Meta has launched a twitter alternative called “Threads”. The application allows Instagram accounts and followers to be migrated directly. From what I can find, there are already over 90 million users using threads.[1] It is Meta’s plan to allow Threads to interact via ActivityPub with other platforms in the fediverse.
Mander has a generally open federation policy. I don’t want to prevent users from accessing specific content through the fediverse purely on ideological grounds, nor do I want to block our information from being accessed. There is a very strong argument to be made to remain federated with Threads in the spirit of having an open and accessible network.
But, after seeing the rushed, non-transparent, and non-EU compliant way that Threads is being deployed, it is obviously not wise to remain federated during the deployment phase. I would be willing to re-federate once it is proven that we can federate with them safely, it is demonstrated that a good amount of value to the users is added by doing so, and that at least a portion of the users is interested in doing so.
Reasons to defederate:
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The fediverse already lives in a legal gray zone in many respects. Threads was not released into the EU due to regulatory concerns.[2] My server is based in the Netherlands. It appears like no one is sure about what the legal implications are, but I consider federating interactions with Threads to present a new liability with a larger amount of risk. The added risk is related to the fact that Meta is often being looked at by regulators, and instances could be pulled into a Meta-related investigation. A hypothetical example - and I don’t know if this is accurate or not - federated comments from EU users that end up saved in Meta’s servers could be construed as a GDPR violation due to the transfer of EU user data. These are risks that are already present in the fediverse, but interacting with Meta may increase the likelyhood of being pulled into a Meta-related legal problem.
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Threads is being released in a very hurried manner to capitalize on the unpopularity of Twitter at the moment. They are deploying these tools at random times without first informing the world about how they work. As far as I can tell, they have told us nothing about how they will actually use ActivityPub. All that we know is that suddenly hundreds of millions of people will be able to take actions that in some way interact with our servers. A likely scenario is that this will be similar to mastodon, their users will be able to make comments to a Lemmy server, and this won’t cause a problem. But they may choose to do something differently, or they can make a mistake in their implementation. A mistake at the scale of hundreds of millions of users would easily deal catastrophic damage to a small instance.
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The developers of Lemmy have strongly encouraged instance admins to defederate with threads. They develop this platform and know it much better than I do. I respect them and trust their judgement, so a strong encouragement coming from them is something that I take very seriously.
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Most users who have commented on this topic here and in other instances want to defederate. While I do prefer to take a stance in favor of a more open federation policy, I do think that the case of a giant corporate entity deploying a potentially destructive platform into the fediverse is a special case.
Generally I prefer to assume good faith and only defederate as a last resort in response to a practical problem. In this case, we are dealing with a commercial for-profit entity that has a strong record of not acting in good faith. The massive scale of this thing is such that we could lose the luxury of being able to easily respond to a sudden practical problem.
I don’t love Meta, and they are most likely not joining the space because they are passionate about helping us create privacy-centric decentralized social networks in which profit and growth are not the motives. But this is an opinion. In the future, if users actually want that, I am committed to re-assessing and potentially re-federating once the dust settles. But I can’t justify taking this level of risk at this time.
If no one asks for it, I wouldn’t actively try to re-federate.
I agree with your reasoning and I’m glad you’re doing this. I’m also worried it’s an EEE strategy on the part of Meta.
I’m happy you agree.
Personally I don’t find the ‘EEE’ strategy to be so scary because the ‘extend’ step of this process takes time and requires the active collaboration from the developers. Forking is also a potential solution down the line. It would be possible to defeat this strategy without defederating at all, and I don’t think that defederation does much to stop it other than shining light on the issue.
Unfortunately, I think that Meta can skip the ‘Extend’ step altogether. ‘Embrace and Extinguish’ could be enough. My personal hypothesis is that one of their motivations for joining the fediverse is to put the regulatory framework to the test, and to either use federation to exploit regulatory loopholes or to bring the whole network down by demonstrating non-compliance.
As I understand it, regulations are being built to try to protect our data from being exploited by large corporations. The fediverse presents an alternative way of networking that attempts to solve many of the problems with centralized networks. However, if we apply the same regulatory framework that Meta has to abide by to the fediverse, it may be found that we are all non-compliant. We are ‘flying-under-the radar’ because the network consists of small independently-run sites and are of little interest to regulators. Once Meta joins the space, regulators will have to actually care about the fediverse and look closely at it. At that point - will they use nuance to create balanced set of rules that can keep something like Threads in check while allowing the rest of the fediverse to thrive? Or will they double-down on current regulations, apply them indiscriminately, and threaten instance admins to close their instances down or face legal consequences? O, even worse, will they skip the threats and issue hefty fines for non-compliance to set an example?
Maybe my concerns are unfounded, and the law does make a sharp distinction between a for-profit corporation and an instance run by a hobbyist with no intention to make a profit… I don’t think that they do, but I’m a scientist, not a lawyer 😅