So I saw a recent post on lemmy from admins of another instance, forgive me for not remembering which, where they posted a full transparency update on Meta requesting a meeting with the admins of that instance. The admins declined, and then shared the correspondence with their community via screenshots of the original email from meta and their response.

My question is did @ruud@lemmy.world or any other lemmy.world admins get a similar invite, and if so, did you accept/attend?

I’m curious, because as far as I know lemmy.world has not made their stance on defederation from meta/threads very clear, not even to say that they weren’t sure or didn’t have a stance yet.

So, lemmy.world admins, If you did attend this off the record meeting, I’m sure they have some sort of agreement with you that the discussion stays off the record… But could you at least confirm or deny if you were invited to and/or attended such a meeting?

Edit: it was mastodon instance admins for Fosstodon here’s a link: https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836 but my question still stands and I think the lemmy.world community deserves an answer.

  • jocanib@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    The 3rd argument for defederation:

    ➡️ To defend against being “Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished.”

    This is a real risk, and others point to Google and Facebook and XMPP, or Google and RSS Google reader. Where a big entity takes over, then rug pulls or extends an open standard slowly into a non-standard, non-interoperable functionally siloed service.

    This is a real risk. But you don’t - and can’t - defend against this by defederation.

    Why not? Because even if the entire existing Fedi pre-blocked them. Instagram has 1.6 BILLION users. If they push this, in one day just on their own they will be the size of the current Fedi’s monthly user base, and then grow from there.

    Virtually Instantly, they become the biggest ActivityPub entity on the planet. With or without a mass block.

    Some instances defederating is precisely what should happen. But all instances defederating is committing suicide to avoid being murdered.

    • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      1 year ago

      … that is not one of the three things I was describing.

      And how does everyone pre-emptively defederating lead to our death anyway? How does it kill us?

          • jocanib@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            XMPP, famously, died when Google dominated the network and then defederated. Leaving XMPP users no choice but to sign up with Google to keep in touch with the bulk of google users who were no longer there.

            Threads does not need to embrace to extinguish, it has 1.6b accounts ready to activate and now over 100m activated in the first three days. Universal defederation will drive a lot of Fedi-users to Threads simply because, if you’ve come from sites with hundreds of millions of users (Twitter and Reddit), it’s going to be very difficult for many to recreate the breadth and depth of content here, and certainly not as quickly.

            The Fediverse would technically survive, as XMPP did. But it would likely shrink, not grow.

            • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              Bout time someone engaged with intelligent arguments. Thank you, I was starting to worry we were going downhill faster than I thought.

              Where I disagree is that mass defederation will drive our users away. I draw a line in the sand between quality work and average work. Most of Zuck’s offerings are the garbage of the planet. Same appeal as McDonalds and reality television and Trump. Simple, quick, cheap.

              We are, frankly, better than that. I think our quality will protect us from heavy loss of users so long as we maintain enough independent identity to actually be something different.

              • jocanib@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                I don’t disagree with that. Threads’ biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: we’ve never seen a huge network establish overnight before and it will struggle to develop a culture outside of what Meta serves up via algorithm.

                But my niche subs on Reddit had a few thousand users, still only just enough to keep them useful. And it required Reddit’s 50 million (daily) users to provide that many.

                There will be a lot of people who want the smaller network. But many of the Twitter/Reddit refugees don’t, really. And that’s where Fedi-growth is coming from right now.

                • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Our best actual growth strategy from here on out is something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to. I think we need to rely on how niche, but also how connected we are.

                  Once the Federation is more interoperable, which should improve as we develop and scale up, we can pull steady, but small, numbers of users from a broad range of services.

                  Mastodon can’t compete with Twitter. What we need is basically the Fediverse to become a competitor of the whole internet, in a manner of speaking.

                  • jocanib@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    2·
                    1 year ago

                    There are several potentially very large corporate instances in the works. My hope is that they can hold each other hostage because it’ll be so easy for their users to jump ship. They can embrace but they might not be able to extinguish.