I would like to know if I can feel safe here

If you have privacy concerns, you should probably not post here for time being.

It is prototype software. Doesn't remove EXIF geotags from photos, for example and posts here are public (and indexed by webcrawlers). Treat this as "open Internet" for your safety/privacy purposes.

It's not much of privacy I'm concerned about as much as community and visibility.

Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users, meanwhile from what I have seen from kbin and lemmy, there is a lot more nuance and maturity in the communities here (for the most part) that I would hate to see overun by Thread users.

Secondly, it's one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me. The fact that the fediverse is a prototype with vulnerabilities makes the likelihood of a company like Meta, who intentionally exploits vulnerabilities to harvest data, all the more likely.

Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks, and I have no reason to believe Facebook won't do this. If I'm going to invest time and effort into making a community grow, I would rather not waste my time on a platform that is doomed to be consumed.

Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users

With this I agree. 1.2bn users is way more noise than I want to experience and I will, personally block the domain. As a kbin user, you'll have the tools available for that as well.

Secondly, it's one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me.

To think that the big companies that base their business models solely on datamining users already haven't been mining the shit out of our data is a bit naive, I think. They don't have to exploit vulnerabilities, make their presence known or launch huge products for it. All they (or anyone!) need is a $20/month linux VPS and a Mastodon installation. The fediverse does not have data privacy controls for content (beyond masking account e-mails/originator IPs).

Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks

I agree. Threads got 10M signups yesterday and they haven't even launched officially yet. They're already larger than the entire fediverse.
Many people will switch to their app. And at some point, they will most likely make interoperability hard (so we have to adapt to their "bugs" instead of it being the other way around).

I just want to make clear that I'm in the "Defederate the shit out of them"-camp, but I also don't think the fediverse is a place that puts privacy first - if privacy is your concern, then my advice is to stay away from fedi. For now.

Right....
BUT -

You aren't going to see ANY of those 1.2bn users, until someone on THIS server follows someone on THAT server. That's the point of federation. It isn't like Twitter - you don't just see everything that everyone over there posts. It's no different on Mastodon - there has to be a social connection before posts start showing up here.

Put another way, if hateful stuff starts showing up on the Fediverse from meta users, it is because someone on the Fediverse is following the people posting hateful stuff.

When meta eventually starts federating - you aren't going to see posts from @asjmcguire until someone here is following my account.

As for if meta makes changes that makes federating hard, that's not our problem. If they make changes that make federating with THEM hard, that's their problem. There is no reason the rest of the fediverse needs to follow what changes meta make. It doesn't hurt us if they break federation with the rest of the fediverse. Meta is in reality no different to mastodon in that regard, it's just another platform - but for example Pixelfed isn't going to bend over backward to make life easier for meta.

But if you go to https://kbin.social/d/threads.net (obviously doesn't work yet), then you can block the whole instance, yourself, for your own account. It has the same effect as the server defederating, but it only affects you.

The only reason why that solution wouldn't be acceptable is if you believe so strongly against the very concept of Threads that you want to make that choice for everyone else. You want to forcibly hit that button on everyone's account and push your beliefs and opinions onto others.

If you simply don't like Meta, that's fine - I get it. I want to use FOSS stuff to see my friends. I want my friends to appear in my feed, and I want their hashtags to be sorted into my magazines. My wish to see my friends is just as valid as your wish to not see anyone from Threads. While Threads has some questionable people, they aren't the majority. It's much better for me to block the individual accounts that cause problems than it is for me to lose the ability to talk to all my friends.

Kbin gives you the power to go to the domain and block it yourself; this isn't Lemmy. Why do you want to take that choice away from everyone who is okay with people from Threads in their feed?

I don't want to take away that choice. I personally don't have a problem with meta joining the fediverse, and in fact today I downloaded the app and created my account. I'm excited by the possibilities of being able to speak to my friends from my Mastodon account.

My point was more for the people who think that suddenly 1.2bn users are going to be showing up in this kbin instance.

That's fair, reading it again I see I misunderstood you. :)

I apologize if I seemed hostile; I just get frustrated with people wanting to block whole instances here without cause (like the instance being primarily trolls or hate speech). On Lemmy it makes sense since only the admins can block domains (and it applies to everyone), but Kbin allows domain-level blocking on an individual level so it makes a lot less sense here.

what you (and other likeminded people) haven't understood is that these 2 are 2 different topics. Defederating with meta is not because people don't want to be near the users of meta. It is because meta is a huge corp and it is not here to promote the idea of a federated network. It is here to make profit and to exploit the network. Allowing them to be part of the same network will just cause harm to the network itself in the end.

I suggest you reading this article https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html which is the story of how google killed XMPP, written by one of the XMPP core developers. I believe you will see the similarities.

@asjmcguire

I think misunderstand. I do understand that. I used XMPP. I've read that article.

My argument is that the fedipact, if executed as desired by the people running it, will defederate from Meta and anywhere that federates with Meta.

So now you have 2 fediverses, completely separated from one another. One side has Meta; the other doesn't. If I want to post something and I want people to see it and react to it, I will post it to the side with more people. If I want to scroll endlessly without needing to stop and refresh or wait because the feed is stale, I will look at the side with more people.

The other side - the fedipact side - will slowly become stale and niche. There will always be hardcore users - people still use XMPP - but it will fade into what it was in 2020 and 2021. My Lemmy account - @EnglishMobster - is from 2020. My original Mastodon account is even older. I've seen this place grow and blossom into what it is now, and the fedipact is threatening that growth. People will leave the side of the fedipact and join the side without it... which is to say, the side dominated by Meta.

Instead of a big wide fediverse with open source projects living alongside random PeerTube creators living alongside movie stars... we have 1 niche one and 1 dominated by a large corporation. It's literally the same result as if Meta went through with Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... but done without the "extend" or "extinguish", a massive "own goal" by the FOSS community.

And worse - it doesn't stop Facebook from going through with "extend" or "extinguish" later. It literally just destroys communities for no reason, leaving us in the exact same situation that XMPP is in today.

I am fine with an instance saying "we won't federate with Threads". I'd rather it not be Kbin, of course, but I will move to an instance that does federate because my friends are important to me.

I am not fine with me being held hostage for that. I don't want to join Threads directly if I can avoid it; I'd rather use my Kbin account. But the fedipact is trying to make that impossible by saying "we will defederate anywhere that federates with Threads".

If I want to post something and I want people to see it and react to it, I will post it to the side with more people

If that's the case, presumably you're in the fediverse for other reasons. If audience size is central to you, wouldn't you be on reddit and insta/facebook?

To an extent, but morality is important to me too.

I don't use Facebook because they corrupt democracy. I don't use Twitter because Elon Musk is a wannabe fascist. I don't use Reddit because they have refused to clamp down on bad actors and have directly insulted their users.

If everyone defederates from Threads, I won't use Threads, because I don't use Facebook. My morals are more important to me than audience size.

But... as things stand, once Threads federates with the wider world, I will be able to interact with my friends without letting Zuck near me. In a most ideal world, they'd be able to follow me here on Kbin and I can follow them back. I'd see their posts in the Microblog feed and sorted into magazines, and I can like and comment and boost without logging into Zuck's website and letting him have my data again.

You can say that's supporting Facebook. Maybe. But if Threads is truly federated, then Facebook would basically be able to go anywhere regardless; in that sense I'd be supporting Threads whether I was talking to someone directly or not.

And in that sense, I totally see why people say "we shouldn't federate with Meta, they're evil and they're selfish and they're going to destroy the fediverse." I can understand why people personally would want to choose somewhere that doesn't do that. I don't think this instance should block Meta because it's large and general-purpose, but somewhere like Beehaw where that sort of thing is part of the mission statement... I get it.

But from my perspective, I am given the chance to talk to a large group of people; people who share the same interests as me; people I know in real life. People who would see my stuff - but (more importantly) I'd also see theirs. And I'm sure most people feel the same way; they're going to where the people are. This'll naturally create an audience, one that gives a wide variety of fresh content and also responds to content you give.

I'd much rather have that then return to 2020-era Mastodon where you'd be lucky to get 3 interactions to a Toot, and you'd see everything there is to see in 15 minutes (at most).

I think I might have misunderstood your wider point. The part where you were positing a hypothetical in which the fediverse splits and one side has Meta. I thought you were saying you will align with the Meta side because of audience size.

Which kind of implies that if Meta then moves into the Extend Extinguish phases you would end up at Threads?