Discussion: Values and priorities regarding Threads.net
Our recent long thread on whether Social.coop should sign the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact (https://www.loomio.com/d/AZcJK6y2/discussion-support-the-anti-meta-fedi-pact) has demonstrated clear differences within our community. A number of participants suggested that the disagreement here indicates a need for a broader conversation about our values as a community, which is something I think we should explore.
There are also still open questions about the future of how social.coop relates to Threads.net, including whether we should defederate from them entirely (a question that is very important to many of our members).
I'd like to use this thread to explore these topics further, including assessing whether or not a proposal to pro-actively Suspend (defederate from) Threads.net would be viable.
Poll Created Sat 22 Jul 2023 9:43PM
Threads.net outcomes you could live with Closed Sat 29 Jul 2023 9:00PM
The poll on which possible approach to proactive moderating Threads.net makes our users feel fully at home indicates that no single moderation strategy makes all of our members feel fully at home, although a solid majority (close to 81%) feel at home under our current decision to proactively Limit Threads.net.
Of the 78 members who voted in the poll:
63 members (80.7%) felt at home with a proactive Limit without suspension
36 members (46.2%) felt at home with proactively Suspending Threads.net
35 members (44.9%) felt at home with taking no proactive action
28 members (35.9%) felt at home with the idea of social.coop hosting multiple instances with different moderation policies toward Threads.net
Taken together with the rest of the threads on Values and Priorities regarding Threads.net, I think the indication is that we are broadly satisfied with the results of the proposal to Limit Threads.net and that it is unlikely that further policy changes would attain majority support at this time.
Given this, and the fact that the conversation on the thread seems to have wound down, my assessment is that it is time to move on from this discussion. If there are other subtopics worthy of further discussion, I encourage other users to start additional threads as needed.
Purpose
To start things off I'd like to get a sense of what outcomes for social.coop's relationship with Threads.net our members could live with.
The idea here is to try to get away from a focus on preferences, and to instead understand which scenarios create results that would make our members feel uncomfortable.
Background
Under discussion are instance-level actions that could be taken proactively by social.coop toward Threads.net, in advance of Threads.net joining ActivityPub (the federation protocol used by Mastodon)
These actions are described in the documentation at https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/
Specifically
-
Proactively Limiting Threads.net (as we have recently voted to do) has the consequence that all accounts on Threads.net are:
hidden to all other users on that instance, except for its followers. All of the content is still there, and it can still be found via search, mentions, and following, but the content is invisible publicly.
At this moment, limit does not affect federation.
-
Proactively Suspending a server would has the consequence that:
No content from the server will be stored locally except for usernames.
Suspending a server will remove all existing follow relationships between local accounts and accounts on the suspended server. They will not be restored in case the remote server is un-suspended later.
Because this poll is about member comfort, I have intentionally included the scenario to neither to neither Limit nor Suspend, even though we have already decided to Limit Threads.net.
Question
Under which if the following scenarios could you feel fully at home at social.coop (select as many as apply)?
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Threads.net is proactively Limited (not Suspended) | 38.9% | 63 |
.jpg){kind=avatar}
|
||
|
|
Threads.net is Suspended (i.e., we defederate from Threads.net) | 22.2% | 36 |
|
||
|
|
Threads.net is neither proactively Limited nor proactively Suspended | 21.6% | 35 |
|
||
|
|
Social.coop runs multiple instances with different policies toward Threads.net | 17.3% | 28 |
|
||
| Undecided | 0% | 303 |
.jpg){kind=avatar}
|
78 of 381 people have participated (20%)
Dynamic Sat 22 Jul 2023 9:47PM
@Jay Is the reminder link not sufficient? I didn't want the poll description to go on for paragraphs and paragraphs.
Jay Sat 22 Jul 2023 9:51PM
@Dynamic I think it would help a lot to have it inline in the description, at least a brief summary. Comments can get buried easily.
Dynamic Sat 22 Jul 2023 10:06PM
@Jay
Fixed.
Mitra Ardron Sat 22 Jul 2023 9:52PM
yes please - a one-liner would help because I can never remember which is which - I think:
Limit - no restrictions on following / being followed by users, non followers posts dont show in feeds
Suspend - cannot follow / be followed or see posts in feeds.
Dynamic Sat 22 Jul 2023 10:07PM
@Mitra Ardron
Just added block quotes from joinmastodon.org. Do these work for you?
Tom Resing Sat 22 Jul 2023 10:45PM
I can accept limiting. However, I'd prefer to understand what policies threads.net will enforce before changing anything.
Evan Boehs Sat 22 Jul 2023 10:51PM
I don't see an option for reasoning. After much thought, I only selected "Threads.net is proactively Limited (not Suspended)". Here's why:
It feels too rash to simply do nothing. I don't trust Facebook, they've done absolutely nothing trustworthy. I wouldn't feel at home knowing there's a tidal wave coming home that we're turning a blind eye to. I certainly would not feel at home if our community was split over a difference as minute as this, let alone one caused by a big tech company (our enemy or whatever). Suspend? That's tempting, but I'm not convinced that does very much. If Facebook simply wanted to harvest data from mastodon, there are much easier ways, and results have shown that 50% of the community does not want this outcome, if I recall (and early polls show only 17% accept this). By limiting, we give the community maximum autonomy at little cost. People who don't want Facebook will never need to see content from it shoved into their faces, but people who don't mind have that freedom as well. I strongly believe this is the only option presented that will keep our community together... Though the situation should, of course continue to be monitored.
Doug Belshaw Sat 22 Jul 2023 11:22PM
I appreciate your efforts @Dynamic but this isn't how you phrase a sociocratic question. There's also no option for clarifying questions here before voting, so we're not doing sociocratic rounds.
At the very least, I'd suggest changing the language about 'feeling fully at home'. Instead, the focus should be on helping people understand what their range of preference/tolerance might be.
For example, I'll be voting for the first two options as although I'd prefer not to, I can live with Threads being limited. On the other hand defederation is something that would potentially make me reconsider my membership of social.coop, and running multiple instances strikes me as schismatic.
Jay · Sat 22 Jul 2023 9:47PM
Any conversation about this NEEDS to have clarification about what “limit” and “suspend” mean.