Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.

Literal fascist rhetoric. Seriously wtf.

The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook's Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I've used the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Consume", to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they're so big, most instances will comply in the service of "content".

Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it's users and non-users.

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for "user safety", where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add "secure messaging" (lol, it's facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it's public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
• Meta's algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-"paid"/"verified" Threads users.
• It's already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

Instance Admins, and the "Friendliness" of Meta

Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do "due dilligence", but I've seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn't make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta's orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they'd probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

Note on This Post

I've realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don't have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p

This is an awesome victory for fast food workers and unions. People constantly shit on the folks working in customer service and kitchen jobs, but they are often gruelling and unpleasant. The people there certainly deserve it more than the CEOs and shareholders exploiting them (I mean, I'm against the entire structure, but if we're working within that structure, then ye ^.^).

Yet another vitally important front in the war on general purpose computing (it's a short and important read imo)

Fuck Google, and fuck DRM.

"Gender updates" is the best term i've heard for transitioning in a while. I'm stealing it now, the bigots can't have it. 󰱫

(also note for anyone reading: the term "tankie" refers to people who embrace authoritarianism and usually specific self-declared "socialist" states repressing civilians, often modern day states that don't even pretend to be socialist like Russia, or the CCP, or North Korea/DPRK, or even just any nation considered "anti-West" regardless of their behaviour or internal political structure x.x

It started when parts of the Communist Party of Great Britain split off from the main party because the main party supported the USSR crushing (with tanks) Hungarian socialists trying to break off from the USSR, for a number of reasons - others were involved too, but the worker councils themselves were major parts of the uprising - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie and https://en.wikipedia.org/... - there were attempts at worker council parlimentary democracy and such, as well as attempts for direct-democracy ^.^

The most recent Tankie Thing is supporting Russia for invading Ukraine, or doing weird enlightened-centrism on it because the USA gives support to Ukraine. More broadly, tankies generally seem to act as if any act by another country is always less bad than the USA, and that only the USA can be imperialist, or various variations on this concept >.<.

It should be noted that the right wing have started to some degree calling all leftists tankies and IMO anyone should reject this attempted co-option of the word because it allows people to falsely conflate leftism with tankie ideologies, even though they are often a small minority in IRL leftist activism, with more common groups being anarchists, democratic socialists, some Marxists (even some Marxist-Leninists, which itself is a controversial term tbh), various libertarian socialisms and communisms, and the odd further-left social democrat ^.^)

"Yale Police Benevolent Association" is such a dystopian name. Real "Ministry of Truth" vibes :/

Say you're a control freak without saying you're a control freak 🤣

I really want to know the AI prompt used to make this :p

My point is that defederation is our defense against corporate interests. And Facebook isn't just "a corporation", it's specifically a known hostile actor with massive experience in social manipulation. It's not a perfect defense, but you don't resist corporate subsumation by letting them straight through the door.

Power being priced negative is awesome. We need more of it imo, make energy so abundant that it makes processes that were previously too energy-intensive viable, and enables a massive increase in both residential and grid storage capacity.

My opinion is that Na-ion batteries are the way for bulk grid storage and apartment/home storage nya.

They use hyper abundant materials and are now reaching the point of decent endurance, and if you arent bothered by them being heavy (as is the case for grid and residential storage), they're fairly comparable to Li-Ion without the usage of relatively rare Lithium.

Never let the nazis gaslight you or certain american media channels try to pan away and deemphasise what he did in their footage. If anyone tries to claim this was not a nazi salute, just point them to this few-seconds-long comparison video, maybe download with yt-dlp (cw: nazis doing nazi stuff like chanting) nya.

Also I'm autistic and nazi salutes are not stimming or simple social difference or whatever.

Stims are usually repetitive and/or simple motions or behaviours or similar (e.g. I stim by jumping up and down or repeating phrases or spinning my arms in circles, sometimes from happiness and sometimes as a way to regulate emotions), and not a complex deliberate action. That salute was a deliberate and non-repetitive action. I could see the bit at the start where he walks around and moves his arms up and down repeatedly being a stim, but the other stuff? And specifically the nazi salute? No.

Plus autistic people are not on the whole less capable of understanding ethics^1 or empathising (though we may have trouble reading non-autistic social cues or emotional states and thought processes, but if we understand what someone is feeling we experience empathy, though of course there are variations on that just like with non-autistic people, if you want to know more just look up the double empathy problem :p). He knows what he was doing.

I'm sick of people (usually bad faith actors of course but still) blaming this shit on autisticness and autistic people. Its like people think that being autistic just means being a dick and not caring about other people (of course, there are plenty of dickish autistic people just like there are of any other group of people nya). And its especially disgusting given that Nazis attempted to genocide us.

I do understand that not everyone understands autism very well but come on.... its such bullshit <.<

1: some studies suggest autistic people are actually more likely to follow their own sense of ethics even without social pressure when it would benefit them to break it, though these kinds of tests are done in very limited circumstances and I've not really looked at them in that much detail

If we defederate, they can technically pull our content because it's public, but it's difficult, and their users won't be able to interact with it.

We would not be able to see theirs unless you manually went to their site.

Right now, they still haven't turned federation on, so we can't do that. If we do federate, we will be able to (easily) see and interact with their content, and they will be able to (easily) see and interact with our content. If we defederate, we can technically see each other's content by visiting their site (or them visiting ours), but we wouldn't be able to usefully interact with them and vice-versa without making an account on their site (or vice-versa) ^.^

lol you really think I just parrot the US state department. Honestly this is another thing with tankies, they seem to be incapable of conceiving of geopolitics more complex than "arm of the USA" or "not arm of the USA".

The idea of only partial-alignment even among nominal allies, and complex conflicting geopolitical interests, and the idea of spectrums and complexity beyond "US=bad" "not US=good" is foreign to them, or even criticizing actions of organizations rather than just deciding XYZ organization is evil or good and retroactively justifying or opposing every action they take (let alone consider that an action could have mixed consequences or ethics, both positive or negative ;p).

For example, I am still capable of criticising Ukraine's actions (for example like using cluster bombs, even if last I saw Russia used them first I still am not in favour of them) and the propaganda they produce, or worrying about the effects of the significant debt on Ukrainians and their public services in the form of disaster capitalism, or also generally expressing my issue with States as a whole while still opposing brazen imperialism by Russia ^.^, or criticising the dehumanisation of Russian people in some of the conversations I've seen (especially the people who left Russia, when those are the people least likely to support the Russian Government's actions and are often fleeing persecution themselves e.g. queer Russians).

I just don't usually specifically say these things because in practise the conversations in which it comes up are already horrifically derailed by apologia for Russia's actions and enlightened-centrism, so expressing the nuance is completely useless because the people I'm responding to just hate anything they associate with "the West" (which itself is not necessarily a fully coherent concept) and usually massively whitewash the shit going on in Russia, both about Ukraine and also other things <.<

Point being, Threads doesn't need any other communities. People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy. These people are also the same ones who don't care about if their content is coming from a federated source, or just Threads.

And hence, defederation is a good idea.

Defederation is to protect us from them. You are absolutely right that they aren't comparable to beehaw in size - now imagine if people here start joining the communities on Threads (not formal ones cus threads doesn't have those), and we later decide to defederate, as some have proposed? Beehaw alone caused a massive clusterfuck, now imagine an instance with 10000x more users and power and concentrated community being let in?

Extremely, iirc. According to wikipedia:

It is extremely contagious: nine out of ten people who are not immune and share living space with an infected person will be infected.[5] Furthermore, measles's reproductive number estimates vary beyond the frequently cited range of 12 to 18,[17] with a 2017 review giving a range of 3.7 to 203.3

For context the reproductive number (average number of unexposed people a carrier will infect) of the most virulent strains of COVID-19 is 3-8. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35262737/ (basic vs effective rate refers to the infectiveness in a naive population vs one which is taking measures and/or has immunity).

This is also all exponential so small increases in R number have big impacts nya.

SALUTE THE FLAG MFER'S! THE RAINBOW FLAG!

Capitalism moment 💀;p

Fuck this bioessentialist piece of trash.

I don't believe in any god, but even if I did I would not think such an entity had any right to dictate or make judgements on who I am and how I am, or my identity or purpose.

I'm so goddamn sick of this bullshit. I get to decide who I am and set my own path, fuck these people who think they get to tell me (and everyone else) what my life and body and purpose and identity are >:(

Really, I can't even begin to describe how much I hate this sort of patronising bullshit, how many of us have to suffer or die because of the relentless repressive normativity imposed by these groups and their infantilising ideologies of self repression and obedience and compliance, especially with the "dignity" and "diversity" doublespeak they've been trying to use in the past few months even while they systematically try to erase those very same things from anyone who doesn't fit into their suffocatingly binary and restricted conceptualisation of identity nya.

Our biology, identity and lives should be ours to control. We are capable of deciding our goals and purposes. I frankly hope more people realise they don't need some patronising religious institution to tell them how they should exist or what their purpose should be (if any, some folks are more nihilistic), and seize their morphological autonomy and decision making from groups that would deny it to them under the guise of such bullshit as supposed "dignity" ^.^

Seriously, fuck this. The Catholic Church (and this """cool""" pope), as well as pretty much all the other organised religious institutions who propagate the same infantilising and self-subjugating rhetoric, can go fuck themselves with a cactus in every available hole.

Absolutely never.