I think this is a culture clash between the privacy minded FOSS crowd that is naturally drawn to a project like Lemmy and the influx of average redditors thats just looking for a new home.
If you already have zero trust in these megacorporations you will naturally gravitate towards preemtive defederation.
I happen to fall into the center of that venn diagram and honestly I feel like the “preemptively defederate!” crowd is acting before it’s even truly clear how to best act and everyone else who says “ehh let’s wait and see how this is going to go before we act” is just getting drowned out by the folks screaming about the end of the Fediverse.
I don’t trust Meta any further than I can throw their servers, but I find it hard to imagine there won’t be some middle ground that isn’t “BLOCK EVERYONE WHO SO MUCH AS TOUCHED A META PRODUCT ONCE” that ends up being the healthiest option
Edit to add: I’ve taken a similar approach to the instant defederating of Lemmy instances with unverified signups since the current phase of Lemmy is so fresh I have no reason to take a hardline stance before it’s clear exactly what the ramifications are. Obviously as an individual I also have the benefit of being able to just go with the flow that an instance admin might not but still
You know you’re taking a stance either way? It’s nice to say “wait and see”, but you can wait and see while being defederated as well. Starting to federate is basically the same decision as stopping to federate. Just because the one happens by default does not mean that federation happening isn’t a conscious choice.
It’s like laying in bed all day. Yea, you were in bed, so it’s the default, so you could say you just “wait and see what the day brings”. But you’re still effectively choosing to stay in bed. You don’t need to be surprised if nothing interesting happens in your day, and it was your choice that nothing interesting happens.
Same with federation and defederation. We already know Facebook is a bad actor. If we federate with them, we’re saying “all right let’s tolerate the shit coming at us”, we’re not “waiting and seeing what the day brings”, because we already know the day is not going to be interesting, since we’re staying in bed.
Sure, you might discover a new game on your phone while in bed and the day might still be amazing. We might discover threads is not bad after all. But it’s just so much more likely to have cool things happen in a day when you’re out of bed doing things. Same as it’s much more likely that Threads is going to be shit.
The fediverse is entirely public. Every action you take (all posts, votes, favorites, etc) is public. Meta will scrape all the data whether Threads federates or not, there’s no privacy difference because there’s no privacy!
Why would they need to scrape anything (which puts them at legal risks)? Threads is vastly bigger than the Fediverse. What do they care about having 1% more content, especially if a lot of that content is stuff their users don’t care about? They don’t even need to scrape stuff because humans will naturally repost content. How much of reddit was reposted from other social media sites by humans?
I think this is a culture clash between the privacy minded FOSS crowd that is naturally drawn to a project like Lemmy and the influx of average redditors thats just looking for a new home.
If you already have zero trust in these megacorporations you will naturally gravitate towards preemtive defederation.
I don’t think any sane reddit refugee would trust corporations after experiencing first-hand how that ends up lol
Who says they’re sane?
I happen to fall into the center of that venn diagram and honestly I feel like the “preemptively defederate!” crowd is acting before it’s even truly clear how to best act and everyone else who says “ehh let’s wait and see how this is going to go before we act” is just getting drowned out by the folks screaming about the end of the Fediverse.
I don’t trust Meta any further than I can throw their servers, but I find it hard to imagine there won’t be some middle ground that isn’t “BLOCK EVERYONE WHO SO MUCH AS TOUCHED A META PRODUCT ONCE” that ends up being the healthiest option
Edit to add: I’ve taken a similar approach to the instant defederating of Lemmy instances with unverified signups since the current phase of Lemmy is so fresh I have no reason to take a hardline stance before it’s clear exactly what the ramifications are. Obviously as an individual I also have the benefit of being able to just go with the flow that an instance admin might not but still
You know you’re taking a stance either way? It’s nice to say “wait and see”, but you can wait and see while being defederated as well. Starting to federate is basically the same decision as stopping to federate. Just because the one happens by default does not mean that federation happening isn’t a conscious choice.
It’s like laying in bed all day. Yea, you were in bed, so it’s the default, so you could say you just “wait and see what the day brings”. But you’re still effectively choosing to stay in bed. You don’t need to be surprised if nothing interesting happens in your day, and it was your choice that nothing interesting happens.
Same with federation and defederation. We already know Facebook is a bad actor. If we federate with them, we’re saying “all right let’s tolerate the shit coming at us”, we’re not “waiting and seeing what the day brings”, because we already know the day is not going to be interesting, since we’re staying in bed.
Sure, you might discover a new game on your phone while in bed and the day might still be amazing. We might discover threads is not bad after all. But it’s just so much more likely to have cool things happen in a day when you’re out of bed doing things. Same as it’s much more likely that Threads is going to be shit.
The fediverse is entirely public. Every action you take (all posts, votes, favorites, etc) is public. Meta will scrape all the data whether Threads federates or not, there’s no privacy difference because there’s no privacy!
Why would they need to scrape anything (which puts them at legal risks)? Threads is vastly bigger than the Fediverse. What do they care about having 1% more content, especially if a lot of that content is stuff their users don’t care about? They don’t even need to scrape stuff because humans will naturally repost content. How much of reddit was reposted from other social media sites by humans?