Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?

I read your edit, you make very good points there and here. We really should leave the power in the hands of users/sub/community mods to decide what they want, rather than instance owners acting like sub mods and making blanket decisions for all their users. That's the reddit model.

I assume filtering requirements requires changes to the Lemmy code base, which if they don't already exist is surprising.

I see your point, and I think that we both simply have different views on what is more important, and there's no need to convince eachother. For me, one of the main advantages of the Fediverse is that you're not directly feeding analytics and algorithms of a large company that is trying to monetize and manipulate you through content that you see - a company which business model is literally to change your behavior (which is a hyperbole, but still a quite from Social Dillema), and it's really important for me to not give them any chance to do that. And I don't see a scenario under which we would federate with Meta (or another multi-billion company) and this would not happen - and even if they wouldn't be able to directly affect what you see in your feed, your data and behavior will still help them train their models and AIs to be better at it, even if you didn't interact with the instance. I simply don't see anything of value federating with meta would provide, that would be worth this, along with the really probable risk that Meta is simply going for EEE, as mentioned in the other comments. And I think this was the main idea of Fediverse - to have a network of community-ran instances, where you are not the product, but the actors are indeed benevolent and selfless.

But I also understand your point of view, because you are right that defederating with them by default goes against some of the principles of decentralized ecosystems, and that there is a lot of content and userbase that we would be missing on. For me, I don't really mind if the growth of Fediverse is slower, but the community has similiar values as I hold, and I'd rather see it fail because it tried to uphold them, than see it turn into, or be destroyed by, Meta. Be it planned as part of EEE, or only a casualty. But then again, that's my point of view and so I vote to defederate, but It's good that there's someone like you with opposite side of view. I also don't think that either side is wrong, we just have different views about what the Fediverse should be.

And one last thing - I don't feel like the example with email is fair, because it's comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users, and none of the risks there are with Meta federating would apply. I've tried comming up with a better comparison, but couldn't come up with anything for quite some time, so I'll just leave it as is. Maybe someone else can think of something.

If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all.

I, unfortunately have this thought unironically.. I (in the midst of a tumultuous social media period), just don't see non"large company" sites living long and prospering.. And I don't want to willingly give Meta even more... (in the "activating the 'instagram' threads" account. God that's confusing)

It's making me question my very existence on the "internet" in more than the "technical documentation vacuum" that I tend to be when I'm not reading Redd Lemmy..

But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so.

Hmm, that sounds fairly applicable to the Paradox of Tolerance, where the we are beholden to be inclusive to an industry that has a repeated history of running afoul in society.

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I appreciate the push to be more analytical. I thought that I was being analytical, but this challenge to my thinking has made me realize that I've not been thorough.

Edit: speaking of thorough, I missed including the founding principles of privacy-centric and ad-free. That would seem to disqualify Meta right out of the gate, just as most people seem to prefer.

Ethically, it would seem that admins are limited by that, although I suppose technically, they should wait and see what an instance does before making the decision to defederate.

Anyway, here's what I came up with should anyone decide to depart from the founding principles.

What our root concerns? I could be wrong but I think they are advertising, accuracy, and civility. Some people are concerned about sheer volume of new entrants, but I don't know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to address that concern.

Accuracy and civility are both moderation problems that the fediverse has to deal with whether Meta joins or not. Yes, there may be issues of scale and volume, but if the fediverse is to go mainstream, those problems need to be solved anyway.

There are forms of advertising that I think we could all live with in moderate amounts, but surveillance ads and malware have pretty much destroyed any tolerance for ads.

Okay, so how would ads get distributed in the fediverse?

1. Any instance could push ads of any type, in any volume to anyone registered on that instance. Any instance could collect data from anyone registered on that instance for serving surveillance ads on that instance or for direct sale to data brokers.
2. Any instance could push ads to anyone who subscribed to communities hosted on that instance, but would be severely limited in data collection without data sharing agreements between instances.
3. Anyone accessing an instance via web page could be served ads, including surveillance ads, whether logged in or not.
4. Anyone using a fediverse client could be served ads by that client, including surveillance ads.

1 through 4 are all instance-specific and can be avoided by any user who wishes to. There will always be nooks and crannies inside the fediverse that are free of ads and surveillance. The very existence of the fediverse is evidence that there is a critical mass of people to keep those spaces alive.

5, the client, has nothing to do with any instance or, in a sense, the fediverse. Clients can always do what a client wants. It's up to individuals to choose wisely.

So what are the potential benefits? If Meta comes it at Meta scale, then anyone currently using both Meta properties and the fediverse might be able to keep the value of both while using only a single platform. If people using a Meta property follow Meta into the fediverse, that can increase the variety of communities and make very niche communities viable.

My take is that the fediverse can cope with an entity like meta because nobody is forced to join their instance or interact with anything or anyone hosted on Meta.

There are a couple of caveats:

1. As previously noted, I don't know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to assess the risk of a very large influx of people over a very short period of time.
2. If "embrace, extend, extinguish" is truly a concern, then I think being vigilant with respect to "extend" will prevent "extinguish."

Risks/rewards for whom?

For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.

But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a "fediverse", where all instances' users can talk to one another if they choose. If that's what we care about, there's no choice here: federate, or you've already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta's content on their home page. Let's beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all @meta.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
• Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
• Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user's post or a @meta.com community post on "all" or "local". Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities. That's all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: "Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won't allow it. Go create an account there instead.". As soon as you do that, it's not a fediverse anymore.