Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just “it’s busted, fix it”. I’d love to contribute actual code, because I’d like to think I’m a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.
I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
It’s not about us embracing them, it’s about them embracing the protocol, which they can do whether we stay federated or not.
The argument against defederation is that it tells newcomers that the defederated instance is an island and they’re better off joining the place where they can talk to their friends. Meta can more easily extend if we’re not around to explain why extending is a bad thing, and if we’re not around to advocate for people to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one
Here is what it actually means
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
I think it’s naive to imagine that anything we say or do will influence Meta’s behavior or strategy in any way. But I do see your point that when an instance defederates from Threads, it makes an island of itself, not of Threads.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.
The usual MO of buying the competitors isn’t posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish
Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we’ll be right back at the corporate social media we’re trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it’s profitable
The super cool thing is that you’re more than welcome to start your own instance where they don’t block it. Or move to an existing one. Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.
Correct, but that doesn’t change who has final say over it. You’re more than free to change instances if you no longer agree with how your current instance is being run.
Yes but being able to technically do something despite it negatively affecting the wider community doesn’t magically mean people shouldn’t express their opinions, and of you’re not saying people shouldn’t then your post is entirely pointless
I can easily imagine the future where “good” instances will then stop federating with the ones that don’t have threads blocked, all thanks to these lists.
I’m pretty sure this has already happened in the past, I swear there was a “Bad instances” list that someone was passing around, which someone else then disputed that the list was bad due to there not being valid reasons for why an instance was marked “bad” - but people had taken the list as 100% fact and blocked said instances.
That is the double-edged sword of the Fediverse, the freedom to choose who you allow and don’t allow in regards to federation. There’s always going to be the “cliques” so to speak where if you upset (for lack of a better word) the wrong people, the size of that instance can claim that you’re bad, and if other instances take their word at face value without verifying this then all of a sudden you can’t communicate with other instances/people (ie, if you get defederated by lemmy.world or mastodon.social - then good luck). Obviously, the good part about how the Fediverse works is the power for each instance admin to make their own determinations of who they want to federate with, but this is the “bad” side of it which is further amplified by the fact that there are always going to be instances that hold a very larger position of power. In a way, fracturing of the Fediverse is a bit inevitable because of this. I suspect what you say will happen (as I’ve already seen this mentioned).
It is what it is, I’m not saying whether that double-edged nature is good or bad, because at the end of the day that determination comes down to every person who chooses to participate, and is a decision they have to make on their own volition.
Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
I get that you, like me, don’t like capitalist companies but what you’re saying is based on nothing.
They can’t steal content from here that’s literally not possible, this comment here I’m writing now can not be stolen by anyone ever - and not just in the piracy isn’t stealing way but in the it’s public domain so you already all own it too.
I use stuff from meta all the time and I didn’t steal it, all the vital open source code they’ve created and which is a fundermental part of stable diffusion and other open source tools is benefiting the community - are they only doing this to kill something?
I understand the logic that successful capitalist company must be evil because that’s how capitalism works but it’s also a lot more complex, open source isn’t just a wishywashy dream for cheapskate nerds like meit’s a powerful and positive force that can benefit everyone even companies like meta without them needing to kill anyone or anything. Participation isn’t just it’s own moral reward it’s actually got a lot of other benefits too.
Meta might just want to federate because open source is good.
See, this is the more reasonable concern. Moderating a fediverse instance is hard, and the flood of posts coming from Threads might be a bad problem. That’s a case where I understand the need to defederate. But on the other hand, that doesn’t feel like a solution that needs to be done proactively - defederating from Threads if/when Threads users become a problem seems perfectly reasonable.
The federated timeline is ready FULL of shit I don’t care about, have no idea what it is, or can’t read it because it’s another language due to people not being able to set their language correctly.
The only time I’m going to see threads content is if it is boosted by someone I follow (which I want), contains a hashtag I follow (which I want), or in the federated timeline I already don’t use.
It’s not a choice between those two, and allowing Mark Zuckerberg in the door doesn’t gain us relevance. We’ve already been slowly growing on our own accord and we’ve finally started to cross the threshold to where there’s enough people here posting enough stuff that it’s not a ghost town anymore. Sure I do still run out of content on any given day when I’m looking at my phone on the bus and on my work breaks but it’s usable enough that I don’t need the corporations. The only thing that threads has to offer us is a large pre-existing user base and there’s nothing else. Once we get enough people even that doesn’t matter
I’m mean, I’m loving it too. My interest are well catered here, but most of my friends see it as a ghost town when they try it, because they are open source tech enthusiasts with a penchant for left wing politics. Like this is my niche and I love it, but also I have to get on other platforms if I want to actually talk to anyone outside the choir.
the total content per day’s fine but some of the more niche interests outside of what us fucking nerds like aren’t here yet. we can change that but we’d have
I think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an “instance” with a long history of poor or apathetic moderation vs. creating an off-boarding system for Meta users to escape the corporatocracy.
Personally I vote for the latter, and I’m glad most of the larger instances are in the same boat.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch with friends, family and news and Meta goes down in flames but maybe that’s the optimist in me.
Fully agree. I feel like helping facebook keep their users stuck on their platform or worse Twitter feels counterproductive in making the world more free.
If you think Meta will allow the Threads algorithm to show anything from the fediverse you are unbelievably naive. And that’s if content from the fediverse even makes a blip on a platform with 100x the size.
Meta doesn’t federate with the goal of giving Threads users an out. They federate because it’s the most efficient way to scrape fediverse instances and build profiles on fediverse users.
Meta has reached saturation with their existing services so they are now branching into any possible extra source of data they can. They’ll take anything, from fediverse federation to Whatsapp emails. All your data is welcome to them.
They don’t need to show you anything in the algorithm.
As for data, that’s complete non-sense. What data do you think they’re getting access to that they can’t already get? If the goal was to trove data they would have done it quietly and not announced it so that everyone could block them before they even had a chance.
They’re federating because of the Digital Markets Act.
Honestly I could see this being a way of trapping people by giving them less incentive to leave. If people like us leave and you have to leave the corporate hellscapes to see our posts that gives people a reason to leave too but if they can enjoy it from the “comfort” of Mark Zuckerberg’s domain they have no reason to leave. That also makes them captive to met us since they can pull the plug in Federation anytime they like or mess with it in a thousand different ways. Convincing people to sign up for another account may be non-trivial but it’s ultimately the best way forward
Users should have the power to defederate in addition to admins.
They do.
Not everyone wants the same thing or has the same idea of what constitutes ‘harmful’ instances.
That’s why I didn’t say “everyone”. I said “people who join those instances”. If you don’t want that, you can choose our migrate to a different one. Or even create your own.
Yes, this is why it’s important to take individual control away from the user; to push an agenda.
You’re correct, of course, but “agendas” are not inherently negative.
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy. They made a browser because everything they make is web-based and wanted to control that. They add non-standard features to the browser because they want to do stuff that isn’t doable as part of the standard, because the web is a document engine that has been perverted into a general-purpose application platform.
This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy.
I am confident that Google does have a high-level strategy regarding areas that they move into. That doesn’t mean that everything that they do that creates compatibility issues is an embrace, extend, and extinguish attempt, though.
Moderators will basically be doing free work for meta. If a Lemmy.ml post blows up on threads then the ml mods will have to deal with the influx from threads users and basically moderate threads for free.
There’s another reason to defederate. Most mods are volunteers. Lemmy currently really doesn’t have the manpower to handle something with a userbase as large as Threads, and Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with moderation, so it’s unlikely they’d do anything about any issues in a timely manner.
Edit: kids -> mods, busy -> really; autocorrect was being stupid again.
I experience this a lot on Reddit where /r/Infiniti gets cross posted to a massive sub and now two mods are dealing with 500,000+ users. I can’t imagine how much more annoying it would be if I was also paying to host the community.
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
My friend… your instance has defederated from several other large instances already. If you were on a lemm.ee account then I could take your argument seriously. It’s like the US admonishing Venezuela for going oil hunting, China suggesting religious persecution is unacceptable, or Russia shouting about gay rights.
But you decided to weigh in on the situation… I suppose I’ve already told you which instance you’re best suited for. Basically the only criterion anyone looks at for a home instance is who they federate with. Past that, your experience is largely identical. Just federation and admins. Click “instances” to see federation.
If you want threads, join threads or a threads friendly instance, but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
That seems like an odd position to take, given the information available. The only number here – the instance count involved – has a majority not blocking Threads.
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.
Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
Yes, yes and yes (I contribute money).
Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just “it’s busted, fix it”. I’d love to contribute actual code, because I’d like to think I’m a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.
I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!
Embrace, extend, destroy is a thing though.
It is
I’m not sure if defederating is the correct counter to it
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
It’s not about us embracing them, it’s about them embracing the protocol, which they can do whether we stay federated or not.
The argument against defederation is that it tells newcomers that the defederated instance is an island and they’re better off joining the place where they can talk to their friends. Meta can more easily extend if we’re not around to explain why extending is a bad thing, and if we’re not around to advocate for people to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one
Here is what it actually means
I think it’s naive to imagine that anything we say or do will influence Meta’s behavior or strategy in any way. But I do see your point that when an instance defederates from Threads, it makes an island of itself, not of Threads.
It does kinda hurt the Fediverse as a whole when it becomes so segregated.
a house divided…
Removed by mod
What?
Utterly idiotic.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
No one is crying because people are “being mean” to meta. They’re adults.
What trust is required to federate? If they’re not moderating their own or some other issue crops up, we can block them at that point.
Are you new?
Mark Zuck is literally saying that right now to Lemmy.world and other instances admins.
Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.
The usual MO of buying the competitors isn’t posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish
Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we’ll be right back at the corporate social media we’re trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it’s profitable
The super cool thing is that you’re more than welcome to start your own instance where they don’t block it. Or move to an existing one. Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.
And the users are allowed to have opinions about it.
Correct, but that doesn’t change who has final say over it. You’re more than free to change instances if you no longer agree with how your current instance is being run.
Yes but being able to technically do something despite it negatively affecting the wider community doesn’t magically mean people shouldn’t express their opinions, and of you’re not saying people shouldn’t then your post is entirely pointless
I can easily imagine the future where “good” instances will then stop federating with the ones that don’t have threads blocked, all thanks to these lists.
I’m pretty sure this has already happened in the past, I swear there was a “Bad instances” list that someone was passing around, which someone else then disputed that the list was bad due to there not being valid reasons for why an instance was marked “bad” - but people had taken the list as 100% fact and blocked said instances.
That is the double-edged sword of the Fediverse, the freedom to choose who you allow and don’t allow in regards to federation. There’s always going to be the “cliques” so to speak where if you upset (for lack of a better word) the wrong people, the size of that instance can claim that you’re bad, and if other instances take their word at face value without verifying this then all of a sudden you can’t communicate with other instances/people (ie, if you get defederated by lemmy.world or mastodon.social - then good luck). Obviously, the good part about how the Fediverse works is the power for each instance admin to make their own determinations of who they want to federate with, but this is the “bad” side of it which is further amplified by the fact that there are always going to be instances that hold a very larger position of power. In a way, fracturing of the Fediverse is a bit inevitable because of this. I suspect what you say will happen (as I’ve already seen this mentioned).
It is what it is, I’m not saying whether that double-edged nature is good or bad, because at the end of the day that determination comes down to every person who chooses to participate, and is a decision they have to make on their own volition.
Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
Threads wants to join the fediverse to either steal the content and/or kill it, there would be no other reasons.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
Sure does seem that way.
I get that you, like me, don’t like capitalist companies but what you’re saying is based on nothing.
They can’t steal content from here that’s literally not possible, this comment here I’m writing now can not be stolen by anyone ever - and not just in the piracy isn’t stealing way but in the it’s public domain so you already all own it too.
I use stuff from meta all the time and I didn’t steal it, all the vital open source code they’ve created and which is a fundermental part of stable diffusion and other open source tools is benefiting the community - are they only doing this to kill something?
I understand the logic that successful capitalist company must be evil because that’s how capitalism works but it’s also a lot more complex, open source isn’t just a wishywashy dream for cheapskate nerds like meit’s a powerful and positive force that can benefit everyone even companies like meta without them needing to kill anyone or anything. Participation isn’t just it’s own moral reward it’s actually got a lot of other benefits too.
Meta might just want to federate because open source is good.
See, this is the more reasonable concern. Moderating a fediverse instance is hard, and the flood of posts coming from Threads might be a bad problem. That’s a case where I understand the need to defederate. But on the other hand, that doesn’t feel like a solution that needs to be done proactively - defederating from Threads if/when Threads users become a problem seems perfectly reasonable.
What does that even mean in this context though?
The federated timeline is ready FULL of shit I don’t care about, have no idea what it is, or can’t read it because it’s another language due to people not being able to set their language correctly.
The only time I’m going to see threads content is if it is boosted by someone I follow (which I want), contains a hashtag I follow (which I want), or in the federated timeline I already don’t use.
I don’t see the issue.
If we let corperate avithilea gain a foothold they’ll EEE us. Learn from history, Meta’s not doing this for our sake
How do we stop EEE or the other option being irrelevant to most of the world? I don’t think defederation does either.
It’s not a choice between those two, and allowing Mark Zuckerberg in the door doesn’t gain us relevance. We’ve already been slowly growing on our own accord and we’ve finally started to cross the threshold to where there’s enough people here posting enough stuff that it’s not a ghost town anymore. Sure I do still run out of content on any given day when I’m looking at my phone on the bus and on my work breaks but it’s usable enough that I don’t need the corporations. The only thing that threads has to offer us is a large pre-existing user base and there’s nothing else. Once we get enough people even that doesn’t matter
I’m mean, I’m loving it too. My interest are well catered here, but most of my friends see it as a ghost town when they try it, because they are open source tech enthusiasts with a penchant for left wing politics. Like this is my niche and I love it, but also I have to get on other platforms if I want to actually talk to anyone outside the choir.
the total content per day’s fine but some of the more niche interests outside of what us fucking nerds like aren’t here yet. we can change that but we’d have
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. “Be the change you wanna see” and what not. I’m doing my part by liking and
I think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an “instance” with a long history of poor or apathetic moderation vs. creating an off-boarding system for Meta users to escape the corporatocracy.
Personally I vote for the latter, and I’m glad most of the larger instances are in the same boat.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch with friends, family and news and Meta goes down in flames but maybe that’s the optimist in me.
Fully agree. I feel like helping facebook keep their users stuck on their platform or worse Twitter feels counterproductive in making the world more free.
If you think Meta will allow the Threads algorithm to show anything from the fediverse you are unbelievably naive. And that’s if content from the fediverse even makes a blip on a platform with 100x the size.
Meta doesn’t federate with the goal of giving Threads users an out. They federate because it’s the most efficient way to scrape fediverse instances and build profiles on fediverse users.
Meta has reached saturation with their existing services so they are now branching into any possible extra source of data they can. They’ll take anything, from fediverse federation to Whatsapp emails. All your data is welcome to them.
That’s not true. Quiet scraping is much easier to implement than integrating AP into your platform.
They don’t need to show you anything in the algorithm.
As for data, that’s complete non-sense. What data do you think they’re getting access to that they can’t already get? If the goal was to trove data they would have done it quietly and not announced it so that everyone could block them before they even had a chance.
They’re federating because of the Digital Markets Act.
Honestly I could see this being a way of trapping people by giving them less incentive to leave. If people like us leave and you have to leave the corporate hellscapes to see our posts that gives people a reason to leave too but if they can enjoy it from the “comfort” of Mark Zuckerberg’s domain they have no reason to leave. That also makes them captive to met us since they can pull the plug in Federation anytime they like or mess with it in a thousand different ways. Convincing people to sign up for another account may be non-trivial but it’s ultimately the best way forward
Haha no one is leaving a Meta service to join one with 1% as many users.
Meta will not allow this to happen, and if/when it does, they will take action. This shit is a zero sum game to these people.
They may not have a choice
No, I don’t think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an instance.
If we want to see it, great. If we don’t, also great. But we should have the power to decide for ourselves instead of some biased admins.
The only people who disagree with this are those who want to control what other people get to see.
So admins shouldn’t defederate from any instances at all? Even right wing Nazi instances with Nazi flags in every profile?
Yes, they want to protect their users from harmful instances. This is something the people who join those instances want.
They also want to “deplatform” those types from society as a whole.
Users should have the power to defederate in addition to admins.
Not everyone wants the same thing or has the same idea of what constitutes ‘harmful’ instances.
Yes, this is why it’s important to take individual control away from the user; to push an agenda.
They do.
That’s why I didn’t say “everyone”. I said “people who join those instances”. If you don’t want that, you can choose our migrate to a different one. Or even create your own.
You’re correct, of course, but “agendas” are not inherently negative.
How can I defederate from an instance? Last time this discussion was brought up, I didn’t think it was possible and everyone else agreed.
Depends on which service you’re talking about.
On Mastodon you can go to a profile or post from the domain, click the 3 dots and “block domain”.
I think Lemmy just implemented this but I don’t know how to do it.
Also -
them: it’s ridiculous they aren’t listening to the user
the instance: held a vote and the majority voted to defederate
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
I appreciate your commitment to this meme. I don’t exactly agree with you, but hilarious nonetheless.
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I think the fear is that this turns into an “embrace, extend, extinguish”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
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This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy. They made a browser because everything they make is web-based and wanted to control that. They add non-standard features to the browser because they want to do stuff that isn’t doable as part of the standard, because the web is a document engine that has been perverted into a general-purpose application platform.
I am confident that Google does have a high-level strategy regarding areas that they move into. That doesn’t mean that everything that they do that creates compatibility issues is an embrace, extend, and extinguish attempt, though.
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Then change instances to one that doesn’t block threads. It’s that easy.
Feel free to removed when we block Flipboard or Automattic. We’re only blocking Meta, because Meta’s interests are not the Fediverse’s best interest.
Feel free to removed? Is that client side or server side?
Good question
Server side. Lemmy.ml has a slur filter.
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So do I.
I just think their decisions might be dumb.
Removed by mod
Moderators will basically be doing free work for meta. If a Lemmy.ml post blows up on threads then the ml mods will have to deal with the influx from threads users and basically moderate threads for free.
There’s another reason to defederate. Most mods are volunteers. Lemmy currently really doesn’t have the manpower to handle something with a userbase as large as Threads, and Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with moderation, so it’s unlikely they’d do anything about any issues in a timely manner.
Edit: kids -> mods, busy -> really; autocorrect was being stupid again.
I experience this a lot on Reddit where /r/Infiniti gets cross posted to a massive sub and now two mods are dealing with 500,000+ users. I can’t imagine how much more annoying it would be if I was also paying to host the community.
0.19 allows for instance blocking, so the good tools will be available.
Yeah, I wonder how many of those instances are primarily enthusiasts self-hosting.
If this wasnt needed we wouldnt even think about doing it.
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
Say it louder for the children in the back.
This is the solution.
My friend… your instance has defederated from several other large instances already. If you were on a lemm.ee account then I could take your argument seriously. It’s like the US admonishing Venezuela for going oil hunting, China suggesting religious persecution is unacceptable, or Russia shouting about gay rights.
My friend, I’m still getting used to the fediverse as well.
Try not to assume the average user knows their way around this place, lol.
Do I just automatically know which instances block which instances? Lol. Of course not.
But you decided to weigh in on the situation… I suppose I’ve already told you which instance you’re best suited for. Basically the only criterion anyone looks at for a home instance is who they federate with. Past that, your experience is largely identical. Just federation and admins. Click “instances” to see federation.
Haha. Just can’t admit when you’re wrong, can you? I’ve met people like you before.
Anyways, peace man. Gotta do my own part and choose which users I interact with, lol.
I know you’re messing with me, but anyone else reading my comment should know that it’s decent advice for picking an instance.
If you want threads, join threads or a threads friendly instance, but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
That seems like an odd position to take, given the information available. The only number here – the instance count involved – has a majority not blocking Threads.
SO FAR
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.