Now with all the discussion going on about Facebook joining the fediverse and what to do about it many people seem to be advocating for defederating with them thinking that they’re going to grab all your data and this is the only way to stop them.
I’m not especially educated on the subject but my understanding is that this is not at all what defederating does and also I don’t think that’s going to stop them from getting the little data that’s here publicly available for anyone anyways.
I’m trying to get my head around the entire concept of the fediverse but it seems like there’s very few people who actually understand how it works and these people seem entirely absent in these popular threads I’m reading.
Voi vastata myös suomeksi.
I was also wondering what is stopping them for making an additional instance to keep as a middle man?
You can’t “middle man” content from a defederated instance unless its reposted there on a different one…
Yeah, but what is stopping me from spinning additional instance to repost stuff?
Is your idea that they could, for example, make 1000 small lemmy instances and amortize their massive userbase across all of them behind the scenes (threads users wouldn’t even have to know), and federate those servers with lemmy instances that are otherwise defederated from without their knowledge, and then mirror content back and forth between lemmy and threads without the lemmy instances knowing?
Yeah, that’s possible. I’m sure it would get spotted eventually since all the content on all the servers involved are publicly visible, but I would be surprised if they cared enough about the drop-in-the-bucket amount content on lemmy compared to their own. Their goal with the “embrace” step is NOT to make threads users dependent on the fediverse’ content; their goal is to make fediverse users dependent on threads content. Then later, when they move to the “extend” step which breaks compatibility with fediverse servers, users are forced to make accounts on threads to continue interacting with that content, thus beginning the “extinguish” step.
The amount of server capacity you’d need…
We are speaking about FB, I’m I right?
I don’t think there’s even need for that. They should be able to see all our content even if every single instance defederates with them. We just wont see theirs, which probably isn’t a bad thing.
