Something I don’t understand currently about the whole Meta/Threads debacle is why I’m seeing talk about instances which choose to federate with Threads themselves being defederated. I have an account on mastodon.social, one of the instances which has not signed the fedipact, and I’ve had people from other instances warn me that their instances are going to defederate mastodon.social when Threads arrives.

I have no reason to doubt that, so, assuming that they are, why? I don’t believe instances behave as any kind of relay system: anybody who wishes to defederate from Threads can do so and their instances will not pull in Threads content, even if they remain federated to another instance which does.

I’m unsure how boosts work in this scenario, perhaps those instances are concerned that they’ll see Threads content when mastodon.social or other Threads-federated instances users boost it, or that their content will be boosted to Threads users? The two degrees of separation would presumably prevent that, so I can see that being a reason to double-defederate, assuming that is how boosts work (is it?).

Other than that, perhaps the goal is simply to split the fediverse into essentially two sides, the Threads side and the non-Threads side, in order to insulate the non-Threads side from any embrace, extend, extinguish behavior on Meta’s part?

Ultimately, my long term goal is just to use kbin to interact with the blogging side of the fediverse, but there are obviously teething issues currently, like some Mastodon instances simply aren’t compatible with kbin. I’m too lazy to move somewhere else only to move to kbin “again” after that, so in the short term I guess I’ll just shrug in the general direction of Mastodon.

To be clear, I have a pretty solid understanding of why people want to defederate Threads (and I personally agree that it’s a good idea), it’s the double-defederation I’m not sure I follow. Is my understanding at all close? Are there other reasons? Thanks for any insight.

  • shepherd@kbin.social
    20·
    1 year ago

    Hmm interesting. I do think it’s just as important that we double-defederate unfortunately. Meta/Threads has to be treated as if it’s contagious.

    If we stay federated with an instance that has accepted the Embrace, what do we do when the Extend happens? Is that when we defederate? Will we even recognize it?

    EEE only works because it’s difficult to see it happening to you. Instances that ally with Meta/Threads will actually present the same threat of EEE, or even a greater threat, because the Extend step may appear to come from non-Meta instances.

    Imagine ActivityPub upgrades developed by a Meta/Threads-ally, let’s say improved inter-instance moderator tools. That sounds good right?

    It’s basically all the exact same arguments again, but with a middle man.

    • Meta/Threads have different foundational priorities (namely, profit) and real incentives to monopolize.
    • Meta-ally instances have real and implied incentives to accommodate
      Meta/Threads.
    • And we have incentives to accommodate the instances that we federate with, so of course kbin would use the well-developed new mod tools right?
    • Seems crazy not to, even if it was developed by a Meta-ally. Right?
    • Great! Repeat for thousands of tiny changes, that’s called Extend.

    That’s how accepting EEE works, each little step looks great but big picture we’re unknowingly in trouble. We’ll have to treat any Meta/Threads-ally as if it is Meta/Threads. (Hell, some of them probably will be lol, the fediverse is just asking for astroturfing lol.)

    We can trust instances that don’t have economic incentives. But any instance that shows they can be swayed by money, or that shows they’ll accommodate instances driven by profit, well they’re showing that they’d consider eating us to become the next reddit.