A community index of servers added a new rule recently, that requires every participant to defederate from Threads. Some admins are unhappy.

Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.

  • @QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
    1•8 months ago

    But, I’m starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta

    This is an incorrect assumption, because

    And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

    I would be very interested to read this! There are definitely limits to my optimism here. I think Meta is a horrible company and I don’t expect them to act in the best interests of the Fediverse; I’m just not yet convinced that them giving up what is essentially free and ad-free API access to one of their platforms cannot be used to our advantage. Threads federation could absolutely be catastrophic, but it’s also possible that it’s a good opportunity; that’s all I’m saying.

    • @octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      This is an incorrect assumption, because

      And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

      In a non snarky way I say that if the dozens of actual past actions linked in the two wikipedia links, plus the recent events I linked, still leave you in doubt, I don’t see how a plausible but still speculative EEE summary is going to tip you over, but I’ll clap anyway if it does, so:

      https://lemmy.ml/comment/9792668

      Quoting @Gestrid@lemmy.ca :

      What’s the number of Threads users compared to Lemmy? If the number of Threads users greatly outweigh the number of Lemmy users, then we’d simply be drowned out by all the Threads posts. That’s part one of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

      Extend adds functionality to Threads that Lemmy either can’t support or won’t support for a while due to development time. People migrate to Threads because Lemmy is “missing” functionality. Plus, though I’m not clear on the exact legal specifications, proprietary code can be added to open-source code, and the proprietary code would be copyrighted. In other words, Lemmy devs would have to figure out a way to interact with and mimic Threads’ proprietary code using open-source code.

      Extinguish is when Threads’ support of Lemmy is eventually dropped. The users left on Lemmy have suddenly lost a huge amount of content, and they’re left with fewer users than before Threads enabled federation.

      There are definitely limits to my optimism here.

      I do feel a little bit bad being the table pounding pessimist in this circumstance, but I don’t see how one can look at this company’s history and come to any other conclusion. It frustrates me like few other areas of disagreement about tech do to imagine folks look at everything Meta has done and think we need to wait and see how they will handle this.

      Regardless, I appreciate the conversation. :)