Discussion: Values and priorities regarding Threads.net

@Doug Belshaw

Do you think I should close the poll?

@Doug Belshaw

For now I've added a strikethrough of the part about Sociocracy, as I'm realizing I don't really know what I'm talking about with regard to that term. (Edit: on further reflection, I just deleted that clause entirely. I don't think it's helpful to the democratic process for me to document my own uncertainties about language so prominently.)

Getting away from the poll and back to the original question, what are our concerns?

I don't love the "Facebook is evil" focus I've been hearing in much of the conversation -- not because I disagree (it's a giant impersonal multi-national, of course it's at least somewhat evil), but because I find it unhelpful. If they have reason to do bad things to us, and the power to do so, I entirely agree that they will likely do so -- but so far, I'm unconvinced that they have either the motivation or power. (Nor that us federating or not necessarily ameliorates most of the likely bad things they might do.)

Also, Threads isn't going to be the last possibly-malign corporate actor connecting to the Fediverse. So it would be helpful for us to figure out, in general, what constitutes acceptable behavior for such instances.

So I think it's more interesting to tease out the likely risks, and figure out our red lines; hopefully that will clarify this sort of discussion, now and in the future.

Tossing out one that Threads might pass, and I'm willing to give them a chance, but I think it's fairly likely that they will fail: moderation quality. For example, it's pretty well-established that allowing Nazi harassers is a red line for banning instances.

Threads doesn't get a pass there, IMO. If their members harass people -- especially people on Fedi -- without consequences, then that is solid grounds to suspend them.

That's just a start. I think the question being asked at the top of this thread is exactly right. Let's figure out what our minimum requirements are, and what are the grounds for defederation, and then hold Threads to the same standard. I honestly think the odds are against them making six months before failing (hence, I think that starting them off Limited makes sense, to reduce the chance of serious damage), but I'd be happier if we create a rubric, and evaluate Threads against it.

@Justin du Coeur

Thanks for launching a more freeform discussion here.

As one answer to your question, one risk that I don't think is taken seriously enough is Embrace-Extend-Extinguish (EEE), which has been clearly laid out from the beginning by advocates of distancing ourselves from Threads.net, but has also been repeatedly and (IMO inappropriately) dismissed as not relevant because ActivityPub is so mainstream now compared to Jabber at the time that Google killed it.

I've described several times how I imagine this scenario playing out, most recently here: https://social.coop/@dynamic/110741518193656318

Opening the gates to federation with an instance as large as Threads.net is expected to be will dramatically shift the composition of the feeds of those who choose to embrace it, and people will adjust their behavior accordingly. If an instance that large suddenly withdraws federation, the space will seem suddenly very quiet, and people will feel less desire to come to the fediverse, which would be expected to have cascading effects for people who follow them.

I don't see this as a serious threat to instances that choose not to engage with large corporate instances that are likely to have an EEE intention, but I do see it as a threat to instances that do.

@Dynamic Fair -- what I'm unsure about is how much Limiting is going to reduce the impact there. I suspect it will do so substantially; how much is pretty subjective and hard to predict.

There's also a question of whether pre-suspending Threads just advances that risk. I mean, it's fairly easy to see where Threads is likely to have an advantage, primarily in US-based celebrity and entertainment content.

(Is Threads really going to help keeping up with friends and family? I'm unconvinced -- I think their strength is more likely to be passive consumption, drawing in much of the passive Twitter readership, many of whom read vastly more than post AFAIK. I could be wrong here, but remember that Mastodon is really, really weird in how much interaction we have: major posters coming here from Twitter remark on that all the time. I expect Threads to be a lot more like Twitter than Mastodon.)

If we pre-suspend, that content will never be available in the first place. Does that cause more or less damage than suspending later? I don't think it's clear.

All that said, it's a totally fair concern, and I don't think there's anywhere near enough evidence yet to guess which way this issue will fly in reality.

@Justin du Coeur

My operating assumption is that Threads would have quite a bit in common with Facebook, which does rely heavily on interactions between users. I imagine it would be similar to Twitter in ways that Facebook isn't, but Meta clearly has the ability to create platforms that are more social that Twitter, and I think it would be unwise to make assumptions otherwise.

@Justin du Coeur

I have no model whatsoever for how proactively Suspending Threads.net could advance a risk of EEE. Can you elaborate on how this would play out?

@Justin du Coeur

remember that Mastodon is really, really weird in how much interaction we have: major posters coming here from Twitter remark on that all the time.

Could you expand on what major posters who moved from Twitter to Mastodon say about the level of interaction on Mastodon?

@Dynamic The concern about pre-suspending is less about EEE per se at this stage, more about irrelevance, which is basically the heart of EEE.

I mean, EEE isn't some sort of magic spell that extinguishes competition -- it's about a mega-Corp managing to make their system look more useful in the public eye than the open version. The traditional formulation thinks about that being about features, but really, it tends to be about network size. Features -- the "extend" part -- come into play as a way to promote incompatibility, thereby cutting the open parts of the network off, reducing their network size, and making them less appealing than the proprietary version.

So the risk of pre-suspending is that, by narrowing the scope of our own federated network, we make it less useful to people than more open instances, and thus gradually lose membership and slide into irrelevance.

I don't know whether being able to connect to Threads will turn out to matter that much, but I think it's a significant risk.

@Matt S - matts Hmm. Unfortunately, the lack of good history search on Mastodon makes it challenging to cite sources.

After Twitter started exposing better metrics (in the hope of making it look more appealing, which completely backfired), I saw several folks with followers in thousands-to-tens-of-thousands (okay, "major" is relative) giving stats that, while they had far more followers on Twitter, the number of interactions they were receiving per-post was far higher on Mastodon.

(I think Teri Kanefield was one of the folks who said this; I'm pretty sure there were at least a couple of others, but I don't know who; sorry.)

Granted, that's anecdotal evidence, and the hellscape of modern Twitter is hard to extrapolate from. But it fits with my general sense of cultural differences.