Meta

I think it's really worth watching this Flipboard interview/podcast with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon.

https://flipboard.video/w/cTBu4HusskGTuPBahqm6WY

He sees it as a good thing, and I'm inclined to trust his judgement - it lets us share our ideals and culture with a broader audience, it lets us engage with a larger amount of content (if we want to), and we still have the power to block it at any point if we decide it's a bad thing. Pre-emptive defederation takes the power out of users hands, only grants more power to large silicon valley corporations, and is self-defeating if the goal is to try to move to a federated web.

Also, their federation is likely to have a near non-existent impact on aussie.zone, given we're a link-aggregation platform and not a microblog like Mastodon or Kbin.

I'm deeply conflicted about this, I want federation with big services, I think that is part of the raison d'etre of #activitypub.

But I know the risks, I'm old enough to remember #Microsoft embracing and extinguishing the browser, #Goggle defederating from #XMPP and #Facebook predatory tactics.

Also, I'm starting to think that federation with the big players is unstoppable. The protocol is open and there is no way to get every instance operator on board with the #fedipact . If people want to see the big players' content they'll move to an instance that federates with them. And defederating from those that connect to threads sounds like a Zealot's suicide pact.

Ideally we'd need some kind of legal protection, that makes big services accoutable for what they do with open protocols, but the best we can hope is that the threat of such legislation being enacted will scare the bigs ones into playing fair.

In the mean while there are no technical measures that I can think of and the social measures are unlikely to work. The only thing we can do is to enter into this with open eyes, aware of our history and hope for the best.

@lodion@aussie.zone

Personally I think this is ridiculous.

First, there's the simple fact that Lemmy's interaction with Threads will likely be the same relatively rare/limited interaction we currently have with Mastodon. People might show up to comment from time to time, and we'll be able to @mention their users. But that's about it. It's not a serious issue for Lemmy instances to be concerned about.

But second, I think pre-emptive defederation here, regardless of whether we're talking about Lemmy or Mastodon instances, is ridiculous. If they start doing bad things, it is trivial to defederate at that time. If they don't, we're much better off letting them participate and benefit from the increased number and variety of users with whom we can interact thanks to their participation in the fediverse.

Don't fall for FUD when there's an opportunity knocking.