Yes I see it your way too, federating with Meta can be the gateway drug to bring normmies into our world. I guess I was just looking at it pessimistically.
I think I saw somewhere else in this thread a link to the instances that are already defederatting, and some were listed as blocking deletions and other halfway steps so I think what you’re suggesting is possible.
100% agree that by using treads directly/installing their app, they get way more data. I would actively discourage people from using it. But all the normmies that are on Facebook Instagram anyway are gonna continue t do what they do. What I’m tryin to say here is that they get the same info on me as a Lemmy/Mastadon user by scraping the public lemm.ee site as they could by federating with us. I’m not giving up any privacy by being on a federated instance. But perhaps I’m wrong here if anyone has a technical explanation.
I also agree with what your saying about manifest v3, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Let’s say 10 years from now Threads and the Open Source Fediverse (plus let Google and the other tech giants get their platforms all up in the mix) are all happily working together. Then Meta Google etc collaborate to change ActivityPub the way Google is changing Manifest v3. The Open Source fediverse continues on without implementing the new bad “features.” We become incompatible with them. We’re back to where we are now. We’re back in a small corner of the internet that doesn’t work with the broader corporate sponsored internet. The potential downside I see here would be if by letting Meta and the like play in our swimming pool, normmies have less incentive to move over to a Mastadon or Lemmy instance and we end up with a smaller pool when everything is said and done.
As someone who deleted Facebook in 2012 and has zero intention of going back to any of Meta’s products… I don’t see a need to defederate and would prefer not to.
Hear me out… maybe i just am still figuring this whole fediverse thing out but I don’t see how it can be bad.
If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts. Like I still have trouble finding/following content across federated instances, basically going there, getting the name of a community, coming back here, and plugging it in.
Any data they could mine about me they could get anyway since it’s either publicly available or not. They could just stave the fediverse under some other domain/IP that doesn’t even need to federate.
In the event they try to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, they would just change the activity pub protocol in some way, at which point we would have two competing standards. Open source ActivityPub, as used by Mastadon, Lemmy, and the like… and Meta’s ActivityPub… if we don’t use theirs their extended (bad) version of the protocol, they essentially fork and we don’t get to see their content. So we’re just going to defederate now so they don’t have that carrot to dangle over us? Why not just know if they starts fundamentally changing the protocol we just let them break themselves back off from us? We don’t lose anything we aren’t giving up already by defederating.
The ONLY thing that fundamentally changes for me is I don’t get to follow any Threads accounts from the relative safety of the fediverse. At which point I probably have to bite the bullet and spin up my own dedicated instance so I can chose to not defederate. All that said I’m more concerned about this on the Mastadon side of things, as like you said it probably wouldn’t even integrate well with the Reddit style fediverse.
Thanks for the clarification. I think my though process would still hold true on the mastodon side of things but this is Lemmy and I didn’t think that through fully.
So even if I only view my subscribed communities on non-threads instances, Meta could be using their algorithm to show/suppress posts from our side and artificially boost the upvote count to put them at the top of our pages…
I’m still in the “wait and see” camp as they probably won’t integrate as much with Lemmy 🤷♂️