Fair, although to

The only ones who’d do it are the ones who are pissed at Twitter alone, and short-sighted enough to not realise that the issue with Twitter applies to traditional social media as a whole.

in particular I would as usual argue that such a large proportion of social media users aren’t into it (“it” being socialization via digital media) for ideological reasons that they functionally drown out all other reasons. It’s not a bad reason, I just don’t think it’s going to even show up in any statistic.

This is a dangerous type of question as it implies we need a reason to add federation. Instead of being federated being the default state, hence the question would be about benefits of defederation.

And like I said above, it’s not like there isn’t potential benefits to that. But it’s important to keep in mind that not only might we be misinterpreting why Meta is adding federation (I’ll stick to my explanation, it’s not about the actual federation it’s about pre-empting regulation) we might end up making their use-case stronger (“we tried to add interoperability, no one else was interested, so that’s why we aren’t doing it” might be a valid excuse to lawmakers).

On a bigger-than-just-meta picture, it’s also important to keep in mind that should the concept of federation take off, Meta will not be the only commercial company pushing into federated applications, especially if lawmakers start pushing into that direction in the EU. In other words, defederating Meta would merely delay the inevitable, and it might be less of a waste of time to focus on how to ensure the protocol itself works against bad faith actors gaining too much power - which, might I add, can also exist on a smaller scale. If you only got 100 users, a 90 user instance controls 90% of the federated space, and can just as well exert pressure onto the protocol itself, we just trust instance owners to not do that right now, in particular the really big ones.

Again, note that I do not list benefits. Like I said, that’s the wrong direction to inquire in.

Of providing sources? Generally that whatever argument you’re making cannot be trivially discarded because it is based on unproven assumptions and hypothesis. That doesn’t mean the argument is making a wrong point, rather that the argument is invalid as an argument.

That is to say, defederation might be the right conclusion, but as OP hints at, not for the reasons commonly stated around Lemmy or Mastodon because those make assumptions about what Meta is doing, why they are doing it, and more importantly, how being defederated affects them.

I would have thought the right, symbolizing how they could bring a critical bigger mass of people without the various smaller instances they gather under (all the screens on the left island). But I might be misunderstanding it entirely.

Money is going to be involved at some point, better make the rules now before meta does.

That’s a really good point. Defederation might delay things, but should the fediverse as a concept take off, we will see big commercial players move in. One way or another. Need to be ahead of the game and regulate it.

It’s not extinguishing, people just need to check their expectations.

It’s like when people blame Google for “extinguishing” XMPP. As if XMPP needed any help towards irrelevancy. It was perfectly fine of seeing itself out. If you’re small enough, you cannot prevent “socialisation” from congregation to someone else who is inherently bigger. The whole idea of social is to be, well, social.

Small setups can work fine for specialized environments (example: The current one right here) but they will only feel as if they are big due to a lack of alternatives. As soon as one rolls around (like when the criticial flood from digg to reddit happened) the smaller place becomes hyper-specialized and quite niche.

And that’s hardly special, or even requires an open-vs-commercial or federated-vs-not debate. That’s a very general thing in how we socialized. There’s a reason everyone konga-lines to the largest mastodon/lemmy instances.

There is literally no benefit for us allowing them to integrate with any of our explicitly non-corporate platforms

Source?

But there is a huge (and in their eyes profitable) benefit for them.

Again, source? "If there weren’t, they wouldn’t try. " is a bit weird, when the reason is so painfully obvious and relates to EU regulation and wanting to pre-empt any issues by showing interoperability and an open protocol. If you know of profit-based use cases beyond that, do share the sources please.

No means no. Never means never. No Meta. The extremism, the “big symbolic action,” it’s all warranted. Block them. Block them forever.

Interesting. Did you know that just recently a major social media site took such an extreme stance against third party apps? Blocked them forever?

Yeah that’s the part people miss. “They’ll harvest the data!” … oh noes? They’ll read the public data. How shocking. I am truly without words.

(Also, people should not post things publically if they don’t expect that information to be, well, public)

Because, once Threads pulls off the plug (eventually they will want to), Mastodon won’t be some small but stable network; it’ll be a shrinking one, and that’s way worse.

I don’t think that’s effective.

Scenerio: federated
Mastodon users stay on Mastodon, but interact with Threads. Threads eventually pulls the plug on federation. Assuming Threads ever reached critical mass, a vast amount of mastodon users now create threads accounts and move over, because well, their social circle is there.

Scenario: defederated
Assuming threads gains critical mass, a vast majority of mastodon users now create threads accounts and move over, because well, their social circle is there.

The impetus is the social engagement. Social media without the social is not really useful, so if all their friends are on platform xyz, they’ll use platform xyz. It does not matter in the slightest (at least, at scale!) what that platform is. WhatsApp, iMessage, vBulletin, Reddit, whatever. Sure, splintergroups exist but their of ignorable size either way, meaning the people who are currently sticking to Mastodon would not move fully over to threads in either scenario - that’s why they’re here right now, basically.

I’m more worried about the load if it truly gets big and mastodon and threads interact a lot, tbh.

Yeah but the point was probably more that the data is intentionally public. It shouldn’t matter whether Meta gets it through federation or opening the web page and reading it. It’s public information, just publicized automatically.

Thank you for being the example of how not to effectively work against Meta.

Yeah but there needs to be an “explicitly not this one”-rank, and if you have to also rank republicans in the US, a whole lot of those.

There are votes here where you have 5 votes. You can split them or keep them together, your pick.

Yeah I’m playing that right now, and I’m honestly massively impressed.

It is utterly boring and rote, in a lot of ways. It’s a 95% Far Cry (as in, it’s slightly weaker than Far Cry mechanically, which I didn’t think was even possible) in the world of Pandora. Some of Far Cry’s mechanics like the camps didn’t translate as well as the devs thought they would, plus the enemy AI is just bullshit, but luckily the game is easy overall as your longbow is extremely OP.

But, on the flipside, fucking hell does this game sell “Pandora”. More so than the movies, even the first one for the time it came out. Walking through and flying over the jungle is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s not just the texture/model designers that deserve a bonus payout: The actual jungle design is superb, too. And the level + sounds designers also created individual setpieces (like the trip up the rookery) that create the perfect feeling in that moment and are really memorable.

It’s in a lot of ways extremely well done. It’s also by Ubisoft and is a Far Cry reskin, which sadly massively limits how good it can be overall. I wish they had let the designers run wild and create their own thing. But it’s still an impressive game and far better than I thought it’d be, even if it’s all show.

Oh, in that case I might have worded my post badly. I explicitly meant non-critical stuff would make sense to not openly show. There’s so much that can go beepy beep on moder wheeled computers that showing it all to the user would result in needing 10x the telephone support staff.

And there’s a lot that’s perfectly fine to leave as it is, and just have someone look at it the next time it’s in for a check-up anyways.

For stuff where the car can break down, yeah fuck no, don’t hide that. I was mostly musing how to do a shown/hide split in a sensible manner.

What do you mean? Is Wyoming big on electric cars? (No clue, not from the US)

given how prescient FB has been on buying companies that grew to become staples, like WhatsApp and Instagram

• Whatsapp was bought for 19 bil, at a time when it was #3 in the US and dominant in major parts of the world. It’s buying it about 5 years too late to be “prescient” about it.
• Instagram was a better deal, but far from “buying it before it grows big”. bought for 1 bil two years after it launched it was already well on track for 20 million users. If they had bought it a year earlier they would have gotten it really cheap, granted. They bought it right after it exploded.

Now, I’m not saying Facebook wouldn’t love to buy competitors, but the examples are kinda weird, in particular WhatsApp. Plus again, the fediverse is so tiny the only reason someone at Facebook probably knows about it is because a lawyer told them to tell 3 engineers to get this done, by which point they didn’t even read the wikipedia and just told them to do it because legal says they should.

Read more than the headline before you post, tbh.

(edit)
Changed this because to be fair, if English isn’t your primary language you might be unaware that you can lose a court case, not only profits or market share. The word is used in a lot of contexts.

Damn, this makes me dread ever taking a train in the US. 😅