Why You Should Be Blocking Threads by Meta

Why You Should Be Blocking Threads by Meta

Hi. It’s me again, long form posting like I do all the time. Today we’re talking about the Fediverse and why you should be supporting the movement to pre-emptively (and, probably post-emptively by the time this is out) block Meta servers out on the Fediverse.

I know, I know, ActivityPub is an open protocol, and open-ness is good. That’s why we’re all here, right? We’re on the Fediverse because we should move from platforms to protocols to encourage user driven control of our content and data. Now whether or not that’s actually the case (and I doubt it), dragging major social media corps along for the ride has gotta be good right?

Unfortunately that doesn’t work too well. While it’s great having big social corps validate your protocol and bringing their large userbase to hang out, mostly cause suddenly all your less techy friends are within reach of your cool space… the significant downside is because of that validation and massive centralisation of new members.

So let’s go explore downsides! :D

There Goes The Neighborhood

Social networks generally have a social strata generated by evolved social norms and mutual enforcement of those norms. People tend to follow these norms and implicit rules to fit in and gain acceptance. Examples of these rules on Mastodon include using content warnings and using detailed alt text on images and videos.

This is to say that over time, people create a culture that defines the “vibe” of a place. It can be great (think of the best group of friends you have ever had, how cool was that? Yeah that’s what I mean.), but it can also be toxic (what I imagine Truth Social or Gab is like). Slow introduction of people creates a scenario where the newbies need to adapt to the cultural norms or leave. Fast introduction… well…

If you dump a large number of people quickly into a social space, the outcomes are either that the culture is diluted or destroyed, or that seperate cutural enclaves form and us vs them dynamics start to pop up. A good example of this for those of us in the Fediverse was the original Twitter Migration. While I still believe the culture that has evolved as a result of the big jump to Mastodon is a positive one, it’s not the culture from the pre-migration days.

Now consider the entire userbase of Instagram or Facebook being dropped into the Fediverse. The effects would be immediate, and tilt the whole Fediverse in the direction of the dopamine-addicted Insta world. This may be fine with you, but I know most people out in Mastodon at the very least came here to escape exactly that.

You might think that you’re too smart and won’t lower yourself to those standards, but it’s a social network. It isn’t about you. The vast majority of Fediverse users will now be looking to become the next influencer, and that will taint everything in your feed.

It’s not even the biggest problem, let’s move on to…

King of the Hill

Social networks are arranged in a power-law distribution. Specifically, they tend to follow Zipf’s Law. Naturally, some places, people, and groups are hugely important… and most other places are small intimate affairs. This works for all sorts of things, from (entertainingly enough) the distribution of likes on Facebook, to the distribution of people in given cities.

I will warn you now, the Power Law Rabbit Hole is of infinite depth, and once you start down the dark path forever will it dominate your destiny.

Trust me, I know.

That ominous warning aside, the way to tell if something follows Zipf’s Law (or power laws in general) is to plot the data on a log/log graph and see if it produces a consistently descending line.

For example, there’s this image I scraped from a Cornell Uni blog post on populations of people in US cities:

Unsurprisingly, when you graph the top 40 Mastodon servers (thanks FediDB), you get the same kind of thing:

Why do I tell you this? Well, if you follow Zipf’s Law to its natural conclusion, that means there will always be a single, massive server in the network that is several times larger than any other. In our current Fediverse that server is mastodon.social. Very shortly (if not now by the time you are reading this) it will be threads.net.

What does this mean? Mathematically, most of the people you meet on the Fediverse will in fact be Meta users. A significant majority of content in the Fediverse will be Meta content. And importantly, the expected behaviour of the Fediverse itself will be in line with Meta’s expectations for the Fediverse.

You might think that last bit is a bit of overreach. After all, both you and I don’t want that, we want our own little garden of fun and joy to remain as it is. However, as I said before, it’s not about you. Everyone who wants to talk to their friends on Meta, everyone on Meta who wants to talk to/follow people here, and everyone who just finds that the reliability of a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth’s infrastructure is just so much better than community driven servers will overwhelm all of us. The Fediverse will, at a technical level, become an extension of a Meta product.

We’re not done. There’s one last thing to talk about.

Extinction

The funny thing is, I actually agreed with you, hypothetical reader who thinks we should just damn well play nice. Meta is doing the right thing setting up their own instance, they’re being cool, we should give them a chance.

The problem is, companies don’t have the luxury of growth right now. They need to make profits in this economy circling the drain. Capital is rare, costs are up, customers are fleeing for the hills, and everyone is eyeing their savings and hoping they can make it through the next week. Meta is no different. You must approach this with that in mind: What does Meta think they can do here to make a fast buck?

The answer is simple, and utterly boring. Meta wants to eat Twitter’s userbase to add to their social oligopoly. Creating a social network from scratch these days is near impossible because where the people are at is where the people will go… and at the moment people are at Twitter (reluctantly, sure, but they’re still there). Meta needs a significant user base to bootstrap their product, and we are that user base.

They, as such, have no intent of maintaining an open protocol for the good of humanity… they instead want to make a quick Twitter compeditor with a readily existing ex-Twitter userbase. We should have no expectation that they will give back to the community in opposition to their own profit.

What would this look like? Well:

• After a gentle start and uptick in users, modification to the ActivityPub protocol to improve advertising and advertising metrics. This will be just great for Fedi admins though, they can monetise their instances passively! No longer will your AWS bill be such a burden!
• Further modifications to the behaviour of the protocol will put many smaller instances and smaller Fediverse projects out of step with the ActivityPub standard as their developers are unable to keep up with Meta changes.
• Failures to keep up and issues with protocol standards (real or artificially induced) will convince non-technical and non-diehard users (as well as users of no longer functional Fediverse apps) to join Threads for the added stability.
• At some future point when most user content is generated by and interacted with Threads users, Meta will detach from the Fediverse, leaving it a husk of what it was, utterly consumed.

Wow that’s dark isn’t it? Surely that’s impossible. Unfortunately this is an extremely effective and often used strategy by corporate giants to harvest open protocols. Microsoft is the biggest fan of this, but it’s been used by other Silicon Valley giants in the past. It is the most logical thing Meta could do given their need for profits. After all, it’s a surefire way of generating ad revenue as well as showcasing to investors that they’re still relevant even as the rest of the social internet burns. “We have a huge userbase across multiple apps! We’re still cool, honest!”

I know this for two reasons:

1. I am a co-founder of a tech startup. This makes sense in the disturbing capitalist sword-logic.
2. It has happened before.

Walling in the Garden

So, after that terrible view of a dark future, what can we do? Send a terminator back in time? Blow up the Fediverse before someone else does?

Nah, we’ve gotta exclude the hegemonists.

Simplest trick is to just defederate and firewall block the Meta servers. Yes their influence will seep into our space in a trickle, but it will prevent them from just dominating the entirety of the Fediverse from day one. Ideally, what we want to do is allow them to use the protocol, but not allow them to use the community. They can use ActivityPub, but they can’t use ActivityPub, get what I mean?

There will of course be some level of interaction, it’s unlikely to die quickly, but by building a wall between the Fediverse and the Metaverse we will prevent our side from becoming a subsidiary of theirs, prevent us needing to implement anything Meta does for our stuff to work (we didn’t want them here anyway), and ultimately make their attempt to subsume the Fediverse moot.

In another way of looking at it, we don’t trust them, and they’re a lot stronger than us. They have to prove to us that they come here in peace and in good faith by demonstrating why and how they won’t harm us. There has so far been no attempt to reach out to the broader user base here, and the contact that has been made seems more akin to treating with the kings of a soon-to-be-conquered land. It is only natural for us to protect ourselves. Acting in our own best interests is not being closed minded, and it’s not being hypocritical.

I hope you will help support and nurture the Fediverse as it is, because as a project it’s far superior to any other corporate owned social space out there.

Good luck to all of us :)