I do the same! It works quite well.

Absolutely fair enough. Am happy to agree to disagree. I enjoyed the debate haha!

And yes, you have a good point: Meta would indeed get value through federation, and perhaps you don’t want to support Meta’s goals, so you don’t want to allow them to proceed. Perhaps we could enhance our user/community level moderation tools to achieve these goals? Maybe you as a user could say something like “never shall any of my posts be sent to Meta’s instance”. Or maybe community mods could say “Meta users can’t join/post/see our community”. I’m even happy if instances enable such filters by default! I just don’t think defederation is the right tool for the job, because it defeats the vision of a connected universe.

I don’t feel like the example with email is fair, because it’s comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users

Yeah, but I believe the principle holds.

Again, thanks for the opposing viewpoint. Glad we had the debate. Cheers!

I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven’t convinced me yet :)

I’m in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit “the fediverse” for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.

But… my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all. And, even if it does, it’s not as valuable to me that way, so I’ll be leaving. What’s the value of a fediverse if it doesn’t even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?

This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.

I honestly don’t think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don’t call it a “fediverse”. It’s just a forum. Would we say that it’s fair for Google to say “From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don’t agree with them”?

EDIT 1: I haven’t made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.

EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.

So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta’s Threads?

That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.

Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they’ll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they’re launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:

1. We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
2. We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.

What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the “fediverse” are people without resources, then what’s even the point? Who wants an email service that can’t send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?

The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I’d prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.

EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:

We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
• Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
• Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
• Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.

That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

I like this one: !git@programming.dev