I just saw that lemmy.ml has pre-emptively defederated from threads. Are there any plans to do that here? I personally want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook, and I’m sure that’s not an unpopular opinion around here.
edit: y’all, please pay attention to where you are when coming from all.
edit again: kbin really ought to make a post’s home instance more clear.
Does their history not count? Threads doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
That’s definitely sufficient if the goal is to cast a judgement on their ethics. But I think the point of defederating isn’t to express general disapproval. It’s to maintain the best possible experience for the users of the instance. Defederating from Facebook just seems like it’s motivated by giving them the middle finger. Which is fine, but as a tool, I don’t think that’s what federating is for.
I don’t feel strongly about this, though. It’s an opinion. If the rest of the instance or the admins decided to defed meta I would not care at all.
Well I’ve found where we disagree! I think defederating from Threads is more of a safeguard of the users of this instance from Meta’s predatory data practices, and history of employing the classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy. Personally, I think having zero connection to anything run by Meta is certainly giving the users of the instance the best possible experience.
I want to point out again that currently, Facebook offers no federated instance to defederate from. They’ve promised this in the future, and it may never happen, so it’s all academic.
Also, I don’t feel strongly about any of this. People are free to ignore me.
With that said, if Facebook did offer a federated product I would want to federate so I could see content from friends and family on that instance. Facebook can’t harvest data or show me to ads on a different instance. If they tried to do something really stupid, like push ads to me through by posting them on behalf of my grandma, THEN I’d agree we should defederate, and most likely we wouldn’t need to hold a vote, because the admins of this instance would just send out an announcement that Facebook is in violation of the instance’s guidelines and has refused to correct behavior, so they’re being defederated, as dictated by the defederation policy.
I think that’s how it should work.
Removed by mod
I’m sort of tired of talking about this, particularly because it’s all academic: they don’t offer any federated instance currently to defederate from. But I want to clarify my reasoning.
My point is NOT that we should “gIvE tHeM a ChANce!” We all know they are run by greedy, exploitative, untrustworthy people.
My point is that I think our response should be rooted in causes and effects rather than vibes. If they offered a federated instance that I had friends on, I’d want to be able to see my friends posts and have them see mine. And if Facebook then tried to find ways to push ads to a remote instance, then we’d obviously defederate. Because that’s an appropriate tool to correct a specific harm.
That’s all I’m saying. Currently, Facebook has no means of affecting my experience on this instance, so I don’t care whether we preemptively reject them from federating. The moment that they DO affect my experience, they’ll obviously be booted. That’s good enough for me.
I gotta be perfectly honest here; if despite all the discussion that’s happened in this thread, you can still say something like this, then I really don’t think anything we’ve said has really gotten through to you, and I too “tire of talking about this.”
Fair.
What if the goal is to use knowledge of their past behaviour to make an informed guess about their likely future behaviour?
I guess what’s the specific history you think is relevant here? I’ll admit to not being an extremely close follower of Meta’s various activities. I have a sense that they are vaguely nefarious but that’s about it.
It only relates to a single issue with Facebook, but I highly recommend the documentary The Great Hack.
tl;dw: Cambridge Analytica manipulated the 2016 US election, the Brexit vote, Ukraine’s 2004 election in which they supported pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich, and various other elections, and they got their data mostly from Facebook, who was complicit, and even cooperative.