25 June 2023

Meta, Facebook & Instagram's parent company, is developing a Twitter-like messaging platform which will use the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is how Mastodon and other components of the Fediverse communicate ('federate') with each other. If Meta releases their new product, known as Threads, then it would be able to federate with any other ActivityPub server, including scicomm.xyz. The news of the imminent arrival of Threads has been ill received in parts of the Fediverse, with many instances signing up to the FediPact petition and promising to defederate (block) it and any other server run by Meta.

This post is about how the admin and moderators of scicomm.xyz view the situation, how we intend to respond, and our reasons for doing so.

Our decision is principally about money and ethics. Specifically Meta's money and Meta's ethics, wherein it is very rich in one and desperately poor in the other.

Meta, recently known as Facebook, is a 'Big Tech' company with a long and storied history of poor ethical practice. It was born as 'FaceSmash', a platform created for male students to rate the attractiveness of female students. Things have not improved from those early days: Meta's various platforms, notably Facebook, have been implicated in ethnic cleansing, failing to handle hate speech, allowing Troll Farms, and subverting democracy in the USA, the UK, and India. Recently, it has run ads for anti-LGBTQ organisations and hosted neo-Nazi shopfronts. Instagram has been found violating the privacy of children and WhatsApp fined for breaching European privacy regulations. Meta fails to protect its users' data and privacy again, and again, and again, and again (and their largest fine so far!).

Meta does these things because people and organisations pay them for it. Meta's core business is advertising. It can show very specific information to very specific people in order to manipulate their emotions and achieve very specific outcomes, as directed by their paying customers. It knows how to do this extremely well, and advertisers find the prospect of highly targeted and manipulative advertising to be very alluring, and they delivered some $113,000,000,000 in profit for Meta in 2022.

To make their product work, it is necessary for Meta to know as much about everyone as it can. It harvests every interaction between every connection of every person that it is aware of … and it can be aware of people without them even having a social media account.

Money is Meta's motivation and data harvesting is their operation. They are not interested in supporting the interests of their users, unless it looks like it might impact revenue. Their moderation is abysmal. They will deliberately mislead their users for the sake of profit and they will put that profit towards lobbying against privacy laws or buying favourable news coverage. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Meta is an unethical company.

Meta's new product, 'Threads' has not been publicly released yet, so we cannot know exactly what it does or what benefits and problems it may bring. However, given what is known about the Fediverse and about Meta, we can be fairly confident about a few things.

Allowing Meta onto the Fediverse would give them ready access to a wealth of user data (and free Fedi content to make their app look lively) from the instances that choose to federate with them. It may already be able to harvest information from the Fediverse, in a limited way, by scraping instance data that is already displayed openly, e.g. public posts. However, the whole process becomes much more efficient if it is part of the Fediverse, with federated servers feeding it a constant stream of information. Federation would allow Meta to cache non-public data too, such as followers-only and direct messages, which pass through its servers as part of the normal workings of ActivityPub.

Given Meta's hunger for data and lack of concern for the well-being of their own users, one can only speculate on where they may place the best interests of the people who are not even users of their products but whose information they nonetheless would have access to.

There is also the very real risk of enshittification of our ecosystem, such as through the 'Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE)' philosophy. With their enormous wealth, resources, and a large user-base Meta would be well positioned to argue for changes to the direction and development of the ecosystem which may better serve Meta's interests.

Over the course of writing this piece, information has surfaced that the admins of certain big Mastodon instances have talked with Meta and signed non-disclosure agreements and there are more plans to hold "off the record" discussions with other instance admins (see here also; but paywalled). There is a suggestion that Meta will compensate these large instances in return for allowing federation of their content. This would make those instance admins dependant on Meta, and so sets the stage for EEE.

Alternatively, the strategy of 'Divide & Conquer' may present Meta with a more efficient (faster and cheaper) route to domination by fragmentation sown from animosity and confusion. Judging by some of the posts flying around in recent days, this tactic may already be underway. The effect of either D&C and/or EEE will be to split the Fediverse into factions of instances which are Facebook-aligned or Facebook-resistant.

It is important to acknowledge that the fears above are speculative, as Meta haven't actually appeared on the Fediverse yet. They have had some secret meetings with a few people but they haven't done anything directly divisive or harmful to the wider Fediverse because they aren't—as far as we know—connected to it. However, they have such a long and well-observed history of Doing The Wrong Thing in practically every other space that they have been involved with, that we can readily expect them to join the Fediverse with less than pure intentions and knowing that it will not be long before they screw something up.

While there is pessimism around Meta joining the Fediverse, there could also be some benefits. One benefit would be the chance to connect with new people and communities who will be using Meta's Threads platform. As an outreach instance, this is at the very core of scicomm.xyz's reason for existing, and the potential new audience that Meta brings is huge. However, many people came to the Fediverse precisely to escape the scale of audience, performative expectations, and surveillance capitalism that are present in these massive social media silos. Furthermore, the idea of 'reach' may be meaningless if Meta selectively federate with those instances that establish a fiscal relationship with them.

If Meta apply their 'algorithmic feed' approach to Threads as they have Instagram and Facebook, then reach may mean something very different on Threads than the rest of the Fediverse.

There is also potential to convince new people from the Meta-world that there are many other, and perhaps better, spaces they can explore beyond the heavily curated walled gardens of Facebook and Instagram, perhaps reminiscent of the Great Twitter Influx of 2022. Federation with Meta's platform would allow this information (Mastodon propaganda, in essence!) to be broadcast more easily, assuming there is no interference on Meta's side to the delivery of these messages. However, most of the positive endorsements of Mastodon in the November influx came from people tweeting about it before they jumped ship; there was no (official) federation from the newly minted Fediverse accounts back to the Twitterverse.

So we are in a position where we know a great deal about the company that intends to join the Fediverse but we can only guess at the potential outcomes from this venture. The likelihood for manifold problems is high whereas the probable benefit is an opportunity to reach more people but even that may come at a cost to our autonomy.

We have sought the views of those who use scicomm.xyz and we found a majority were in favour of defederation. Of those who offered their opinion, over half supported defederation, about one quarter supported taking no action (or deferring action), and the remainder were undecided. Regardless of how we proceed, we can always revisit the question at a later date and review our position with the benefit of hindsight.

Our options therefore are either:

1. 'Cautiously defensive': do nothing for now but take rapid action if-and-when something bad happens.
2. 'Prudently defensive': block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block.

We shall take a prudently defensive position with pre-emptive defederation. We believe this is in the best interests, and meets the expectations, of the majority of our people whilst also aligning with the values of the instance and the wider Fediverse. This is a proactive move to protect our users.

The onus is then on Meta to demonstrate its value and positive potential. If Meta can show their platform is well moderated and our people are respected then we may have confidence in restoring federation to their instance(s), albeit on parole. If this is not forthcoming then we will have protected our instance from the outset.

With regards to the FediPact petition, the terms do not specify the duration of any defederation action. It is implied that defederation should be a more permanent gesture than what we are prepared to commit to at the present time. Therefore, we do not feel it is appropriate to sign the FediPact petition at this moment. We may also revisit this decision in future, pending Meta's behaviour.

We welcome the growth of the Fediverse but not at any cost; it must be sustainable and we value a community of many small instances over a few giant ones. We support the open nature of the protocol but recognise that we also have the power to selectively close the door when necessary. We do not trust Meta to arrive in our people-centric community with benevolent motivations and innocent intentions. There are already many large companies and for-profit enterprises operating on the Fediverse but few have the size, resources, and track record to pose a destabilising threat to the system as Meta. This is why we are taking exceptional and proactive action against Meta compared to our usual reactive moderation approach to new instances from less-powerful or unknown people and companies.

We will apply the approach we have taken to Meta to any other unethical Big Tech company which joins the Fediverse and we will similarly pre-emptively deny federation to their instances, pending demonstration of good stewardship.

We hope that our users understand and support our stance on this matter.