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”.
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
Defederation is cancer and it will kill Fediverse faster than any Meta.
Ability to choose with whom to federate with is a core concept of the Fediverse
If you don’t want any defederation, join an instance that doesn’t do it.
No, that’s not a core concept of Fediverse, that’s exactly the opposite. You want echo chambers? There are plenty of them already. It should be the user who decides what content to see and with which instances to interact, not instance admins.
Imagine Chrome not allowing you to visit specific sites and then Firefox not allowing you to visit a different set of sites. That would be a death of the web.
Imagine Chrome not allowing you to visit specific sites and then Firefox not allowing you to visit a different set of sites.
Imagine a worse, less fitting analogy
You can literally spin up your own instance in 20 minutes and see every instance ever if you’d like, it’s a choice and its good to have
You can build your variant of Chrome yourself as well. Analogy is fitting.
On the contrary, defederation is vital to the health of the network. Choosing which instances to not interact with, like far-right groups and hate speech groups, allows users to focus on reasonable content on their home server.
The instance should also be transparent on which instances they defederate with so occasionally the user can venture out into the wild west and see other instances and their points of view.
That causes fragmentation of the network, which in turn will kill Fedi over time.
On the contrary: Advising popular instances to defederate with threads will actually help promote diversity of instances, since the Threads population is orders of magnitude a larger network than Mastodon. Having popular instances defederate with threads will keep lemmy from actually just merging into the threads network.
No, as I explained in other comments.
Millions of Facebook users outnumbering previous users 100 to 1 will kill it. Oh, there’ll be more activity than ever, but it will be a sanitised corporate safe space for advertisers, where millions of normies argue about politics, with misinformation and ads sprinkled throughout.
That’s called growth. Or do you want to keep Lemmy exclusive for marginals?
Exactly cuz threads will lure a lot of people in the fediverse after the fediverse gets even more accessible and for all means more recognition than we can think about defederating threads.
Okay. I’ve seen stuff like this on both mastodon, and here, but i haven’t heard about them doing anything that would actually harm the fediverse. I guess i don’t know what the problem is. I know they’ve got a negative reputation, and for good reason, but isn’t that the awesome part of threads being federated? We can follow and connect to people there without being part of their system, and therefor not susceptible to their bs? If I’m missing something please fill me in.
People are concerned because there were examples of such things going horribly wrong, most notably with Google and XMPP.
Way back in the day, Google announced that its Talk messenger will support XMPP, which made decentralization fans very happy - finally, they can communicate with everyone from the comfort of their decentralized instance!..oh.
Google started implementing features in Talk that are incompatible with XMPP, and then dropped XMPP support altogether, ending up deprecating Talk in favor of Google-only Hangouts. This forced many XMPP users to get into Google’s ecosystem, since the people they contacted through XMPP were mostly just using Google Talk, and they couldn’t be contacted through XMPP any more. As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
now most of their contacts were in defederated Google to which they now didn’t have access.
It is inevitable that Meta will try to kill the fediverse while chasing profits, there is no other possibility in their endgame.
If that is pushing ads into other instances or killing those instances entirely we don’t know yet but it will happen.
It has to because the shareholders must always have more.
I just don’t think it’s possible for something to kill the fediverse. And if it is possible, then it is a flaw in the design of the fediverse and needs to be fixed.
Are you planning to pay for the extra bandwith to deal with all the additional traffic?
Meta will.
And then when they own the servers amd all the traffic, lemmy will be quietly murdered.
Quietly, because they’ll control the traffic, and therefore the narrative
And then when they own the servers amd all the traffic
That’s just…not how any of this works.
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.
Oh no not free speech
could be worse
If I don’t like it I won’t look at it, simple as.
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
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.
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
@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’d personally at least give them a chance. Defederating is a pretty easy process and can be performed at any point in time. At least some Threads users may as well get to know about Lemmy and switch to it.
Upd: yes I do understand many people don’t trust Meta and neither do I. But I also understand lots and lots of users here are using anonymous accounts, and federation information is already public to begin with. Combining the fact that Fediverse may gain more than it may lose, including more users, original content, recognition and etc, I generally think it’s worth the risk. I am generally content with any decision, just sharing my two pennies of thought.
Comment stolen from user “copygirl” from blahaj.zone:
Looks like they’ll be harvesting your data if you follow anyone from Threads, maybe even injecting ads. Unsure what happens to the data of people that get followed by a Threads user. A large part of the fediverse is here precisely because they want to escape corporate meddling, data-hoarding, advertising and other anti-user malpractices. There’s a number of people talking about this, here’s a recent post that highlights some of the things from their TOS.
Anyone can collect the data anyway, and I’m sure at least one person out there is already harvesting our Fediverse data.
There’s a big difference between some random person and Meta collecting the data.
Everything is public on fedi (if we’re talking about communities alike), so any bot can and is already scrapping everything through regular HTTP. You must be extremely ignorant to think otherwise.
Meta can collect every scrap of Lemmy right now
It’s not as if something was preventing them from
data-hoarding
and
harvesting your data
here anyway.
So that part about being followed by a Threads user is just a bit stupid.
The danger is in them becoming an integral part of the network where people don’t bother to register at a normal instance, and then Meta pulling out and the network remaining half-dead.
Let users decide because we’re fucking adults.
Then go join threads.net? Nobody’s stopping you from doing that. That would put you on a server friendly to your beliefs.
Server admins also have opinions, and are not required to take a democratic vote and each individual user’s choice into account. They can decide for themselves, and they will, for good or ill. If you don’t like where it ends up, your user decision should be to fuck off to threads.
I don’t want to join a proprietary service, but I want to be able to communicate with people who chose to join it.
Facebook accounts are free, that’s all ya need man
They are not free because they deprive you of your privacy.
Interesting. Then why would we want lemmy drowning in all that?
Because if the content is federated, then you can access it without sacrificing your privacy.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying.
They’re saying that some users and admins might choose to wait and see
“Yes, Jeffrey has, in the past, killed and eaten gay men. But we should wait and see. It’s impolite not to invite him to the party!”
I don’t want to use their platform, but I get why some people might choose to stay federated so that there is incentive to pull people to mastodon and educate people about the issues
There’s enough nuance there that I’m not dead set on either side, and I think we still have the chance to defederate later if there’s an increase in spam and harmful content / disinformation.
“Jeffrey doesn’t always eat people. Just sometimes. We should totally go clubbing with him and spurn him later if he eats one of us.”
This. Imagine begging daddy admin to protect you from mean Meta.
Imagine zucking on Marks schlong.
You understand that no matter how much you kneel down to service Meta, Zuck the Fuck won’t be trickling anything down on you that isn’t a bodily fluid, right?
And hey, I’m not going to kink-shame. Just pointing out that if that isn’t your specific kink, you might want to wake up to there being zero dollars trickling down to you.
What a meaningless, worthless comment. Letting Threads federate with the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t give Zuckerberg power over us (unless you’d care to explain how it does) - rather, it just gives its users and our users the ability to interacted. Why are you so interested in building walls?
I swear, I’m seeing the western equivalent of wumaos servicing Meta here. Only at least the wumaos got paid; it made sense. These idiots are doing the labour for free!
This is why I don’t understand all the hysteria about this.
If I don’t want to see Threads or I don’t want Threads to see me, I can go to a Threads account and click “block threads.net”.
But obviously that’s too complicated and it’s easier to just whinge to your instance admin about how Threads federation will be the death of us all. 🙄
If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?
What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?
What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?
Leave it to users. Let people decide what they want to see.
You have the full right to decide, you can switch servers to one that chooses to, or open multiple accounts. That’s your choice. This isn’t Nostr, in the Fediverse instance blocking is normal and it happens without your input, but you know what does happen with your input? Registering your account on a server that fits your needs best, or as close as possible.
This is a bigger issue to leave it to users imo. Like lemm.ee admin said a few months ago, threads is too fucking big.
Anything they push on the fediverse will be what users see in All. Plus, popular stuff on threads is determined through Facebook’s algorithm, and it will also determine the fediverse recommendations by consequence.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
However, lemmy 0.19 block feature doesn’t work on users of an instance, only posts hosted in an instance. Add to this that Facebook is a cancerous company making all its money from ads. Expect their bots to comment and make posts pushing ads on all instances.
All of this will also mean high workload on mods to regulate the content. Threads doesn’t bring anything good here, and defederation is probably the only way to protect us.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
Yes. One minute of a user’s time and all that’s gone.
Compare that with having to move instances due to admins blocking at the instance level.
Great thing about the fediverse
People get to decide what they want from their platform
Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.
People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.
In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.
Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.
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.
Imagine thinking Myanmar is facebooks fault. Wow.
That one is actually public record, with
-
Facebook using their influence to set up in the country in a way that made it the dominant form of internet access for the country, enough that a large number of people considered Facebook=internet
-
Facebook getting multiple reputable warnings about what was happening on the platform, what their advertising policies and algorithms were encouraging, and they chose to not act on them and instead continued to profit from it
-
They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
-
Because it was totally and we have the receipts? Imagine being that ignorant of world events.
Read up rookie
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/
I don’t know what version of reality you live in but i hope these articles are illuminating
🙄 I guess the years of violence well before hand we their fault too. Imagine trying to tie years off violence and genocide to Facebook.
It’ll always be Burna to me.
It will always be … a name that doesn’t exist and has never existed?
(Hint: BURMA. It’s hard to sound smart when you can’t even get a single fucking name right! Especially the name that “it will always be” for you. Holy fucking shit!)
You wrote all that over an obvious typo? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
An “obvious” typo you missed when you wrote it. When you read it back after posting. In a post where you were putting on airs of being smarter than everybody.
I fucking love it when that happens and love to rub it in.
I can’t imagine why you are getting push back. I can tell you are very passionate in your position and are on the right side of a complicated issue. The only reason I can think of is your idea hasn’t become mainstream yet and people hate it when they don’t know they should be upset.
Either way I have no skin in it and I agree that meta is garbage. Thank you for be passionate about something in this dispassionate world.
I’d imagine is because Myanmars situation is way more complicated than Facebook “undoubtedly caused a genocide”.
Seems like it’s getting trivialized to shit on Facebook
Facebook deserves every ounce of shit it has coming to them.
True.
But do you believe the actual people commiting the genocide and manipulating Facebook shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions?
:3
I will leave my instance lemy.lol if it defederates threads.net. Defederating is stupid
no one cares if you leave. literally no one.
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
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
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.
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 Kbin defederates from Threads, I’ll just leave Kbin, and stay with Threads. Defederating over vibes is not how the fediverse is supposed to operate. And for everyone advocating for this dumb idea, I’m just using this thread as a honey pot.
Please let the door hit you in the ass on the way out
I’m pretty clear that meta has more problems than “vibes”.
Once they can interact with your account, they can pull your data into their server and analyzing it to deliver ads campaign.
Bye felicia.
fediverse isn’t supposed to have most users concentrated in one instance also
Big tech is a cancer on the internet. It makes sense to avoid it.
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.
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.
Go look for yourself instead of being condescending.
Welcome to Lemmy!
It’s like Reddit with the provocative takes and hyperbole, but even more extreme somehow!
This place is hilarious.
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.
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.
