Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
please take a look at the replies under zuck’s own post in threads.net and determine if that’s the type of content you want.
for those who don’t want to visit, majority of the commentators are bots. some advertising crypto, and others asking for money.
even if you think you can individually block those accounts, keep in mind the size of threads compared to fediverse.
for Lemmy: monthly active users are barely150K40K, while for threads it’s 100 million. there’s no chance you can control that inflow of bots.and if it still doesn’t convince you, you can read threads’ privacy policy, which states that they’ll gather all that pii if you interact with their content.
most of the internet is already bigtech, I don’t want Lemmy to become another arm of it. though I have faith in my instance maintainer and dessalines, the dev.
Mr @zuck is there any chance of you reading my messages about my request for 2M$ man i have been trying every day to contact you and waiting for your response since last 5 months . I have told you why i am asking you for 2M$ i dont know if you ever read my messages but in short you are the only who can make it happen and if there is someone who can give me 2M$ its only you so please read my messages and please make it happen for us and change our lives I am waiting for you since last 5 months .
Looks like the exact same bullshit as facebook and twitter. There might be better examples of good or bad posting though since Zuckerzuck’s posts are especially spammed out, since splammy people think they’re especially good for visibility.
yeah, but I didn’t want more brain damage sifting through accounts over there lol. but still, when you have a 100 million mau, there are going to be a ton of bots, especially when there are next to no moderators.
I’ve barely ever used threads, in a large part because they don’t have a fully functional website and require use of an app. So I have no idea… I assume there’s some quality content but I agree that it must be flooded with BS too. I’d be interested in seeing what a Lemmy instance connected to threads looks like. I assume it would wreck browsing ‘New’.
I’ve used threads since it was released out of curiosity, and it’s so far got some of the best moderation I’ve ever seen.
No joke, it seems like they are trying their best to make it as friendly and wholesome as possible.
So many women and minorities uplifting and helping each other, it was honestly quite shocking.
On twitter, I sometimes spend a couple hours just reporting hateful people, and only one or two reports ever gets acted on, everyone else seems to get a pass to hate.
But on Threads, I’ve yet to even need to report a single post, it’s kinda eerie.
Even if there were no bots and it was only “real” content from Threads … is that the sort of content we want to have Lemmy flooded with?
This is dumb gatekeeping nonsense. It’s the exact same asshole bullshit behaviour we saw on Reddit when people complained about it getting popular.
Reddit is far better for reaching a wide audience then it was when it was just a bunch of 20 something nerds in their echo chamber.
they arent wrong
Yeah they are.
how do you know
I don’t really have much faith in the developers myself. Considering all the shenanigans they get upto.
I do however have real faith in the main developer of lemmy, considering his ideology, which is incompatible with bigtech values.
you can even see it from his own profile.
His ideology is why I don’t have any faith in him. Hes authotarian left wing. Generally I find tankies not to be the nicest of people and tend to ignore alot of historical facts. Like the Khmer Rouge! I wonder what happened in Cambodia at some point in history 🤔🤔🤔 The way they operated there modus operandi is almost like a certain other points in history
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Please explain how federating with Threads is “supporting Meta” and not the opposite.
I’m not sure if federating will help meta so much as it will definitely (most probably) hurt the lemmy/mastodon network.
Here’s a similar case that happened before, with the XMPP protocol being coopted by google but eventually killing it in favor of their own proprietary solution:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Big tech isn’t on our side, and we have to handle outside corporate influence with heavy skepticism.
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
“make another account somewhere” isn’t really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
Excuse me sir, i cant be more agree with you
Israel have been successfully pressuring meta to remove and shadow ban accounts sympathetic to Palestinians. The level of censorship is crazy.
OK, I’ll bite. You got something more substantial than “I read it on the internet” to back that up? One reputable source on your accusation? Not sayin’ you’re lying/wrong, just asking for some verifiable proof.
At the moment this is coming from secondary sources from within meta so there are no articles about it that I’m aware of. But Palestinians and activists constantly have their content removed, account reach limited, and comments removed (which has happened to me multiple times). People also have their accounts threatened and removed.
These actions are visible constantly, meta have been doing this since the start. For example, when you go to someone’s stories at the top it might show 4 or 5 stories, but when you click through to their profile there’ll be 20+.
Some people I follow don’t even show up at the top anymore and I have to access their stories via their profile page or if I’ve messaged them recently.
After (as of this reply) eight hours, you have produced nothing more than anecdotal evidence if not outright invented. I must assume at this point you are spreading disinformation for whatever your goals may be to that end.
Thank you for wasting everybody’s time.
Welcome to Lemmy!
It’s like Reddit with the provocative takes and hyperbole, but even more extreme somehow!
This place is hilarious.
Go look for yourself instead of being condescending.
Numerous actual popular accounts and news sources have been suspended. It was major news in the Arabic-speaking world in October. Meta even apologized for auto-translating Palestinian as “terrorist.”
Hate to say it but that’s a fail on producing a reliable source.
Did you want specific accounts?
Palestinian Shebab News Agency has facebook pages shut down
@Eye.on.palestine on IG suspended by Meta, then back up after a backlash.
#IStandWithPalestine and #FreePalestine getting censored by Facebook
Thanks, that’s much better.
You know, you have access to search engines too. You don’t need to be lazy and treat the rest of the Internet as your personal stenographer/research assistant.
Fucking HELL, despite how increasingly easy it is to find information, it cannot keep pace with just how utterly fucking lazy people are getting.
“Everyone everywhere should federate.”
“Not like that!”
We don’t federate with nazi instances either.
Threads has massive homophobic and racist accounts like LibsOnTikTok and MomsForLiberty. We shouldn’t federate with an instance that can’t even take care of banning that.
Better yet, let them enjoy the full connectivity for a month. Once they’ve enjoyed all the awesome content and got used to it - defederate.
If anybody remembers XMPP being widespread and what Facebook, Google, Apple and others (say, I personally remember VK and Yandex in Russia supporting it) did to it, that’s what will happen if you “wait and see”.
EDIT: oh, half the thread is such comments
I remember what the standardising committee did to XMPP: users wanted to share photos, send files, and make audio/video calls; XMPP said “we’re not going to standardize that, but each application can use its own extensions”… then it all went to hell.
XMPP was dead on arrival.
XMPP is still alive and well, is it not?
You don’t get how big it was in 2007. I used ICQ and felt some sort of peer pressure (and progress pressure) to switch to XMPP. You could chat in FB via XMPP, in VK via XMPP, a lot of services would just give you an XMPP account because why not. It was like RSS.
Will the Mastodon and Lemmy instances we have today cease to exist because of Threads federating?
I’m just genuinely curious how we could be worse off than before.
From a previous comment of mine:
To be clear, I want it to be users deciding on Lemmy too. Also, people already here moving to threads wouldn’t be the problem, we’re small in comparison to them. It would be a few things:
- They would bring in a huge party of users that would take it over and overwhelm the current users. It would be like a cruise ship of tourists taking over a small town and breaking everything for the current residents.
- They could post to Lemmy, but we can’t really post to Mastodon. They’re going to send ads our way disguised as content, guaranteed.
- If they can manipulate the users from Mastodon, it’s going to get out of hand fast. They have teams of devs and psych engineering to accomplish that.
- This is volunteer ran, do we have enough energy to fight Meta when they try to enforce something?
- Can they manipulate Activity Pub software because we’re a small team of devs? If they can, they will.
- One person mentioned them having instance owners sign NDAs. What’s up with that?
It doesn’t benefit them to send adds disguised because they are paid to provide ad impressions which they wouldn’t have data for. It’s just an annoying business model not a conspiracy to brainwash you.
Nah, companies did it on reddit all the time, it’s a thing.
That’s why you need Nord VPN so you can play raid shadow legends safely…
The thing is they have so much less control if they do that, I’m fed up of places with adverts where comments are turned off or heavily moderate - if their post comes here they can’t do any of that, I say we let them come, we let them come and then we smash them
Why do you hate user choice so much?
Are we not discussing the choice to defederate? As in most choices, some options are better than others. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what the best option is. People discuss and share ideas to make their decision.
We as a community are faced with the choice of whether or not to support threads[.]net. We can think about it individually, or on an instance-by-instance basis - but we can also discuss it collectively. That’s whats happening here.
Defederation is not user choice, it’s decided by the admin of an entire instance.
What a lame take.
Go to their server if you want to or one that don’t defederate, or spin one up yourself, the choice is still yours.
I don’t want meta to benefit from my server, hosting their biased crap, how about that for a user choice.
It’s your freedom as an admin to block them, but indeed the cost is the freedom of your users to communicate with people on Threads. As a user I would prefer an instance that doesn’t restrict my communications in that way.
Freedom isn’t letting everything be or letting anyone do anything. That’s anarchy.
When meta kills off 99% of Lemmy servers because they can, where’s your “freedom”?
Freedom isn’t letting everything be or letting anyone do anything.
I only talked about communicating with Threads users not “anything”.
When meta kills off 99% of Lemmy servers
Why should Meta be able to do this?
By all means, fuck Meta to the moon and back, but for goodness’ sake, users on federated servers can choose to block the domain with the same result, not to mention that admins can simply restrict it (see social.coop/@eloquence/1115888…). It just isn’t so black and white as people are making it seem.
Federation with a bigger platform is realistically the only way for Fedi to become mainstream, and at the moment Meta seems at least to be trying to be communicative. And with their quite unvaluable userbase they really don’t have enough leverage against the privacy-concious Fediverse to turn AP into MetaPub. For now.
You’re playing the classic “it’s the individual responsability” game. It’s how you deregulate everything and the consumer losses every right.
We have to acknowledge that we have systemic or/and societal issues. This is a systemic issues so a common thing.
What exactly is “pushing their crap”? Chances are it will be more moderated and less arbitrary than what passes through from some lemmy instances. Hatred and misinformation? Harvesting your data? Like this isn’t already a factor with lemmy? In the Fediverse, we have admins who flagrantly break their own TOS. Plus it seems to me this is an opportunity for lemmy to get advertisement at Threads’ expense.
could be worse
Oh no not free speech
There is no point to defederate threads.
If folks find the content on the instance I maintain interesting, I want them to join from whichever platform they feel most comfortable with. As long as they don’t cause problems, that is.
The fediverse’s worst enemy is itself. The persistent paranoia that people are out to ruin it is going to drive all the rational people away.
Yeah, close that protocol! Build the walls around our garden higher! No need to wait for them to actually do something worth defederating over, we just don’t like them!
This is silly. A major social media network is trying to join the Fediverse and everyone’s keen on stopping it. If Meta does something dirty or damaging, sure, defederate them then. But I was kind of hoping that open protocols would flourish, not just end up as another bunch of balkanized forums and Reddit-likes.
I’d be closer to agreeing with you if XMPP didn’t completely invalidate your point. They did it there and they’ll do it here.
XMPP works great, you just have to use it. It doesn’t invalidate anything.
Theres a reason nobody uses it anymore. Google extended the crap out of it, effectively took over the protocol and then retired it. It bears the same echoes of what’s happening here.
This didn’t happen. In fact Google was the one who fell behind development when the protocol moved on and deprecated unencrypted connections for example. People just don’t make it a priority to use XMPP instead of the walled gardens they are using now.
I’m sure Meta won’t be awful this time! Sure they’ve been awful quite literally every single chance they’ve gotten, but they won’t be this time!
I’m not saying they won’t. I’m saying there’s no reason to defederate preemptively.
Ever play Plague Inc? The secret to winning is to not become deadly until you’ve already become engrained and established throughout society. Then you add the deadly features once you’re too deep in.
Don’t let the cancer establish itself as something innocent. The owner of the platform WILL take any opportunity to seize control of the media so it can seize control of the message.
If you haven’t noticed them doing dirty or damaging things for the last twenty years, feel free to engage with them.
There’s more than enough evidence to show their intentions are far from pure.
How are we supposed to do that when people like you are encouraging admins to defederate which removes any semblance of freedom of choice that you are fucking trying to imply we act upon?
I’m sure there will be instances that remain federated with them, and you can join those… or just join Threadstagram.
decentralization purpose is choice to move to other instance
Or build my own, which is great to have as a contingency.
They’re a multinational corporation, they don’t need us to host their shit for you to be able to read a goddamn article and learn something.
If you don’t yet understand that they’re evil that’s on you.
But why do YOU get to choose for everyone else?
Choose what? If you want to find an instance unscrupulous enough to federate with that company then go for it. Who is stopping you?
People like OP here, begging admin to block it?
Like are you for real? He’s literally asking them to take my choice away.
It is always the admins’ choice, that has never been any different. You are free to choose which instance you are part of.
This petition changes nothing about that.
What if some of us don’t care if they’re evil?
Then you’re evil. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Go ahead, be evil. It is certainly your prerogative.
Edit: just look at how many votes “But what if some of us don’t care if they’re evil?” got. Like, what a wild-ass bullshit thing to say. This thread is definitely being astroturfed.
It’s sarcasm. I upvoted them because I would have said something similar to highlight the absurdity of any argument against defederating with Threads.
Read their replies. They are apparently being sincere. You have fallen victim to Poe’s law.
Thanks, it is my prerogative.
This is the point of the freedom of federated communities: we can read whatever the fuck we want from wherever the fuck we want without having authoritarian censor-heavy limp-wrist adult-baby moderators and corporate fascists determining what we are allowed to read or affiliate with.
The freedom to read both sides and control what I want to interact with on my own will, and make my own decisions is why I’m fucking here. I don’t want people like you making decisions for me, go fuck yourself.
Thanks for noticing I’m evil. I’ll go make a nice blood sacrifice to my effigy of Satan by eating another baby.
Right, so nobody’s stopping you from joining threads, or making your own instance. You can call it evil.villain. Why don’t you?
So when they steamroll this place so hard you only get their side of the story, what then?
Well fucking said.
I’ve noticed a lot of turfing on all of these threadsfed posts. It’s becoming more and more. People just need to get a threads account if it’s so important to them.
Lol
Then get fucked?
Meta are largely responsible for the current state of affairs right now. Nearly every current war, genocide, fake news, and more can be tied back to Meta.
Are you seriously simplifying all current conflicts caused down to simply social media? So if we completely remove all social media, humanity instantly becomes the utopian society from science fiction. STFU with this stupidity you ignorant child.
Then feel free to go to threads or somewhere that does federate with them. You don’t have to stay on a particular instance if they don’t federate with something you want to engage with.
That’s your freedom of choice.
There is no plan for kbin to defederate with Threads, which is why I’m here you dolt. Maybe you should leave.
So… admins aren’t free to choose? Why are you trying to take away admins freedom of choice? Sounds kind of authoritarian to me.
If you’re self-hosting a personal instance, do whatever you want.
But if you’re hosting a community for other people, you should consider what they want. That’s the responsibility of a community leader.
That’s the beauty of the fediverse, if the instance you’re on isn’t doing what you want, you can move to another one. Or create your own.
I’d say that’s a pretty clear indicator of the popularity of decisions. Saying “No, you can’t do that, cause I don’t want that” is putting your desires above the desires of others.
This is why I love federated communities; the freedom of choice is great to have.
If you like meta so much, why are you here?
I don’t like Meta. Why do you assume everyone has to be on one “team” or the other? I’m in favor of open protocols and open protocols can be used by anyone. Even if you don’t like them.
There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/
Oh jeez how do I turn off all the moving stuff
That site is an assault on my eyes.
The design convinced me to give meta a chance.
I think we should let meta federated to the fediverse until they try to influence it or integrate ads in posts or something else that can hurt the fediverse
Short-sighted advice from people who don’t understand the purpose of ActivityPub.
Yes allowing corps into the Fediverse is very short-sighted.
It wasn’t a roll-call.
why is snark
I’m snarky because I’m annoyed at seeing the constant FUD being lauded around here. Sorry if that snark comes off as hostile.
Yes, Meta is a shit corp who doesn’t deserve any free pass. However, ActivityPub wasn’t built with exclusion in mind. Nor does the protocol allow Meta access to anything that you aren’t already giving up freely to thousands upon thousands of other servers (many of whom cannot or will not respect your rights to data privacy) whenever you use any Fediverse platform.
People who are scared of Meta joining the Fediverse simply do not understand how the Fediverse works, or misunderstand the design philosophy of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub wasn’t built with exclusion in mind
Yes it was, that’s what defederation is for. The potential for exclusion is literally built into the design philosophy of federated networks. Every instance has the freedom to not host Meta’s crap. I don’t know why people don’t understand this.
You’ve also made the point that the information is still accessible, so it’s not like we’re taking down their instance. We’re just turning it into a pariah to devalue it, and if enough instances do this, I guess that means the action is popular. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t succeed. There’s very little to debate here, it just sounds like you don’t like people using their power to do something you disagree with. Sorry, that’s up to those people. It’s not for you to dictate what other people do with federation.
have different problem
platform owned by corporation tends to have more pro corporate users
what happens to existing culture on fediverse
is general trend that online communities get worse when above threshold
Most people on Threads aren’t pro-corporate, they don’t actually give a shit about that. They’re just too confused by the decentralized model to be on Mastodon, couldn’t get an invite to Bluesky, and wanted somewhere to be other than Twitter.
Being connected to it all via Threads could eventually help them get enough understanding to migrate to a different instance.
aren’t pro corporate
threads can still have more pro business people than fediverse
does analogy about non-technical topic work better
what happens to existing culture on fediverse
Likely nothing. If Threads users are problematic and Meta refuses to moderate them appropriately, then instances can defederate later.
Doing it preemptively or forming a pact is just absurd, though. It’s treating the users of Threads as a threat, instead of Meta (who can and will still be able to harvest anything they want from the Fediverse, because that’s how ActivityPub works), and that’s not fair to them who didn’t ask to be thrown into our community in the first place.
@mypasswordis1234 I mean, what is the point in defederating while being in a Lemmy instance? You cannot interact with microblog while using #Lemmy. The only thing that comes to my mind is that threads users will not be able to comment on a lemmy post or comment, but let’s be honest, the way communities will probably federate to #threads (the same way it is today with mastodon*) is not good, thus reducing the amount of attraction a lemmy post can get over there.
- For some weird reason in the implementation of the AP protocol, lemmy posts are seems as just a link on mastodon, the replies are complete though. If someone understand this better and wants to explain, feel free to do it.
I will leave my instance lemy.lol if it defederates threads.net. Defederating is stupid
no one cares if you leave. literally no one.
