’t know procedure how w3c is makeing decisions and updates to it, but I doubt someone that is not using it can have influence.
It could easily be forked if they start fucking around, but that is a real danger.
Meta or any other corporation with interest in social media sphere (to be read: wanting to make profit on the back of the users) will, sooner or later, kill the fediverse if allowed to enter.
Why?
Simple because the reason for a corporation to exist is to make profit and that profit has to grow each year - so there is all the incentive in the world to milk everything from the user until they can then move on to the next “thing”.
Well if that’s the case, Fediverse was dead on arrival. But that is not the case. If you use a close sourced client and sign up to a server with bad practices, you cannot use that as an example for the whole Fediverse.
Well companies killing descentralised networks it’s not something new. Please see below an example:
I understand that’s possible, however it is not possible for a company to take away users who care about ethics from the fediverse. And only those people matter, as we are not going for profit. Others can join in if they understand the need to join in.
For those who don’t know, the strategy is called Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The phase comes from Microsoft who used this to (try to) crush competing document editors, Java implementations, browsers, and operating systems. Other big tech companies employ similar strategies.
Facebook coming to the Fediverse is the Embrace phase of this process and that makes Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, and Akkoma the competitors.
If I wanted to see content from my racist Trumper uncle, I would just create a Facebook account. Keep Threads far away from the rest of the Fediverse. We don’t need to compete with them. Who cares if they’re way bigger with way more content if 99% of that content is garbage?
if 99% of that content is garbage?
Counterpoint: beans.
Serious note: I think the point of decentralized networks like this is that each instance will have to choose to federate with Threads or any other future corporate social media. If that sounds dangerous, welcome to the freedom of choice baybee! It sucks that the truth is that as long as we want this to be a free space where people can choose what and where they see content, that means some will choose to work with the big-easy-techgiant rather than take a harder approach because 99% of people aren’t that invested.
Could Threads essentially cause a kinda DDOS attack onto other instances or bloating other instances with data?
Other instances would just de-federate in that case. I don’t think this is that much of an issue really because threads would just end up being its own ecosystem with no other instances willing to federate with it.
Can someone with a better understanding of how Federation works confirm or explain why this is wrong? I only learned about this stuff like 4 days ago after leaving Reddit.
They could, but why would they need to? They are so much bigger they work will be done for them without having to do anything
I don’t exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:
Point 1: “Meta will unethically defederate from instances…” I’m assuming that means they’ll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don’t really see the problem with that. This won’t affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn’t have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn’t for meta. Its a win basically since they’ll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.
Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.
removed by mod
Do I think facebook et al will kill “The Fediverse”: Maybe. But that will be because we’ll finally stress test things and find all those issues and determine what is a fundamental flaw versus something updatable. But I would rather use a good product/software than get cranky that one specific protocol/implementation which is demonstrably inferior got pushed out.
This just means that you’re not really here for the stated purpose of fediverse (to create a digital commons) you’re here for an alternative to reddit. You don’t care if it’s centralised and in the hands of one person or not, you’re just mad at what reddit did.
What this misses is that reddit didn’t do what it did just because Spez is a meanie. It did what it did because it’s what EVERY capitalist would have done in the run up to IPO.
What you miss here is that you’re just advocating for exactly the same conditions that caused what you didn’t like. And for some reason you don’t think those conditions would re-create exactly the same outcome in future.
You fail to understand that these outcomes are not the project of individuals with the wrong ideas. They are systemic issues and the entire point of fediverse is to subvert that system and the many problems it creates.
removed by mod
it mostly just boils down to people learning what they do and don’t want over time
Lmao, this “individual responsibility” shit is just you regurgitating Ayn Rand/Thatcherite bollocks. “Oh the corporations became the overseers of everything simply because they made a better product” is such an utterly house-broken and naive mindset. “Ohhh you just need to make a better product and then you’ll magically beat them, wink wink”.
It is extremely rare that I see someone this housebroken.
removed by mod
“Opportunity” lmao. Someone works in tech, and can’t stop themselves using corporate office speak in an anti-corporate conversation. You sound like you’re giving a whiteboard presentation.
i think this is a good read on what they can do https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish you may also be interested in the story of XMPP
From what I’ve heard the big concern is EEE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish?wprov=sfti1
I’m more concerned of them integrating new features and bullying everyone else into following to integrate them or else.
“We have to defederate or else they’ll run incompatible code that won’t let us federate with them”
This seems like a self-solving problem to me, I still don’t understand what the hyperventilation is about.
They won’t do that until after absorbing the users. Much like how Reddit killed off almost all internet forums.
You really think Facebook is gonna poach users from the Fediverse, people who are explicitly here because we don’t want to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc? C’mon. This isn’t a realistic outcome.
Yes of course I do. Almost everyone here is still using corporate social media while also using fediverse, side by side, I wager you’ve looked at something corporate today. Why? Because fediverse does not have everything that they want to consume on a day to day basis.
Creating enclosures where that content exists pulls the users over because they can not get it anywhere else.
Let’s say you cook a meal, fish and potatoes. You get your fish from the river (publicly available) but the potatoes are only being grown on the corporate land. You are forced to get it from there, so you begrudgingly do because you want your full meal obviously.
Later on they find a way to enclose some of the fish too, and eventually all of it, removing it from the public space. The fediverse still exists, but it’s a shell without anything you want on it. You begrudginingly go to the corporation’s space for it.
People want their content, and enclosing on public commons by walling off that content is easy to do bit by bit, like thinly slicing a salami until it’s all gone. People will even defend against it and pretend that it’s not going to happen, like right now.
Later on they find a way to enclose some of the fish too, and eventually all of it, removing it from the public space. The fediverse still exists, but it’s a shell without anything you want on it.
This analogy doesn’t make sense. How are they gonna take what we already have and enclose it away from us? We run the servers, not them.
If they close it off again, we go back to how things are now. Which we’re all clearly fine with, because we’re already here. Are they gonna hypnotize us on the way out and lead us pied piper style?
We run the servers, not them.
So did internet forums. Where are they these days? Oh, they all became subreddits as users moved away to the convenience of reddit.
They will find a way to drown everything through big-data analysis if you give them even the slightest bit of leeway. They must be treated as a completely hostile bad-actor because that is precisely what they are.
So did internet forums. Where are they these days? Oh, they all became subreddits as users moved away to the convenience of reddit.
Moving from isolated forums to an aggregate community is a huge quality of life change. We’re talking about them convincing people who are already on the Fediverse to move to their Fediverse server, which is a side grade, offered to people who almost all hate Facebook already. There’s no hook there, and nobody has given me an even slightly plausible pathway that’ll convince anybody to move over. There’s just vague gesturing and unspoken implications.
Nobody here wants to use their server. We all know how bad they are. We’re here because of them. But suddenly a nonspecific siren call is gonna move us all over? It just doesn’t make sense. I can think of plausible ways we can gain users from this. I can’t find any plausible way to lose users or cause damage to the Fediverse that doesn’t involve mind control.
Facebook and Instagram killed off the forums I used. I was highly involved with a niche art independent website forum which was pretty well known to people within the community, and then right around the time average people really started using the internet, Facebook boomed and then Instagram. Using those got huge within the community. The corresponding sub on reddit has never amounted to much at all.
Sorry to hear that. Art and photography definitely had a stronger time on platforms like insta, tumblr, and twitter, where the artists felt they were more directly benefitting and growing their presence and audience. It was more so the discussion-based forums that reddit killed.
Not sure how you’d go about building Lemmy in a way that appeals to them. Perhaps if profiles could be posted to and profiles functioned like communities that could be subscribed to, then users could subscribe directly to artists reddit sort of half-heartedly did this but never really made it very visible that you could directly follow a user and never promoted that content via the “follow” feature. Something like that could be done for Lemmy. A feed of your direct user/author subscriptions. This could however create a power-user problem.
Facebook replaced the discussion part because the average artist wasn’t nerdy/computery enough to use reddit, which was more obscure at the time (around 2011-2013). It’s still obscure compared to FB/IG even now. Then after IG started becoming popular, people hopped there because that’s what the customers were using, and at the same time the industry was flourishing.
It was also frustrating, having been involved in ecommerce website and stats development, to see people using Instagram as an auction site… the most feature-free platform to sell your work. Granted, it’s because our work (primarily glass pipes) wasn’t welcome on eBay, and eBay is overcomplicated and expensive, and Etsy allowed it but is sort of lame… but still, silly to see people have auctions in a chain of instagram comments, and then suffer all these various problems that ecommerce platforms were designed to overcome. Reserve price, reputation, record of bids, backup bids, requirement payment and follow-through. People would be “I sold and the buyer didn’t pay!” or “I bought equipment and they shipped me a brick!” and it’s like no kidding, that’s the reason ebay exists and you’re doing transactions in instagram comments.
So yeah, what you’re suggesting is basically for people to use Lemmy as a personal blog or website. I think that’s a good idea. Sort of something like tumblr. Many people are getting sick of not having an identity, not having a true connection to their customers, getting suddenly cut off from years of followers when a site decides to ban them and being lost on huge generic platforms that cover everything. There’s a bit of a movement towards personal websites. The best way to do that, though, is still to have your own website - I can picture that some people will have problems with instance admins who are just as arbitrary and unaccountable as large corp social media, maybe even more. So the best thing for an artist to do would be to run lemmy or pixelfed on their own domain and server, and federate. Then people from the lemmifediverse can follow and comment, whether they’re on your instance or not, and you could also add sales software, and you can’t be cut off short of losing your domain.
Technically you could hack this together in a certain way with the existing software. An artist buys a domain, hosting, puts up their own Lemmy instances but does not allow registration on it. They put up a single community on that server and make themselves the sole poster on it. They post their art and content, other people on the federation with accounts from elsewhere subscribe to that comm and comment/interact with works.
This is of course not a very clear out-of-the-box way to use Lemmy. And it has the problem of seeking out subscribers. It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to find subscribers and fans by crossposting to art communities on other lemmy sites though. Further customisation and personalisation of that site requires css and html knowledge too to edit and change the front end.
Really for all of this to be viable for that kind of audience it needs to be provided as a simple 1 purchase install and setup for that target group. Then they also need fairly advanced understanding of fediverse combined with knowledge of reddit where subreddit crossposting for growth is very powerful in order to get the growth they’d like.
And even then, it’s not gonna be what Twitter is to them. They will end up spending most of their time on Twitter because that’s where they get the dollars. This setup would be entirely in their own control though, and free of anyone else’s rules on what they can post in their own instance.
Yeah, Lemmy is already perfectly appropriate for that. It would just take an easy way to install it, the way that many hosts will install WordPress or other CMS packages automatically, and an easy theming system. I’m not really a WordPress fan (though I haven’t had to customize it in 12 years), but perhaps more realistically, Automattic is working on an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. I’m not really sure how that will work but it would accomplish the same thing.
I feel like it’d be the other way around honestly. Maybe I’m just shilling but right now the app is literally barebones as shit and it looks and feels like it was made in a week.
Or else what? I guess they can’t do much?
“Join our fed or this code in the post body will not work for you”
I don’t care about their code in the post body. If there’s a possibility I just block the whole instance. Don’t want to see anything from them.
You missed the point. Let me rephrase.
They coule add features that makes their instance/own client add things to posts, that don’t work in other clients/instances properly.
This in effect could get some users who just don’t care about avoiding meta, and also FOMO type of users, to switch.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t care, but it’s bad for Lemmy.
I don’t really see how this is bad for Lemmy. Let me rephrase what I said as well:
Let them add those features. People who use metas instance wouldn’t have come to Lemmy in the first place. The users who “just don’t care avoiding meta” aren’t on here now (maybe there’s a miniscule amount that’s how I see it). They will come when this threads thing properly rolls out. In my opinion Lemmy won’t significantly change when this happens since people who wanted to stay on reddit did and those who are here now are trying out the better Boss way of living and probably won’t switch to meta as soon as it comes out. Therefore this won’t cause any trouble. Just block the meta instance “out of sight out of mind”.
Imagine hanging out with a group of friends and someone from outside starts harassing you and that person really doesn’t like you. Are you going to start hanging out with them? Obviously not. Just chill with your friends and don’t mind them. Nothing about your friends is going to change.
I doubt that someone who got used to the free libre FOSS style of life and really enjoys it would switch to meta. No clue what meta would have to offer to them to switch. I think its easier to switch in the other direction.
