Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web
www.timothychambers.net
With the upcoming #meta #Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining … However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the Fediverse public social graph today - Want proof? See here: is.gd/q8U2pv But what if they merge that Fediverse data with their own internal data from IG isn’t that worse than just scraped data?

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

  1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

  2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

  3. Defederate (wait and see)

  4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

  5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

  • @[email protected]
    2•1 year ago

    I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.

    Means the instance isn’t part of the hive mind and we obviously can’t have that!

    • @[email protected]
      -2•1 year ago

      I am a fediverse enthusiast and I am excited for Threads federating. I hope it incentivises Tumblr to federate also and then we actually finally have proper choice.

      • Kerrigor
        8•1 year ago

        I see you’re not familiar with EEE. This is a classic move by enterprise to kill an open competitor.

        • @[email protected]
          0•1 year ago

          I am. How could they kill the fediverse? If they tried to kill it, it would only return to how things was. Chances are tumblr could join in and then they couldn’t easily extinguish it.

          • Kerrigor
            7•1 year ago

            Ever heard of XMPP?

            If a single party participating in an open standard is large enough, they can go off the track, and then kill off interoperability.

              • @[email protected]English
                6•1 year ago

                It’s blatantly wrong. Google extended XMPP for their own purposes and when participating with XMPP no longer suited them, they left. The collapse of the “XMPP userbase” is a misnomer - those users were never XMPP users. They were Google Chat users. When Google left, XMPP was in the same state it was in before Google got on board. It returned to its status as a niche protocol for a service that, as @[email protected] points out, people didn’t really want anymore.

              • NineEnglish
                2•1 year ago

                I completely agree with this take!

            • effingjoe
              2•1 year ago

              I feel like people read a comment that linked XMPP with EEE and keep parroting it while not understanding it.

              XMPP still exists, but people largely don’t want “Instant Messaging” anymore. They don’t want to care about whether the person is online before they can send a message.

              Google dropping support for XMPP didn’t do that, it’s what caused them to drop it. They moved on to what people wanted: asynchronous messaging.

              This concern about the now overused “EEE” stuff is blown away out of proportion.

              • Kerrigor
                9•1 year ago

                They’re well-established now. A behemoth like Meta entering upends everything. Especially if they gain traction over the next year.