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Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

The idea that they will destroy it by just... Being a bigger instance? Because they can influence development? Isn't this shit developed by a tanky? A self-proclaimed stalinist? Why the hell would they capitulate to a megacorp? I'm more worried about the actual developers ruining this shit than Meta and Threads.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Even if you aren’t against federating with threads on principle part of the challenge is going to be able to keep up with moderating their entire user base en-masse and being able to afford the cost of federating content from so many users at once.

    It’s a burden I doubt a lot of smaller instances can handle.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    You make a very good point there. That's probably the best reasoning to be against federating with them I've seen. It also brings up duplication of content. If they have so many users, would it be possible that a smaller instance getting content from them could literally fill up all their storage space, assuming it's not a gigantic data center but something self-hosted? Text may not be problematic, but images from Instagram can be massive. I suppose if your instance was that small you'd already be picking and choosing what to federate with, though.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I mostly agree. The one thing I will say in favour of defederation is hate content. Meta has incredibly lax moderation. People can literally say "this person deserves to be killed", or even "I would absolutely murder this person if I came across them" and Meta will be like "yeah we understand this may be disappointing to you, but we're gonna allow that to stay" if you report it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I saw that here, too. Thought about reporting when I saw the sidebar didn't even have a rule against it (forgot which community though - my app doesn't present that in an obvious way)

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    There's definitely users who will do that here. There are on any platform open to sign-ups by the general public. But my experience has been that it's very likely to get removed if mods or admins are made aware. I don't think I've ever gotten a positive response on Meta.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    they could develop new features but intentionally implement them in a way that they are not compatible with other services. they could put all the other instances they federate with on rolling blackouts so that it seems like they are down when in fact it's just them cutting the connection. doing just these two things with purpose could make it look like Facebook has the most advanced and stable instance. in addition, as you mentioned, it would also have the biggest populace. there would be pressure to abandon other instances to join that instance to stay in touch.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The people making the most noise about it don't seem like they're pressured one bit. Also, walling it off through defederation won't stop any of what you propose may happen, anyway.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Why would that happen anyway? A lot of people already came here from bigger sites, like reddit for example. If we don't federate, then why would people who are already here be pushed by something that isn't there?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago
    1. yes, by being a massively bigger instance their algorithm will have a huge impact on the feed algorithms on the fediverse side. If they show a post in their algorithm in threads, it will get massively more engagement due to just being shown to a larger user base

    The only "solution" is granular federation - the fediverse side could treat them differently, say by having their posts and comments count less when building a feed... But that's easier said than done. Do they build a "threads ranking" feature into the core, or do they they give admins the tools to build specific configurations for federation?

    It's definitely not present in Lemmy, and I don't believe Mastodon has it either. And on that topic...

    1. they have granular control over their own federation. They're a monolith where the fediverse isn't - if they want to sprinkle in fediverse content, it's much easier for them. If they want to publish only their most controversial content to the fediverse, they can. They can do it at any time telling no one

    For example, there was a post claiming they're blocking toots referencing pixel fed. I don't know if it's true or not, but they easily could. And in doing so, they effectively derank those posts in the fediverse (see point 1)

    1. they could EEE conventionally, by extending the activity pub standard to serve their needs, or by making the fediverse reliant on their content then pulling away

    There's a lot of ways they can leverage their size as a weapon. They're not another instance, they're a private monolith running their own code... And they have a terrible track record

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