@Doug Belshaw

Do you think I should close the poll?

@Doug Belshaw

For now I've added a strikethrough of the part about Sociocracy, as I'm realizing I don't really know what I'm talking about with regard to that term. (Edit: on further reflection, I just deleted that clause entirely. I don't think it's helpful to the democratic process for me to document my own uncertainties about language so prominently.)

Getting away from the poll and back to the original question, what are our concerns?

I don't love the "Facebook is evil" focus I've been hearing in much of the conversation -- not because I disagree (it's a giant impersonal multi-national, of course it's at least somewhat evil), but because I find it unhelpful. If they have reason to do bad things to us, and the power to do so, I entirely agree that they will likely do so -- but so far, I'm unconvinced that they have either the motivation or power. (Nor that us federating or not necessarily ameliorates most of the likely bad things they might do.)

Also, Threads isn't going to be the last possibly-malign corporate actor connecting to the Fediverse. So it would be helpful for us to figure out, in general, what constitutes acceptable behavior for such instances.

So I think it's more interesting to tease out the likely risks, and figure out our red lines; hopefully that will clarify this sort of discussion, now and in the future.

Tossing out one that Threads might pass, and I'm willing to give them a chance, but I think it's fairly likely that they will fail: moderation quality. For example, it's pretty well-established that allowing Nazi harassers is a red line for banning instances.

Threads doesn't get a pass there, IMO. If their members harass people -- especially people on Fedi -- without consequences, then that is solid grounds to suspend them.

That's just a start. I think the question being asked at the top of this thread is exactly right. Let's figure out what our minimum requirements are, and what are the grounds for defederation, and then hold Threads to the same standard. I honestly think the odds are against them making six months before failing (hence, I think that starting them off Limited makes sense, to reduce the chance of serious damage), but I'd be happier if we create a rubric, and evaluate Threads against it.

@Justin du Coeur

Thanks for launching a more freeform discussion here.

As one answer to your question, one risk that I don't think is taken seriously enough is Embrace-Extend-Extinguish (EEE), which has been clearly laid out from the beginning by advocates of distancing ourselves from Threads.net, but has also been repeatedly and (IMO inappropriately) dismissed as not relevant because ActivityPub is so mainstream now compared to Jabber at the time that Google killed it.

I've described several times how I imagine this scenario playing out, most recently here: https://social.coop/@dynamic/110741518193656318

Opening the gates to federation with an instance as large as Threads.net is expected to be will dramatically shift the composition of the feeds of those who choose to embrace it, and people will adjust their behavior accordingly. If an instance that large suddenly withdraws federation, the space will seem suddenly very quiet, and people will feel less desire to come to the fediverse, which would be expected to have cascading effects for people who follow them.

I don't see this as a serious threat to instances that choose not to engage with large corporate instances that are likely to have an EEE intention, but I do see it as a threat to instances that do.

@Dynamic Fair -- what I'm unsure about is how much Limiting is going to reduce the impact there. I suspect it will do so substantially; how much is pretty subjective and hard to predict.

There's also a question of whether pre-suspending Threads just advances that risk. I mean, it's fairly easy to see where Threads is likely to have an advantage, primarily in US-based celebrity and entertainment content.

(Is Threads really going to help keeping up with friends and family? I'm unconvinced -- I think their strength is more likely to be passive consumption, drawing in much of the passive Twitter readership, many of whom read vastly more than post AFAIK. I could be wrong here, but remember that Mastodon is really, really weird in how much interaction we have: major posters coming here from Twitter remark on that all the time. I expect Threads to be a lot more like Twitter than Mastodon.)

If we pre-suspend, that content will never be available in the first place. Does that cause more or less damage than suspending later? I don't think it's clear.

All that said, it's a totally fair concern, and I don't think there's anywhere near enough evidence yet to guess which way this issue will fly in reality.

@Justin du Coeur

My operating assumption is that Threads would have quite a bit in common with Facebook, which does rely heavily on interactions between users. I imagine it would be similar to Twitter in ways that Facebook isn't, but Meta clearly has the ability to create platforms that are more social that Twitter, and I think it would be unwise to make assumptions otherwise.

@Justin du Coeur

I have no model whatsoever for how proactively Suspending Threads.net could advance a risk of EEE. Can you elaborate on how this would play out?

@Justin du Coeur

remember that Mastodon is really, really weird in how much interaction we have: major posters coming here from Twitter remark on that all the time.

Could you expand on what major posters who moved from Twitter to Mastodon say about the level of interaction on Mastodon?

@Dynamic The concern about pre-suspending is less about EEE per se at this stage, more about irrelevance, which is basically the heart of EEE.

I mean, EEE isn't some sort of magic spell that extinguishes competition -- it's about a mega-Corp managing to make their system look more useful in the public eye than the open version. The traditional formulation thinks about that being about features, but really, it tends to be about network size. Features -- the "extend" part -- come into play as a way to promote incompatibility, thereby cutting the open parts of the network off, reducing their network size, and making them less appealing than the proprietary version.

So the risk of pre-suspending is that, by narrowing the scope of our own federated network, we make it less useful to people than more open instances, and thus gradually lose membership and slide into irrelevance.

I don't know whether being able to connect to Threads will turn out to matter that much, but I think it's a significant risk.

@Matt S - matts Hmm. Unfortunately, the lack of good history search on Mastodon makes it challenging to cite sources.

After Twitter started exposing better metrics (in the hope of making it look more appealing, which completely backfired), I saw several folks with followers in thousands-to-tens-of-thousands (okay, "major" is relative) giving stats that, while they had far more followers on Twitter, the number of interactions they were receiving per-post was far higher on Mastodon.

(I think Teri Kanefield was one of the folks who said this; I'm pretty sure there were at least a couple of others, but I don't know who; sorry.)

Granted, that's anecdotal evidence, and the hellscape of modern Twitter is hard to extrapolate from. But it fits with my general sense of cultural differences.

@Justin du Coeur

Facebook's existing user base is so much larger than the current fediverse, that I think that the scenario you describe---in which Facebook has a much larger social network that we would have cut ourselves off from by suspending their instance---is virtually indistinguishable from the status quo, in which they already have a much larger social network that we are cut off from.

People find value in being here now, despite our much smaller network size, and people will continue to find value here, despite our smaller network size. We would still be able to federate with non-Meta parts of the fediverse that don't block Meta, so I'm not seeing any kind of harm to us from choosing not to federate.

I think the only way that our network would shrink at all would be at such time as instances that choose to federate succumb to the extinguishing process, in which case, what are we even trying to protect ourselves from?

@Justin du Coeur @Matt S - @matts

Here's a specific example of an "influencer" being surprised by their engagement levels on Mastodon: https://climatejustice.rocks/@kathhayhoe/110436657882930430

@Justin du Coeur

while they had far more followers on Twitter, the number of interactions they were receiving per-post was far higher on Mastodon.

Ah, interesting. Thanks! I'm glad to hear Mastodon provides more engagement than Twitter, as I hoped it wold.

@Justin du Coeur

So the risk of pre-suspending is that, by narrowing the scope of our own federated network, we make it less useful to people than more open instances, and thus gradually lose membership and slide into irrelevance.

This is only true if the majority of instances federation with threads.net. If the vast majority of instances see threads.net as the existential threat to the fediverse as we know it that it is and don't federate with it, then people will have to choose between the OG open fediverse as it is today or the temporarily-open-but-soon-to-be-walled-off-after-EEE threads.net fediverse, just as people today have to choose between the two.

I don't know whether being able to connect to Threads will turn out to matter that much, but I think it's a significant risk.

What do you mean by "matter that much"? I agree that federating with them is a significant risk and that risk matters a lot to me lol.

Just noticed the specific block quotes from @Justin du Coeur that @Matt S - matts pulled out, went back and read them in context, and realized that I'd misread what Justin was saying, so apologies for the off-topic reply.

@Matt S - matts

I think that by saying that federation with Threads.net won't matter that much, what @Justin du Coeur is saying is that he doesn't think the service they will provide at all resembles the "I finally get to talk to my family who are on Facebook" service that a lot of the pro-federation people are imagining, so the user experience on Mastodon won't differ much as a function of federation or not.

@Justin du Coeur Are we really having a conversation about how we can't live without Facebook? I don't think we should federate with them, not because we hate them, but because all they have ever done is use our fear of missing out to get their tendrils into our heads.

Meta was complicit as their microtargeted ads were used to bring us things like the Trump administration and Brexit, and their track record with moderating hate speech is terrible.

I suspect if Meta had what they wanted from the Fediverse, they would not bother with Threads.

@Michael Potter Sure -- but we can make some pretty decent inferences about what they want.

First of all, Meta is scared. Facebook is in decline, and there's no likelihood that that's ever going to change. The huge VR push may or may not ever come to anything. They have a huge company, with a huge stock price, that may be fairly hollow. Twitter has demonstrated how fast the mighty can fall.

So they're trying to find new ways to sell people to advertisers, and I believe Threads is throwing spaghetti at the wall since Twitter left a gigantic market hole. That's what Threads gives them: somewhere to advertise. And what they want from federation, I suspect, is content -- nothing more, nothing less. They want their users to be able to subscribe to Mastodon feeds that they can then wrap with advertising.

It's entirely reasonable to find that repulsive, and if folks want to lay that down as a possible red line, go for it. But we should talk in terms of this sort of red line, not in terms of vague statements about companies having bad intent.

(Again -- I've said this a hundred times and I'll say it a hundred more -- I don't care much whether we federate or not. I care a lot about making the decision for good reasons that can be applied to other players as they come on the scene, based on evidence of their actual behavior here, rather than just "FB has done bad things". Every site is a potential risk of badness, so we need to know when we're going to cut them off and why.)

@Justin du Coeur It's true, this could be a desperate act, or an almost arbitrary one on Meta's part. Someone heard Mastodon was a thing, so they decided to get into it.

They want to sell us advertising, but what do they offer us? I didn't create a Mastodon account so could connect with Facebook.

@Michael Potter

They want to sell us advertising, but what do they offer us?

The thing one we created the fediverse because FB et al didn't offer; the ability to interact with people using their platform without having to use it ourselves. As I've said before, in this group and in the verse, if fediverse servers block Meta's Chains en masse, we're the ones keeping people trapped in their DataFarm. That seems profoundly unethical to me, in a way that Limiting Chains (allowing follow relationships without helping to promote posts from their server) does not.

@Danyl Strype

In what way will being able to connect with us without leaving the world of Facebook free them of the "DataFarm"?

@Michael Potter I don't think they're trying to sell us advertising. I mean, they'd love to, but there's no way to do it, and I suspect they won't worry about it much.

What I'm saying is the opposite: they want to use us to sell advertising to the members of Threads. Remember, that's the whole game -- provide an endless stream of content, see what people engage with, extrapolate their interests, and sell advertising based on that. (And intersperse some of that advertising in between messages.)

In other words, I suspect Meta views us as mainly a source of that content. We're equivalent to online articles being linked-to on FB: external fodder to keep their membership's eyeballs on Threads, and to feed the big AI engines examining what those members care about.

So I'm less concerned than many about Meta trying to extinguish us; if anything, they'd probably prefer to have us around, so that they can say, "Look! We're not monopolists -- there's this whole network we work with" when the anti-trade commissions investigate them. Having a smaller, nerdier competitor that doesn't handle the mass market well (which, sadly, we don't) is generally a net positive for the mega-Corps in the current environment.

But I can see people being distressed about being used by Threads like that -- hence my "repulsive" comment above.

@Justin du Coeur

I don't see any particular reason why Facebook couldn't do both things. In the short run they might benefit from having our content, but if they succeed in getting Threads.net off the ground, they wouldn't need us any more, at which point, why not extinguish?

In terms of using our existence to assert that competing models exist, it doesn't particularly matter to them whether we are small (as we are now) or smaller (as we will be when a bunch of users defect to Threads.net or whatever). The Fediverse itself isn't going anywhere[*]; it'll just change in size.

I think from the perspective of a business like Facebook or Google, it might be preferable to have small open alternatives exist, but they'd still prefer for those alternatives to be as small and obscure as possible.

[*] I really don't think it's going to happen; there is too large a core body of contrarians / iconoclasts who will never federate with Threads.net or similar for the Fediverse truly to go away entirely (see my June 24 thread here https://social.coop/@dynamic/110598380016611869)

@Dynamic You're hitting the nail on the head imo, Dynamic. Applying basic mega corp capitalist logic and looking at Meta's own history of exploitative decisions in the name of profit, I believe we should expect them to eventually gut the fediverse if we (all the existing instances) let them in.

@Dynamic

In what way will being able to connect with us without leaving the world of Facebook free them of the "DataFarm"?

This is begging the question. Being able to connect with us allows them to leave the world of FarceBook, without losing contact with those who haven't (yet). Here's a story to illustrate the social dynamics involved.

Alice and Bob follow each other on InstaGrope. Alice, being more of an early adopter, signs up for Chains, and convinces Bob to do the same. Then Chains turns on AP federation. Alice realises she can still follow and talk to all the same people on Chains from other fediverse servers, and moves to one.

But Bob is confused by the plethora of servers choices, and besides he's had enough transition pain for the time being. so he remains on Chains. But Alice and Bob can continue to talk to each other, until Bob is ready to choose a new server and make the move. In fact, his continued contact with Alice and her glowing reports of life outside the DataFarm makes it much more likely that he will.

@Danyl Strype

This is begging the question.

Actually, it was a question. I didn't know the answer.

But Bob is confused by the plethora of servers choices, and besides he's had enough transition pain for the time being. so he remains on Chains. But Alice and Bob can continue to talk to each other, until Bob is ready to choose a new server and make the move. In fact, his continued contact with Alice and her glowing reports of life outside the DataFarm makes it much more likely that he will.

Thank you for this description. I think understand the scenario you are imagining now, but I don't think it's likely because this isn't at all the way that the people I know behave.

1) In general, even highly technically minded people seem susceptible to corporate marketing and manipulation. I don't know why this is the case, but it is exemplified by the fact that when I asked for advice on setting up a blog years ago, one of my most savvy friends---someone with all the skills to set up a website for himself---recommended Medium to me. He never really gave me a coherent reason why.

2) Another example: Gmail. Gmail has been creepy as f*ck from day one, yet when they started offering accounts, practically everyone lined up to get one. I got my own invite from someone with a PhD from MIT.

3) Following the recent large influx of people to the Fediverse from from Twitter, most of them have left. Many of them went back to Twitter, despite everything. And a lot of them have jumped over to Bluesky, an entirely new platform with no benefits of network effects. I don't know whether the glowing reports didn't happen or didn't move people, but most people didn't stay.

4) In the scenario you describe, Bob might really care about Alice, but the average Bob will also have close relationships with Charlie, Doris, and Eleanor, who he interacts with on Threads.net, and who are not motivated to leave or who perceive open-source platforms as too much work and therefore (if things get bad enough and they do jump ship) will be more tempted by the next corporate shiny thing.

See also Cat Valente's popular essay "Stop Talking to Each Other..." https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

And my old (soon to be deleted) rant about creepy corporate interfaces, which I link to here: https://social.coop/@dynamic/109522108163755378

@Danyl Strype

Maybe the bottom line for me is that I'd prefer to protect what we have than to try to leverage Facebook's activities into an imagined opportunity for expansion. They have almost infinitely more resourced than we do, and I don't think we stand to gain much at all.

@Dynamic

Following the recent large influx of people to the Fediverse from from Twitter, most of them have left. Many of them went back to Twitter, despite everything.

Right. Why? Because they couldn't follow and interact with contacts they valued who are still on Titter. If Titter federated over AP, most of the them would not have gone back. You're making my case for me.

(As it happens, I think the extent to which people have gone back to Titter is being over-exaggerated, thanks to Melon Husk's PR shills, but that's beside the point.)

Bob might really care about Alice, but the average Bob will also have close relationships with Charlie, Doris, and Eleanor, who he interacts with on Threads.net, and who are not motivated to leave

Right. So if Chains is blocked by fediverse servers, Bob, like Alice, will be trapped on Chains by the desire to keep talking to them. Again, you're making my case for me.

@Danyl Strype

If it is all about network effects, why did people leave Fedi for Bluesky?

Right. So if Chains is blocked by fediverse servers, Bob, like Alice, will be trapped on Chains by the desire to keep talking to them. Again, you're making my case for me.

I stuck to three names to make the example tractible, but realistically it would be more like 50 or 1000 names, and it goes both ways. Say Bob has 500 connections, 100 of them real world acquaintances, and 10 of them close friends. 90% of each group will be on the larger social network. And say Alice also has 500 connections, 90% of them on the larger social network. When the connection is severed, who is going to feel more isolated, Alice or Bob?

Right now, people know to expect Fedi not to connect to the corporate internet, and the network is working well for the people who are here (otherwise they wouldn't be here). If the floodgates are opened, that will all change, including for people who are already here if they don't proactively avoid connections with Threads.net. If interconnections occur without regard for who is on which network, and assuming that Threads.net takes off, it will tend toward a place where 99% of everyone's connections are on Threads.net. Alice would have to be really amazingly special to tempt Bob to abandon 99% of his connections for her. Not many Bobs will have a Fediverse Alice who is that special.

@Dynamic

If it is all about network effects, why did people leave Fedi for Bluesky?

I'm not convinced they did, but if they did, I would presume it's one of two reasons a) curiousity, or b) because there are people there they want to connect with, ie network effects.

the network is working well for the people who are here

So your argument boils down to the argument for a gated community. Keeping the plebs out, so they don't bring down the property values. Good to know : /

@Danyl Strype

I have zero interest in excluding individuals. I am interested in excluding platforms, particularly platforms that we have reason to believe would be interested in dismantling what we have.

@Dynamic

I can't put it any better than Michael Kwet did in his 2020 article.

"... these companies are able to monetise surveillance because the data is running through their platforms, and they force people to be a part of their networks in order to interact with their friends and family. For example, a user who does not like Facebook’s privacy practices can leave for another network, but then they have to convince their friends to join them.

The second idea proposes a solution to this problem: make social networks interoperate. Social media platforms would be forced to allow members of one network to interact with members of another. For example, a Facebook user would be able to post a comment under a YouTube video while logged into Facebook, and vice-versa. Users’ data would also be 'portable' so they could move their profile to a different platform."

It’s still unclear to me what the consequences of doing nothing vs limit vs suspending are. Is there a public article, social.coop member article, or loomio comment that summarizes what the actual and/or potential risks to a fediverse instance doing nothing are? Does limiting or suspending actually limit or cancel those risks?

I understand the principled stance of not wanting to associate with Meta in any way. I generally apply a consequentialist approach to decision making, so I would prefer to understand the consequences of the different options as best they can be known or inferred.

Edit: I decided to work my way through the past loomio threads and came across this article giving an overview of the wider Meta/fediverse discussion. It was last updated on July 14 as of this edit. https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/

Edit #2: Mastodon CEO/Founder Eugen Rochko answered some common questions on July 5th and seems to be welcoming to threads.net with the information about their plans that is currently available. He seems to neglect the history of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" especially the "extinguish" part when he addresses it at one point, focusing on the positives of a standard he loves (and profits from lol) being adopted by a platform of millions of users. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads

Edit #3: This is the most complete and succinct take from an instance that decided to take a prudently defensive position with pre-emptive defederation. It also has updates and news as recently as July 15th as the time of this edit. https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on_the_fediverse_to_block_or_not_to_block

Edit #4: This WIRED article from Jul 18, 2023 summarizes all the major notes on the debate: https://www.wired.com/story/metas-threads-could-make-or-break-the-fediverse/

@Matt S - matts

I've been really puzzled as to how to most efficiently communicate what the arguments are (both for and against federation) to people who need the kind of synthesis you're requesting. A lot of times it feels like we're throwing the same arguments back and forth in a circular fashion, but also these conversations can be really unwieldy to keep up with, so I sympathize.

Maybe if my argument map experiment that I suggest below (https://www.loomio.com/d/taD7sGP9/discussion-values-and-priorities-regarding-threads-net/16) gains some momentum it could become a resource for framing some of these conversations, but I don't know if it will work.

@Dynamic Thanks for sharing your argument map experiment. The concept seems very useful! Hope it catches on.

@Matt S - matts Here's a table I made with my best attempt at charting out the practical implications of limits vs suspends. I don't know the best way to share this (maybe a Markdown table on GitHub), so for now it's an image of a Numbers export.

@Jay

Oh, this is a neat framework. Can you also add a distinction between what we (as Limiters, uh... Suspenders, or err.. No Actioners) would see vs. what they (as Limitees, Suspendees, or No Actionees) would see?

I'm actually more interested in what they see than in what I see.

If you're looking for ways to share spreadsheets online, you might try Ethercalc? https://ethercalc.net/

@Jay Cool! Thanks for making this. This is helpful for seeing the consequences on the level of an individual poster on social.coop.

I think it's also important to consider the consequences on an individual instance level and on a collective fediverse-wide level. For example, after my deep dive into this yesterday, I believe that if big tech and Meta's history are any guide, after Meta adopts the open protocol they will ultimately make users on open or Limiting instances choose between Meta's hyper developed protocol that allows those users to maintain their connections with friends and family on threads.net or the default open protocol and lose those connections, eventually. This will put instances and the fediverse at-large at risk of losing large numbers of members. Without robust democratic oversight of Meta's actions once they federate, I don't trust Meta to not exploit the fediverse to the fullest extent possible. (Even with democratic oversight and even if they don't "extend" the protocol with advanced features, they can de-federate later, making users choose between OG fediverse friends and normie friends on their server).

@Matt S - matts How would defederating prevent them from accomplishing that?

@Jay If we do not allow threads.net to federate with us and fediverse servers comprising a super-majority of fediverse users do the same, then Meta will not be able to absorb a critical mass of existing fediverse users through EEE because Meta won't have access to fediverse users. The fediverse as it is constituted today will continue to exist and grow as it is right now. Threads.net will be Meta's version of Twitter.

In other words, the potential damage to the fediverse posed by Meta is proportional to the number of existing users whose servers federate with Threads.net.

@Matt S - matts

I agree with your last sentence. I *don't* think that we need a supermajority to take a stand. Every instance that takes a stand makes the residual community a little stronger.

Personally, I don't see a compelling reason to defederate or limit. like others before me said better, any malicious behaviour (e.g. data harvesting) is perfectly possible even if defederated, granted probably less likely. though federating with the official mastodon server probably makes that "less likely" chance plenty likely.

hopefully nobody takes this the wrong way, but the idea of defederating from threads not only sounds to me like self-defeating behaviour, but also is reminiscent of the "cool kids table". assuming security/moderation is relatively well handled by meta I don't see cause for concern. people of this community are generally more aware of freedom and privacy and cooperation, but threads users are just people. they're not some "normies" we need to keep at a distance.

like any general population server, there are going to be plenty of good and plenty of bad people. but ultimately i feel like the fediverse has a lot to gain with a potential dramatic uptick in users and diversity that can result in mastodon and its ilk no longer being social bubbles. i could be wrong, but i feel like federated threads is a huge opportunity towards making the fediverse the de-facto standard for social media.

I hate meta as much as the next guy, but i don't hate their users, and I feel that is what is really the question here. of course we should do a proper risk assessment as I'm sure I'm ignorant on a multitude of things, but that's where my head is at atm

@dom

I hate meta as much as the next guy, but i don't hate their users

This!

Then help entities like social.coop facilitate a clear alternative to the toxic conditions they are presently subjected to.

@Rich Jensen

Can you clarify which toxic conditions you are referring to? There are a lot of opinions flying around, and it's hard to keep track of what is being said where.

Essentially the conditions of surveillance capitalism. I see the value of socialcoop related to providing a break from those conditions.

@dom

I don't see a compelling reason to defederate or limit.

From my viewpoint, a compelling reason is to save the fediverse as we know it from going away.

How would the fediverse go away if we do nothing or limit?

If Meta behaves as it always has and as mega corp capitalist logic dictates, that is maximize profits by absorbing or destroying any competition to their business model, then they will almost certainly use a tried and true strategy of "embrace, extend, extinguish" (EEE) to absorb most of the current fediverse users (and likely entire servers), tearing instances apart, and sending the fediverse back years in terms of progress. It took me a few mull-overs to totally understand the risk, so if you're like me, I'd recommend starting with this well-written and well-cited post by a science communicator over at the scicomm.xyz instance: https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on_the_fediverse_to_block_or_not_to_block

Would love to hear you're thoughts on this risk assessment, @dom.

@Matt S - matts This is a well-formed opinion piece that makes a good case for preemptive defensiveness, though I can't say I'm swayed by its arguments for what there is to fear. EEE is an extremely big threat for non-decentralized tooling, but that's not what the fediverse is. The only mechanism I can really see for them to EEE would be if they were to single-handedly branch off of the standard ActivityPub implementation (which they will, we know) and later become incompatible with existing instances that align with the standards. Instances are then faced with a choice: submit to Threads' demands, or continue as we have been this entire time

The risk here is in going from Current Fediverse -> Fediverse + Threads users -> Current Fediverse. If the loss-aversion to going back to the way things currently are is critically high, in my view the worst place the fediverse will go is right back to where we are now. IMO this would not be the result for two reasons. First, I believe the vast majority of current fediverse users are anti-Meta and pro-open-standards, and as such would never be swayed to leave the larger fediverse for Threads and the like. Second, federating Threads would reveal to many future users that they do not need meta for social media and can easily jump ship.

The largest point of vulnerability, in my view, is the resolve of the maintainers/contributors to the ActivityPub spec. If they practice what they preach (I imagine they do), then Meta will not be able to dictate the future of the standard, and may actually be able to provide insights as to how it can improve, directly or indirectly. these insights would, of course, need to be filtered by the larger community's demands for privacy and decentralization, but nonetheless can prove valuable. It's also arguable that nothing on the fediverse, save for credentials and private messages, need be considered "private".

Provided we have trust in the future maintenance of ActivityPub as a standard, I currently believe we have nothing to lose. I actually feel like BlueSky poses a bigger threat to ActivityPub than Meta in terms of its ability to fragment the community that currently has been built.

I also don't view the relatively small size of the current fediverse as a compelling reason to defederate from Threads. If people want small communities, that is valid and is an entirely separate question, though to me that desire is actively ignoring the biggest strengths of the fediverse, and I would suggest small communities either implement a whitelist on their servers or use a forum instead.

Personally, I want to see the fediverse grow. I want to see ActivityPub grow. I want it to be the de-facto standard for social media going forward, and I don't think I need to convince anybody here of that take. For that to happen, that means that we need to play ball with the world at large. That does not mean we need to compromise on our values for what that standard is, but we should be welcoming participation wherever we can such that proprietary social media can no longer own the data of its users. I'm surprised threads has even considered this, but I think we should take the opportunity and remain steadfast in our values.

@dom Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I will need to mull this over.

As an experimental effort to organize our understanding of the issue and how to respond to it, I invite anyone motivated to do so to help flesh out the "argument map" document I created here: https://pad.disroot.org/p/Social.coop_Threads.net_argument_map

The purpose of this document is not to convince people of any one perspective, but rather to describe the range of perspectives held by the people contributing to the document. This is my first foray into collaborative argument mapping, so please understand that this really is an experiment.

My guidelines for editing are here https://pad.disroot.org/p/Guidelines_for_posting_to_Threads.net_argument_map

@Dynamic Hey, I suggest getting rid of the subsections that include the "permanently" conditions, because making a decisions permanent is not realistic, advisable, nor desirable. I believe this because facts of the case often change and when they do people will certainly bring the topic up again for debate. And I would argument it's desirable to re-evaluate our decisions when facts changes. Having the "permanently" sections gives a false finality to the debate. I may be missing a reasons to keep this decision permanent and would be happy to hear them. Also, on a practical level, having all the arguments for and against in one place (not divided into two for and two against sections) makes it easier for users to see the full picture because any argument for permanently adhering to an outcome is also an argument for tentatively adhering to an outcome.

@Matt S - matts

Fair enough. Perhaps even more importantly, it's confusing to have so many options. I'll make the changes you suggest.

@Matt S - @matts

Hmm. Do you think I should remove the "with the option of rolling back the policy" language?

@Dynamic Yeah, I think so.

@Matt S - matts

Hey Matt, are you able to see the private message / thread I sent you about next steps for the argument map?

@Dynamic Hey, yes! Sorry, I wanted to sleep on it, and probably shoulda let you know that. I just replied.

@Matt S - matts

Thanks for your reply, and glad to know that you did get notified of the thread. I wasn't sure how clear Loomio's interface would be in letting you know there was a non- Social.Coop message for you.

Thanks for putting it this way, looks good to me after the tweaks. Yes, I can live with options 2, 3, 4. Limitation seems to be a good compromise, and I am willing to move a bit away from my initial stance to make that possible. In case of a failure the split is my second choice, that has some potential too. To do nothing is somewhat a no-go for me, but I will not take a dramatic exit if that becomes the outcome - it would just cause a severe loss of rapture in my case, but I am certainly not the center of the world *giggle. Again, I like your pragmatic and lighthanded approach @dynamic, factually being a mentally challenged half-whit with reduced interest in over-intellectualizing a topic that is somewhat complicated enough for me. Cheers.

If anyone is looking for a resource on "what are the arguments for and against different approaches to moderating Threads.net", @Matt S - @matts has done a tremendous amount of legwork starting to flesh out the argument map document that I announced above (https://www.loomio.com/d/taD7sGP9/discussion-values-and-priorities-regarding-threads-net/16).

Thank you for this, Matt!

The document itself is available here: https://pad.disroot.org/p/Social.coop_Threads.net_argument_map

Not all sections are fleshed out yet, so if you are motivated to add more, feel free to (once you have read through the guidelines).

How does Limit work in the opposite direction? If we set a server to Limit, you'll have to search to find usernames or content on there. Will the same to be true for users of the server when it comes to our usernames and content?

I'm not asking out of concern for privacy because every post set to public will be available to anyone on the internet. I'm more curious about whether Limiting a server will allow the server to display our content in their user feeds while interspersing ads (even if the user doesn't follow us) or not.

@Matt S - matts

I haven't seen any clear documentation on this.

I have posted a toot attempting to ask around. I guess we'll see if there are any responses.

https://social.coop/@dynamic/110769041924142067

According to @[email protected]'s responses to the above toot, Limit does not behave like a default Block. What it does do is to make all accounts on the Limiting instance behave as if they have "Require follow requests" turned on.

Also, Suspend by itself doesn't prevent secondary federation (visibility of a Suspending instance's content on the Suspended instance when that content is boosted by users on a non-Suspending instance) unless "authorized fetch" is turned on.

Clearly there's more complexity here than is evident from the JoinMastodon documentation.

@Dynamic Thanks for asking around! Indeed, there is complexity here. Once we understand each other's apprehensions about connecting with threads.net, it will be good to understand the technical options for materializing our desired level of connection.

These questions are hard to answer because Threads is not federating. We still know extremely little about how it will federate and how Meta/Threads will behave if it does. I could imagine situations in which I could live with absolutely any of these outcomes that are listed. But whether or not I would be comfortable with any is contingent on things that have not happened.

I hope the concerns of people that are calling for preemptive defederation are overblown but I don't think they unrealistic. If the pessimists are right, I think we should cut off Threads. If they're wrong, I'd rather not have jumped the gun

Basically: I don't trust Meta but I don't see what we lose by waiting and being reactive. This is my the driving priority/value and it's a point many people have made in the big thread so I know that many others share it. It's difficult to express this using the pool you've put together.

@Benjamin Mako Hill

I think a big question here is if we plan to be reactive, *what are we planning to react to*?

If the threat model is exposure to bigotry and harassment, then we know exactly what we are looking for, and there should be no problem with moderating Theads.net in the same way as other servers (although it might not be fun to be a moderator on day one).

If the threat model is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, it might be years before the bad thing happens, and I don't see how we could take positive action when it has actually come to pass. I'm open to persuasion that there's some sort of signal we could have, but right now I have no idea what it would look like except for a bunch of people suddenly being very unhappy because they've been cut off from 95% of the people on their feed.

@Dynamic This all sounds right to me and I agree that we haven't thought this through fully. That's also why I think that it's difficult to answer this poll.

I'll admit that I find your embrace/extend/extinguish argument a little difficult. Is that argument that because people will likely value talking to people on Threads enough that they will be unhappy if it is taken away that we should not allow them do it at all?

Google did something similar with XMPP/Jabber with GTalk: they joined the open/federated network, they became the biggest player by far, they wanted to extend the protocol in some ways, and then they withdrew/defederated as a result. I was definitely sad when most of the people I followed on Jabber fell off the network. On the other hand, I'm I don't buy that either XMPP (or myself individually as a user) would have been better off if I was never able to talk to them at all from Jabber since the vast majority simple never would have joined XMPP/Jabber had Google not integrated it into GMail.

@Benjamin Mako Hill

I'm not sure whether when you say "your embrace/extend/extinguish" argument you are referring just to the very minimal amount I said in this thread, or if you've read what I've said elsewhere.

If it is the former, and if it is helpful, I talk a bit about how I imagine this playing out in the thread here: https://social.coop/@dynamic/110741518193656318

What I really want is to be on a democratic instance with people who are sufficiently committed to the Fediverse as a model for social media to understand why this is problematic. I don't care what other people do, but I would like to personally be on an instance that takes this issue seriously. Currently, with the way things are going, it appears that this desire is at odds with my desire to be on a democratic instance. I'm not sure which desire will win out for me.

Our decision to Limit Threads.net helps because it at least decreases the chance of us (the instance, not the Fediverse) being utterly extinguished in five years of whatever, leaving the Fediverse with no democratically run instances.

I've speculated on the idea of some of us splitting onto a separate instance, so that we can do both things while taking advantage of Social.coop's extensive infrastructure, but a lot of people (weirdly, often the same people who want to federate with Threads.net) seem to react negatively to that idea, so I'm guessing it isn't going to happen.

@Dynamic I had not read that thread you posted but it conforms to what I was thinking. The specific ways you think this might play feels to me like imaginative guesswork.

I disagree with you on how we should act in regards to Threads now not because I don't value strong viable alternatives to corporate infrastructure or because I don't think that federating with Threads is entirely problematic. I have been involved in both anticorporate activism and building autonomous network infrastructure for more than twenty years. I convened the first meeting on freedom and network services that published the Franklin Street Statement in 2008 which, in many ways, jumpstarted the whole movement for federated alternatives to centralized and corporate-controlled services. This isn't even the first time I've been involved in a federated network service that a giant tech company joined! So, believe me, I share your concerns, I don't share your confidence in your particular story about how things will play out with Threads.

@Benjamin Mako Hill

I'm also just really tired at this point. I think I did two separate writeups of the EEE thing within the past 48 hours, not counting the work Matt S and I have been doing to put together the argument map. I apologize if that's coming through.

@Benjamin Mako Hill I remember you from our Indymedia days. This is definitely not our first rodeo ; )

@Dynamic Indymedia might be a useful comparison, since it was very much understood as a political network, where federation with the rest of the nodes was a political relationship, not an automated technical one, and the default answer to a request to join was "no", until a set of minimum conditions were met (I remember going through these for Aotearoa Indymedia). I suspect some people think this is what the fediverse is, or what they want it to be.

For me, the verse is a permissionless, open network, like the net and the web beneath it. Federation with other nodes is an automated technical relationship, not one based on any kind of political alignment, and the default answer to a request to federated is "yes", unless moderation conditions are met. If they are, this could result in Limit or Suspend actions, but these are case-by-case decisions made for each node by its admins, not at a network governance level.

Now, to be clear, you could certainly build an Indymedia-style activist media federation using fediverse tech. There are people trying to do that. I think its worth considering that they've made no noticeable progress, whereas the verse as a whole continues to grow in waves.

I have thoughts on why this might be, and I've expanded significantly on this comment in a blog post here: https://strypey.dreamwidth.org/4001.html

For me this, in large part, is a collective thing. While I may choose individually to block, I'd rather we made a collective decision in the spirit of co-operative decision-making and looked at it that way. (I realise that there have been opportunities to decide on a collective line).

@Luke

Yeah, that's a lot of the distinction I'm trying to get at with the most recent poll.

Another poll to vote in. Is there ever going to be a poll that actually makes the decision that we as a group need to make?

@Hollie Butler

I've been in information gathering mode, and I apologize if the polls have felt like too much.

Can you talk some about where you would like us to go, and any thoughts on how we might get there?

Looking at the previous two polls, I don't think that a proposal to defederate would be likely to pass at this time. The first poll suggests that the bulk of our members are happy with Limit as sufficient proactive moderation, and that the other options would make a large number of our members uncomfortable. The second poll suggests that more than half us wouldn't block Threads.net as an individual action. Unless the non-voting population is significantly different from the engaged group here, I'm not feeling optimistic for such a proposal, but please let me know if you are seeing something different.

It would also be helpful if you would share any thoughts on steps that you think would get us where we need to be.

@Dynamic What would help me a lot is understanding the process. Do we have one? I've been in co-ops before (specifically cohousing) and we knew what the process was, but here it's unclear to me what we're doing. It feels like just asking for everyone's opinion, and then their opinion again, and then their opinion again, etc. At what point do we make the actual decision and something gets put in place? I feel as though continually contributing my opinion via polls isn't really doing anything.

@Hollie Butler

With the caveat that I'm no kind of expert on social.coop's process, and that there doesn't seem to be a clear process for members to learn how the process works other than reading the documentation, here are the guidelines on making a proposal: https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Make_a_proposal

I guess I've been trying to do two things with this thread: 1) have a conversation about member values surrounding the Threads.net question, and 2) assess whether there are circumstances under which a proposal to defederate from Threads.net would pass. At this stage, I think the answer to the second question is "not at this time."

When voting on whether to Limit Threads.net, a number of people said that they hoped the proposal to Limit would soon be followed by a proposal to defederate / Suspend. A number of people also observed in that thread that our division on this question might point to a need for a values conversation.

Perhaps we could have had this conversation without the polls, but for me at least it was valuable to attach some kind of numbers to where different people were.

Threads should prove themselves before we federate. The company has a long history of being incredibly poor stewards of other people's information, and absolutely deplorable about moderating away racism and violent threats. What is the harm in waiting a year to see how well or poorly they manage privacy and moderation? Defederate now, assess again in a year or so.