Erin Kissane
I needed to understand the angles on Threads federation in a more rigorous way, so I took a few days to think through and write up my sense of the benefits, risks, and available risk mitigations, along with loopholes that need closing and questions to discuss with fediverse administrators.
This is a blisteringly hot subject for me, so it's hard to keep my head cool enough to understand other people's trade-offs, but I'm trying.
feld
feld
qdot
Tim Chambers
@kissane I really like this point:
"Until now, I haven’t involved myself much in discussions about how Mastodon or other fedi servers should react to Threads’ arrival, mostly because I think the right answer should be really different for different communities, my own revulsion notwithstanding....I don’t think the answers to these questions are going to be—or should be—the same for every server on the fediverse."
Other bits want to think on more; and may have questions on.
Mike McCue
Kaito
Tim Chambers
Would this be a fair distillation of the big set of pros and cons listed here: See if I got these right, want to engage but first want to be sure I grasp it and don’t oversimplify:
I’ll start with the easy and shorter bit the “pro or benefits” section you mentioned.
Pro: users on both sides of the Meta/non-Meta Fediverse could have a larger social graph and connect with friends or accounts they otherwise would miss.
Tim Chambers
Cons/Risks:
Both the Overt and Covert “attack vector” risks seem to my eyes to be based on this assertion:
Meta and Threads history indicates that they will function as a massively giant, unmoderated or poorly moderated Activitypub server and also shows them to be a mendacious untrustworthy company.
All the other risks you referenced all stem from that base assertion.
Tim Chambers
The risks start with this:
Interoperability with a poorly moderated 100MM user AcitivtyPub server greatly enables more bad actors on the Threads side to discover and brigade vulnerable populations on the non-Threads Fediverse, compared to the existing set 2 million or so population of the current Fedi that by comparison will have far fewer bad actors today.
And I read three other major risks I think....
Tim Chambers
The next risk was:
Interoperability with Threads, also might put the non-Threads Fedi as more vulnerable to larger well well-organized cross-mainstream social media attacks. In essence, they might attack Threads and because we interoperate with that, get to our users, whereas if we weren’t we might be a smaller fish they would not target.
The last two risks seemed to be about offering benefits to Meta.
Tim Chambers
The last two risks (If i read it right) were these:
Interoperability with Threads could offer them reputational benefits that mendacious companies should not merit.
Interoperability with Theads would likely offer them more social content produced by mostly non-profit labor that they will one day run ads adjacent to. Thus indirectly supporting a mendacious company’s business success.
Whew! OK just want to know if i missed anything there, or oversimplified anything ?
Tim Chambers
@darius @kissane Thanks I'll go back and edit out "mendacious" - by that i was trying for a synonym for what you were getting at and "villainous" sounded cartoony. To your point "mendacious" just means deceitful. I'll go back and replace it with "reprehensible."
Darius Kazemi
@tchambers @kissane I can't speak for Erin but that seems like a reasonable distillation of the main points, though I think "mendacious" as an adjective undersells the moral arguments and should be replaced with "willfully genocide-enabling" or something like that
Erin Kissane
@tchambers @darius The last section is messy because I tried to present three frames for thinking about the risk of ~complicity: endorsement, direct monetization, and contribution of labor.
For me, the third frame (labor) is most useful—I don’t want my labor to make it easier for Meta to extract more from its users—but I mostly wanted to disambiguate those three angles, because I’ve seen people talking past each other by conflating or confusing them.
Tim Chambers
@kissane @darius Ok thanks, it sounds like I got those last points summarized pretty closely?
Tim Chambers
Erin Kissane
@tchambers @darius (The other pro for me is the possibility of building better off-ramps out of Meta/surveillance-heavy engagement machines, which I don’t want to discount, despite my curiosity about implementation details.)
Tim Chambers
@kissane @darius To that - very much agreed with this on the point of prepping for larger scale attacks: “I do think the next twelve to eighteen months are a critical moment for building cross-server—and cross-platform—alliances for identifying and rooting out whatever influence networks fedi administrators and existing tooling can detect. “
Think #IFTAS can play a role there.
Erin Kissane
@tchambers @darius I think that’s a fair summary of part of it, but the tricky thing for me here is that this stuff is coming to fedi anyway, and all big boosts to fedi population and visibility just accelerates it, so this particular risk is less about Meta being Meta and more about Meta just being very big. But there’s a side point here…
Erin Kissane
@tchambers @darius My fear is that at some point, AP nodes will either build working relationships with industrial-scale security and safety teams or become very soft targets for well resourced operations, which are more widespread than I think most of us want to acknowledge.
(I think present-day fedi is pretty unprepared for something on the scale of Secondary Infektion, for example.)
Tim Chambers
@thisismissem @greg @kissane @darius
Yes, this was exactly what I was thinking too….
Emelia 👸🏻
@greg @tchambers @kissane @darius I think for this my FIRES proposal might help actually — it allows for groups to work together on producing advisories and recommendations about various fediverse entities, including Actors/Users.
Greg Scallan :verified_red:
@thisismissem @tchambers @kissane @darius This is probably the largest risk. Even on Flipboard, we regularly disable or otherwise limit hundreds of accounts created daily which have bad actors behind them. A major goal we have to to never allow these accounts to federate to begin with, but it is a cat and mouse game, so IFTAS and AP node admins working together will be crucial to a safe social environment.
Emelia 👸🏻
@tchambers @kissane @darius I think honestly these issues are both something IFTAS can contribute to working on, but also much bigger than IFTAS alone. We're going to need a very comprehensive task force to tackle the issues coming in the near-to-mid-term future.
Greg Scallan :verified_red:
@jenniferplusplus @thisismissem @tchambers @kissane @darius agreed …. 1000 times over
Emelia 👸🏻
@greg @jenniferplusplus @tchambers @kissane @darius I'm already planning to work on a proposal for federating moderation notes between Admins / Moderators, such that two instances have a back-channel to communicate on regarding Reports
(I'm hesitant to allow communication not related to Reports)
Jenniferplusplus
@greg @thisismissem @tchambers @kissane @darius and AP developers. There's no way moderation keeps up unless moderators get better tools. Ones that take advantage of federation, in particular.
Tim Chambers
@kissane @darius Yes, I suggest considering adding more on that in the doc - & a few other "pros":
"If the Fedi *does* largely support interoperating with Threads - Once interop happens, even if Threads does not (initially) support account migrations out, this still is a giant blow to their formerly fully closed, fully walled-garden strategy lock-in. It fundamentally changes the power dynamic between Threads and its users. Suddenly the cost of any future Meta bad actions becomes sky-high."
Tim Chambers
I hope so too. And thanks for thinking on the interop-power dynamic question, Erin.
Zeroing out switching costs (which even just basic interop would functionally do) nullifies a great deal of Meta -or any silo'd platform's - power.
Cory has written well on this:
https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/
Erin Kissane
@tchambers @darius The bit about potential off-ramps is in the doc already, with about as much emphasis as I feel I should give it until implementation deets arrive, but I do hope it happens.
I don’t immediately agree about fedi interop fundamentally changing Meta’s power relationships with its users, though—the back-of-napkin math doesn’t seem persuasive to me—but I’ll think on it.
Evan Prodromou
blaine
That's how I see it, too.
The debate around blocking Threads hinges on the question of "is it possible to have both?"; @evan wrote up a great summary of the trade offs: https://evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-small-fedi/
From my perspective, we don't have a choice. We have to be part of the world, connecting with everyone AND build safe spaces. We all lose if we fail to do both.
blaine
@kissane I think gets to the heart of it; is the fediverse a "safe place" or is it just part of the world?
For me, the pragmatic "big fedi" option is clear, and let me explain why:
I live in Canada.
Okay, maybe that's not enough. If it is, you can stop reading. 😅
hannah aubry
@blaine @kissane I'm curious why "part of the world' and "a safe place" are mutually exclusive? To be sure, there are plenty of unsafe places in the world, but there are people and institutions that have built safe spaces within it too. To me, the benefit of the fediverse is that you can be part of the world, and connect with anyone *and* also build a safe corner of the internet for yourself.
blaine
I missed @kissane's post on Threads last week, but I bet a bunch of others did, too, so I just want to share it in case you're one. If you care about the fediverse or how we think about the future of human communication, go read it, in full. ❤️
https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads
We've needed so much more deep, thoughtful, and specific writing on these topics for decades now, and I for one couldn't be more grateful for Erin's work.
Evan Prodromou
@kissane @blaine @haubles Set a reminder to talk about it next Wednesday, then!
Erin Kissane
@blaine @haubles @evan I vowed not to write about the internet this week, so I will just put here in the margin that I am myself committed to both big-world networking *and* refuge and I think that we(-as-in-tech) are obligated to make both work, which is going to be wickedly difficult and politically(-as-in-polity) messy, but also a worthy and fascinating challenge. 🕯️
blaine
More importantly, the year after I gave up, I went to the US and met an incredible group of committed, tireless activists.
Most Americans aren't bad, even if their country has committed many terrible atrocities. In fact, it's quite the opposite (if you're familiar with Canadian culture, you'll know what a statement this is!):
The Americans I know are consistently some of the most amazing, incredible people on Earth. Also resilient.
blaine
But if not, here's the thing: the United States is worse than Meta, but it turns out that some things aren't boycott-able. I literally boycotted everything I possibly could from the US for about year after the US invaded Afghanistan. We don't grow a lot up here in the winter, so I ate a *lot* of Jerusalem Artichokes. I still can't stomach them.
Even putting pungent tubers aside — and this might sound obvious — for me as an individual Canadian boycotting the USA wasn't sustainable.
blaine
But to cut off my amazing American friends who choose not to leave America? Honestly, I would be the baddie.
I'll never be as eloquent as Erin, but for me this experience transfers directly to the Fedi debate. I understand wanting safe space, and strongly believe in communities' rights to build and protect those spaces. From my perspective, though, online safe spaces have always been relatively easy to build, like an off-grid homestead.
blaine
But here's the thing: culture and community matters. They can't "just" leave their homes and their communities and move to Canada because a law commits women to forced births, or their identity is banned. Many have, and speaking as someone who's been an immigrant times over, it sucks and is harder than anyone who hasn't found themselves uprooted can imagine.
So for me to cut off America when I didn't know any Americans: that was the easy part. And moral.
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