A community index of servers added a new rule recently, that requires every participant to defederate from Threads. Some admins are unhappy.
Server indexes of places for newcomers to join can be instrumental for Fediverse adoption. However, sudden rule changes can leave some admins feeling pressure to change policies in order to remain listed.
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I cannot see anything bad here. Blocking an actively malicious actor should be the norm.
deleted by creator
predicted? they’re facebook, they are not predicted to be bad, they ARE bad.
lets learn from history and not be deer in the headlights
It’s often advantageous to prevent catastrophe before it occurs rather than clean up the mess once it happens.
The mess left by a “catastrophe” often consists of rubble and blood, not some internet comment
What the social media algorithms did to teenagers are for sure a catastrophe involving blood. Suicide went up 48%. 131% for girls.
Jonathan haidt have a public repository of all research on the subject.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/
https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews/
You mean being instrumental in facilitating a genocide in Myanmar of the Rohingya people isn’t sufficient?
Bringing the Marcos name back to the Phillipines, while minor by comparison, is also an issue with repercussions potentially lasting generations.
The thousands of extra-legal killings that were the direct result of the election of Duterte as president (who was AFAIK elected with direct help from Cambridge Analytica and a vile social media campaign on Facebook) is also nothing to scoff at.
But I think the Rohingya genocide is way more insideous, because Facebook knew that their platform was being used for direct encitement of violence and coordination of progroms and chose to ignore it because they thought Myanmar would be a lucrative market and wanted to consolidate their monopoly power there.
Yes but enough about your mother.
Why cover your nuts when you can just let somebody kick you there repeatedly?
In this analogy, they haven’t kicked your nuts.
Where have you been living the last 20 years? Facebook is a repeated offender.
Sure they have, over and over and over, just not in this neighborhood yet. Folks were either too young to witness or just weren’t paying attention to the decades of anti-consumer bullshit from this company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms
Here’s a couple recent individual ones:
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/
They have been very nearly the worst example of an awful tech company for their entire existence. They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.
Not to stir the pot, but at one point Zuck was an idealist. Circa 2008? When interviewed by a news corporation about privacy concerns he said, and I quote, “It’s your data. You own your data.” At the time, he hadn’t monetized with anything more than ads, and I think he truly believed it.
A short few years later he saw the opportunity to become a multi-billionaire and probably decided ethics and idealism is for poor people. Much the same as Reddit, Google, Apple, etc. Do you remember? Those of us who lived through it remember.
One day, the largest Lemmy instances may be no different. Time will tell.
Slight difference is that Zuck has had control from the start, whereas other companies might have had “don’t be evil” leadership that was… optimized away for financial reasons.
Not that it really matters nowadays. Just an observation.
I don’t really see the point of this comment.
If so, I don’t really care how nice and kind Zuck was when he was a freshman in college. I care about what he has done since then, and leading up to now.
I don’t even get that idea, so I am guessing that can’t be it.
I lived through using 8" floppies, so yes, I remember.
Which of those are open source projects that anyone can fork and/or run their own instance of at any time, providing a place for people to seamlessly transition from Reddit, Google, or Apple if they don’t like what those companies do with their platform? The comparison you are trying to make falls apart immediately.
Take it at face value. The comment is a historical correction and gentle reminder that we only have one chance to prevent data from walking out the door, regardless of how friendly the platform is. Once your data is out, it’s out. Guard it well.
Is FaceBook detrimental now? Yes it is, unquestionably.
Was it always? No, it wasn’t.
Should we de-federate? Absolutely. Yesterday and retroactively, if possible.
Reddit. Once upon a time.
Ah, 8" floppies. Good memories. And bad. “Please read that… Why aren’t you reading it? If you’re not going to read it, spit it out… Let go. Now try again. Why is it blank? It wasn’t blank after I wrote to it. Why did you wipe it? Damn.” It was the best of times.
I was so excited when 3 1/2" introduced attached switchable write protection. The peak of convenience.
Did you already forget the shit Facebook keeps doing? Repeatedly.
Facebook has and it’s doing plenty bad. At this point, assuming this time they will be good is too much of wishful thinking.
Still I would let the instances decide. Seems a bit counter spirit to try to force them. Even as a user your can block them (there are two that a lot of users are blocking already…)
Its probably good to federate so that Threads users can leanr about alternatives and migrate to a better instance on the fediverse
Just to be clear, threads can federate with an instance that is not defeated with them, and in this case threads users can see all the Lemmy content, but not the other way around.
So this means that we can just keep posting anti Facebook content all the time and they will serve it to their users or will have to be blocking it.
The more I think about it, the worse it seems for threats to federate.
What’s the number of Threads users compared to Lemmy? If the number of Threads users greatly outweigh the number of Lemmy users, then we’d simply be drowned out by all the Threads posts. That’s part one of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Extend adds functionality to Threads that Lemmy either can’t support or won’t support for a while due to development time. People migrate to Threads because Lemmy is “missing” functionality. Plus, though I’m not clear on the exact legal specifications, proprietary code can be added to open-source code, and the proprietary code would be copyrighted. In other words, Lemmy devs would have to figure out a way to interact with and mimic Threads’ proprietary code using open-source code.
Extinguish is when Threads’ support of Lemmy is eventually dropped. The users left on Lemmy have suddenly lost a huge amount of content, and they’re left with fewer users than before Threads enabled federation.
Right, so that means when someone on Threads is complaining about Threads, Lemmy users can’t chime-in and say “uhh, just register on here and thats not an issue, guy”
Well, meta plans to federate with at least some instances… Right? Else their users won’t be able to speak either.
cough
Haven’t done anything to the Fedivese yet.
“the mass murderer have killed multiple people in Spain and Italy, but we can’t just assume he will do the same thing in France”
Oh? I missed where Meta had done bad things to previous Fediverses.
Like XMPP?
Not Meta.
Facebook allowed connecting with XMPP clients for a while and then cut off that access. While they were not the main offender compared to Google, they still did nothing but leech off the XMPP ecosystem until they decided it wasn’t in their interest any longer.
I’m failing to see what’s wrong about this. They used XMPP and then stopped? That seems to be exactly what people angry about Threads federation want Meta to do with ActivityPub.
The point is that at no point in time where they actually interested in supporting the XMPP federation. It was only a short term tool for them to capture some audience that it would not have otherwise.
Sure, but this is Mastodon, not murders. Much lower stakes.
if the stakes are so low then blocking them is as low-stakes as not, so why make a fuss about it?
deleted by creator
Well sure MS-13 may be a brutal trafficking gang known for extreme violence, but they haven’t done anything to ME yet.
I think this comment chain is going in a circle while everyone actually agrees with the underlying point.
It might be true that they aren’t ACTIVELY being malicious currently. It’s also true that they have a horrible history, and they will likely be actively malicious in the future.
(I say ‘might’ because I seem to recall them being malicious towards the fediverse with secret meetings with admins, but I didn’t follow up on that)
like this?
Wasn’t the original post amended to state it wasn’t intentional but rather a bug?
“bug”
So wasn’t Google when they killed XMPP.
like this?
Thought of this immediately as well
if only Facebook had started in 2004 and not 2024 we might have some historical evidence about how the company handles moderation or community safety or protecting user data or…
if only threads wasn’t launching literally today and we knew if they’d enthusiastically welcome hate accounts like Libs of Tiktok https://www.mediamatters.org/libs-tiktok/timeline-impact-libs-tiktok-told-through-educators-health-care-providers-librarians
The thing is, Meta does not care about community safety, or moderation, or protecting user data. (Fun fact: they don’t have a data protection agreement, but a data usage agreement.) All they care about is how they can get the most money out of something. Killing off things left and right of their path.
The question is not IF Meta kills the Fediverse but only WHEN they do it.
Ounce of prevention > pound of cure; or in Meta’s case, imperial fucktonne of cure.
It’s Facebook dude. To put it in Lemmy friendly terms, they’re not different entities in the way that Linux and Windows are. They’re different entities in the same way that Windows and Xbox are. It’s not technically the same thing but it’s the same people calling the shots. Expecting something different is only going to leave you disappointed.
I’m voting for Trump because he hasn’t done anything bad as a second term president.
They have done a lot of bad, not with threads, but with any other app. A wait and see approach to Facebook at this point is insanity.
the one reason I joined the instance Lemm.ee was because its mission was to avoid defederating and be the widest firehose nozzle of lemmy content available.
even i would prefer for lemm.ee to defederate threads.
Is this really a problem for Lemmy though? Threads content isn’t going to show up here because threads doesn’t have communities, and Lemmy doesn’t allow you to follow people.
Part of the concern is deceptive/astroturfed content developed as advertising showing up in Lemmy communities. While those same actors could theoretically be based on lemm.ee, that’s a lot more work than simply scaling up operations when you’re doing it on Threads anyway.
Yes, my point remains. Even if a Lemmy instance is federated with masto or threads, the content does not appear here on Lemmy right now. It’s physically impossible. Lemmy literally has no code written to support self posts and to follow users.
For example, here is NPR’s masto account viewed through Lemmy.world. You get their name, avatar, banner, and bio….but zero content.
https://lemmy.world/u/NPR@mstdn.social
Until lemmy decides to copy Reddit’s user pages, this isn’t a problem. Federate, defederate - makes now difference for lemmy right now.
TIL Lemmy doesn’t allow you to follow people. Wtf.
I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone’s eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It’s already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.
I just don’t see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they’re only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.
It’s not that crazy, the Threads devs are already looking at specific FEPs for things like quote posting. If they really wanted to, they could implement Lemmy-compatible community groups.
Threads can still participate via comments on Lemmy. I believe they can also post to communities via hashtags?
Mastodon has groups similar to Lemmy communities, Threads could definitely implement them too.
And what kinds of trouble do you expect Threads users to create by participating in our communities?
Well, for one thing, Threads is already full of ads. And I don’t mean Threads ads, I mean users posting ads, like ads for their own products or services or for their audience, trying to be an influencer and all that.
But it’s not necessarily the users that will be problematic. It’s more that by federating with Meta, you’re giving value to Zuckerberg. And I don’t want to do that.
imo it doesn’t matter for Lemmy right now one way or another, and maybe not ever. Being federated with Threads doesn’t do anything yet. Defederate or not, the only change (from my understanding) is about making a statement, or standing with other microblog platform instances that made a choice.
On mastodon however, I’ll likely either use a federated instance or run two accounts. It’s very likely that some person I want to follow will be on Threads, and until people can convince them otherwise ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What’s nice though is that if Threads is on activitypub, you won’t need to log in to see the content. It’s only if you want to engage with the content, and that can be done from a second Mastodon account.
You realize that it makes it a lot more difficult to convince people to come to the rest of the Fediverse instead of using Threads if people are following them and federating with Threads?
This is exactly how Zuckerberg wants you to think.
These conversations we’re having are all speculative, and we won’t know how things play out till we get there. Trying to predict the behaviour of large groups of people is… difficult
What I predict is that defederation will play right into their selling point. We’re going up against a behemoth of evil with enough money to bankroll creators into joining and promoting their platform. Defederating (when the majority of people don’t understand what that means) will end up with people joining Threads.
Threads has a very high (artificially inflated) user count, it’s by a company everyone already knows, and all instagram users already have an account. The strongest selling point we can have is “Join Mastodon, you can see all the same stuff but it’s run by a non-profit instead of Facebook” That doesn’t work if the selling point is “Join Mastodon to see different content”.
For what it’s worth, I’m actively using Mastodon and trying to inform any friends / family that are jumping ship to shift to Mastodon. Best case scenario, Mastodon takes off properly, Threads becomes a failed project by Meta, and we can nail this shut for good.
But you’re giving Meta the same selling point, right? Join Threads and see all the same content. There’s no point in going elsewhere then. It kinda goes both ways.
You’re right that we don’t know what will happen. So it could just as well be that Threads would swallow the whole Fediverse and then if Threads blocks an instance, it’s like a death sentence for that instance. That’s the whole embrace, extend, extinguish.
Somewhat yes
We saw a bit of that last July for how some people picked Lemmy instances
Hmmm maybe? But I think that’s a misunderstanding from a lot of users. You don’t want to see all content, trust me. Defederating is not necessarily bad. In most cases, it’s healthy.
Yep I agree with you there :) It’s a useful tool, and it’s great that we have the option
The best place to go is Z, which federates with both.
I think that even if EEE is what Facebook is going after here, after a certain point some users will just get fed up with the demands/changes they’re making and move to an instance that is incompatible/defederated with Threads and then we’re pretty much back at where we’re right now.
Like when reddit gave the ultimatum to switch to their app or stop using reddit we didn’t really have a 3rd option. However if reddit was in the fediverse we could have just told them to have fun with their new platform while the rest of us stay with the old one among ourselves. Sure, you’ll still lose majority of the content there but when it comes to threads we’re not really interested in their content in the first place so it doesn’t matter. If a Lemmy user is willing to play by Facebook’s rules just so that they can stay connected to a bigger userbase then I’m not sure if we’re actually losing anything of a value if and when our ways apart. Facebook can poison the majority of the fediverse but there’s not much they can do with the instances that don’t care if they get defederated or not. The niche instances will continue existing.
I’m not personally against my instance blocking them but I’m strongly against people pushing their values onto others. I would much rather have individual users block that instance if they so wish instead of someone deciding for them. Sure you can always switch instances but what Fedi Garden seems to be doing here is going against the essence of fediverse and bullying instances to do as they want just like we’re worried of Facebook doing.
But many users might now and then we’ve given Threads leverage - stay federated with Threads and give in to their demands and changes, or lose a big chunk of your users. That’s not leverage I want Meta to have. So I say defederate ahead of time.
I’ve seen this sentiment before and I understand how it can seem appealing. Why should anyone decide what any user sees? Just let every user decide for themselves.
However, there’s multiple problems with that idea. Firstly, it doesn’t scale. It’s not sustainable to have every user block all the bad stuff for themselves before they get a sane feed. Secondly, it’s not a whole solution. A single user can block an instance, but that instance will still have an influence with votes (and blocking an instance right now in Lemmy is only blocking community posts so you’ll also see comments from an instance you “blocked” and this is by design). So user blocking simply doesn’t do the same thing as defederation does.
Also nobody is pushing values onto others really - each user decides for themselves what instance to join. They can join one endorsed by the Fedigarden og fedipact or whatever else they want. Or they can join another one. Up to them.
Meta: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1320040111, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
Instance admins: Let’s give them a chance guyyyyss!!
Those of you who think the problem is data scraping or whatever are totally missing the point. All profit-motivated social media platforms engage in promoting hate content for engagement, and in doing so have deadly real world consequences. The Fediverse is one of the few online spaces where people can just be themselves naturally without being manipulated by algorithms. Given their history, there’s no reason to assume Threads won’t be any better about handling their own community, and anything that happens with them will affect the rest of us.
for real. im new to lemmy but places like hexbear seem really good for trans stuff. i hate how so many trans places are dependent upon facebook or reddit to exist. facebook itself is problematic because those fuckers already assisted a genocide in myanmar, whats to stop them from helping to massacre trans people here?
Hexbear is definitely a good place for trans stuff, its just a shame about all of the authoritarians.
youre starting to really sell me on it
There is a spectre haunting Lemmy
HB and blahj are the two explicitly pro-trans instances. Hexbear is strongly oriented towards communism but I would strongly suggest them over blahj just because of their abysmal handling of c/196’s noncery. They just don’t have as strong of a track record as hexbear.
hexbear seems way more active in the trans spaces at least. its also nice seeing everyones pronouns and being able to guess what variant of transness someone is talking about when theyre describing their experiences.
im on lemmy cause i saw advice saying that you could access pretty much all the lgbt spots on the fediverse from here, which seems true. ive already seen a bunch of transphobic bullshit on this site and on blahaj so maybe ill just swap to hexbear, idk
Yeah you should make the jump if not seeing transphobia is your goal. lemmyML is a great omni-instance but as a result you’re going to be exposed to a lot of right-wing bullshit. And really, transphobia on blahj? That’s extremely disappointing but not all that surprising.
yeah one of the top trans posts the other day was filled with transphobes and people debating the merits of transphobia. i think blahaj doesnt have very active modding?
We aggressively remove transphobic/transmisic posts/comments on lemmy.ml. Please report any that you see. But understand that we don’t control the content of other Lemmy instances, so when you select “All” instead of “Subscribed” or “Local,” it’s the wild west.
i guess the question is more of bans and not just removals. for instance this guy https://lemmy.ml/comment/9833425 seems to regularly go on to write misogynistic and queerphobic screeds, but seems to not have been banned because he is a moderator and has been here for 4 years?
He’s gotten some temporary bans as well as post/comment removals. Omega_haxor is right about hexbear: it’s explicitly socialist, unlike lemmy.ml, and it’s even more explicitly supportive / aggressively protective of the trans community. Several of the largest instances have defederated from hexbear, so for better or worse, access is more limited.
my thing is this guy is a clear misogynist, hes discussed his misogyny for 4 years now. you dont have to be a socialist to think thats unacceptable. are the rules simply never enforced with bans?
no answer? alright jotting that down… ✏
Okay, let me know how this passive-aggressive pressure tactic works out, person who just just got here. I’ve given you my answer.
getting all defensive about keeping misogynists around? maybe just ban the misogynist? doesnt take someone being new to realize that youre just inviting reactionaries that will drive people off the service, i had this whole interaction and understanding within three fucking days. people come here to leave reddit, not to find more redditors
i asked, and you did not answer, do you actually enforce your rules with permanent bans? what causes someone to be worthy of a permanent ban? do you simply just like this guy and go to bat for him?
I’m not going to take the time to dispel your presumptions nor explain myself, my motivations, or this Lemmy instance. I’ll just say that I’m not convening a grand jury trial and constitutional convention because one new user (who on first impression is giving Western chauvinism vibes) had one negative interaction with one Global South socialist who has been here over four times longer than me.
Edit to add: Again, please note that this is not an explicitly socialist instance. I won’t elaborate as to why, but it’s no more by accident than the explicitly socialist ones. What is lemmy.ml?
🤣 im a communist, dweeb. you dont have to be a communist to think misogyny is bad, in fact, thats the prevailing opinion almost everywhere. the idea that the global south is in some way inherently reactionary is absurd
all youre giving off is chauvinistic reactionary misogynist vibes. jesus christ this place is a shithole, good luck getting anyone that isnt a white guy and/or a techbro here. all im getting is you got a handful of bigoted buddies that you hang out with and are completely uninterested in introspecting on it
They do have moderators they just care more about PR-washing than actually protecting their trans base. I would stay away from them.
I am not trans, and so this may be incorrect, but while of course you can use any instance you choose, IIRC it’s https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ that is very explicitly trans-supportive at the instance level. (I’m not saying other instances are transphobic, to be clear)
Edit: I see you’ve already taken the convo far past the comment I replied to, sorry for not reading ahead!
You think lemmy doesn’t have algorithms?
Verifiable algorithms. Algorithms meant to make using the platform enjoyable, rather than meant to entrap users for profit.
Maybe I’m just being naive, but this seems like an argument in favor of federating with Threads. One of the reasons Facebook and Instagram are so effective at driving engagement is that users have basically no ability to curate, sort, or filter the content that they see, especially since third-party clients are banned. You can’t even view most things without logging in.
The implementation of ActivityPub in Threads is a strange departure in this context - (federated) Mastodon users can view all of the content Threads has to offer without subjecting themselves to Meta’s arguably predatory curation algorithms. It almost seems like an escape for people who want to use a Meta-sized platform without Meta getting its grubby little fingers all over your mental wellbeing.
If people are worried that Threads will affect likes and comments (and therefore like/comment-based sorting algorithms) on other instances, it should always be possible to exclude Threads’s contribution to those metrics, no?
That’s one of the effects of defederating. And you are still ignoring the overall point of the comment 2 layers up from your reply.
Really I think you are losing the forest for the trees. Meta/Facebook/Zuck is a known quantity. They will corrupt and exploit any environment they are a part of via any means they can. We don’t need to be able to predict every last detail of how they will do so to know it is true. They have a track record of being awful, anti-consumer corporate citizens. WHY would we want to try to invite them in and try to contain them? Can we make the fediverse invisible to them? Of course we can’t, but why would we cooperate in any way?
Folks who don’t think this is a problem can use an instance that federates with them, just as I’ve chosen ( and will always choose) an instance that does not.
There is no reasonable argument for trying to be a good neighbor to Meta, because you can always, always be sure that Meta has no concern for being a good neighbor to you.
Right, unless they can’t, though. Ideally the Fediverse should be resistant to this kind of influence without resorting to defederation. I’m also concerned that defederating from Threads will make more Threads users than Mastodon users.
I mean, some idea of what they might do would be nice.
I couldn’t care less about Meta itself. My interest begins and ends with Threads users. There are a ton of people that would never give the Fediverse a try for one silly reason or another—predominantly, I would argue, the fear of the unknown—and this seems like it could be an opportunity to overcome that obstacle if leveraged correctly. The prospect of everyone and our parents using social media that is not completely beholden to Meta is exciting to me.
Again, maybe I’m wrong, but this whole thing is basically an experiment, isn’t it? I’d like to see what happens before reaching any conclusions.
Already done, and by an order of magnitude at least. (probably many orders, I don’t have the numbers at hand)
You can look at their entire history for that. And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.
But, I’m starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta, and at the end of the day my freedom ends where yours begins, so although I will continue to advocate for defederation and flee any instance that does not make that choice, I very sincerely encourage you to do you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms
Here’s a couple recent individual ones:
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/
I firmly believe that hoping Meta isn’t going to be the worst possible company they can this time is not the way to achieve that, and is in fact actively working against that future possibility.
I’ve been alive, adult, and working in IT for the entirety of the existence of Facebook, so I’ve had a long time to see everything I needed to see about them.
This is an incorrect assumption, because
And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.
I would be very interested to read this! There are definitely limits to my optimism here. I think Meta is a horrible company and I don’t expect them to act in the best interests of the Fediverse; I’m just not yet convinced that them giving up what is essentially free and ad-free API access to one of their platforms cannot be used to our advantage. Threads federation could absolutely be catastrophic, but it’s also possible that it’s a good opportunity; that’s all I’m saying.
In a non snarky way I say that if the dozens of actual past actions linked in the two wikipedia links, plus the recent events I linked, still leave you in doubt, I don’t see how a plausible but still speculative EEE summary is going to tip you over, but I’ll clap anyway if it does, so:
https://lemmy.ml/comment/9792668
Quoting @Gestrid@lemmy.ca :
I do feel a little bit bad being the table pounding pessimist in this circumstance, but I don’t see how one can look at this company’s history and come to any other conclusion. It frustrates me like few other areas of disagreement about tech do to imagine folks look at everything Meta has done and think we need to wait and see how they will handle this.
Regardless, I appreciate the conversation. :)
That’s the same thing with a different label.
Maybe I’m naive but I kinda don’t get it. People talk about defederating as if…what, all Meta IP addresses will be magically blocked from scraping your content? Any script kiddie can harvest Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever content.
Has Meta shown itself to be a bad actor? Yes. Should my email provider block all emails from Meta? Well…that’s a bit much I think? If Facebook email still existed, should my email provider block that?
My point is yes, Meta bad, but all Thread users also bad? I thought — and apparently I’m very wrong here — that the Federation paradigm was kinda like email. And the only email I want blocked is a domain where every single user is malicious, not a domain run by a malicious entity which has normal people as users, who aren’t necessarily very tech literate.
I don’t actually care, but I just find it a little confusing tbh.
@qjkxbmwvz I think the main fear is Embrace Extend Extinguish.
It’s not about interacting with Threadworms, it’s about sleepwalking into a situation where Meta is changing the very nature of ActivityPub itself.
I’m actually curious about “Embrace Extend Extinguish”: What can they do? They “extend” the ActivityPub protocol in a proprietary way, ok. Doesn’t mean any other instance has to use that, no? Ok, that would mean if an instance doesn’t follow that extension, it can’t interact optimally with Threads, but how does it matter? To me it seems all that can be lost by that is the content/user base that Threads brings into the Fediverse and then we are at the same point as we would be if we defederated immediately. Maybe I’m missing something here?
I think this article, How to kill a decentralized network, gives one of the best explanations, because it uses a real world example of how it has happened in the past.
I guess it is impossible to say what would have happened if Google never used XMPP. To me it mostly looks like google joined XMPP and made it way bigger than it was before and eventually left it again, making it small again. But is it worse than before Google even joined?
Maybe, but can we say for sure?
Maybe the lesson is not “don’t let the big corporate players in”, but rather “make sure the development of the underlying protocol itself is done in an open way”. If Google/Meta adds proprietary extensions, just don’t add them to the main protocol. If they leave the protocol again or changed their implementation in a way that is largely incompatible with the open version, nothing is lost than what they brought in initially. Doesn’t that make sense?
I agree.
I think a good example is how Slack started off by having good IRC integration, then slowly added features which were incompatible with IRC, and finally terminated IRC integration.
So clearly, Slack killed IRC, right? (…of course they didn’t!)
I see the potential situation with Threads as similar.
the problem occurs when most of the content comes from Meta (they will likely have the vast majority of Fediverse users). especially if major communities exist on their instance. when meta decides to no longer support fedi integration, those in the fedi are forced to decide between staying with their communities by ditching the fedi and moving to threads or having many of their communities ripped away.
meta will do this at some point as a play to draw users to them, but we can decide if we want to be affected when that comes to pass.
Threads exists for the sole purpose of capturing some of the people showing interest in the fediverse as twitter dies and keeping them in the facebook ecosystem. Once it believes it has exhausted this window of opportunity it will defederate just as it de-federated it’s xmmp based messenger service once it thought it had the upperhand.
Every server that defederates from meta preemptively is working to build a resilient community that will survive this inevitable scenario. Every server that federates with meta will become dependent on it then collapse as their users leave to join threads once that becomes their only option to continue interacting with the threads users that their social experience was built on.
Your post only concerns threats to an individual user re scraping or malicious interactions. The threat meta poses to the fediverse is systemic. In the long run the meta-blocking servers are the fediverse. The meta-federating servers might see some short term attention but in the long run will have the same fate as those that hitched their wagons to the metaverse.
I dont care if they scrape my comments I just wouldnt want to see sneaky “promoted” posts aka ads and I enjoy the idea of boycotting facebook.
Ultimately the decision is for the instances owners and admins to make, not ours. I will just migrate to one that doesnt federate with facebook if I have to.
I don’t quite see how that would even work. Those posts would need to be coming from individual users rather than from Facebook itself and you can just block those users. Facebook can display ads in between posts on their own app but those wont be visible to people using other apps.
Here’s one scenario.
Facebook feeds its users content according to an algorithm.
Facebook and lemmy users can interact with the same user content (liking, commenting).
There are vastly more Facebook users than lemmy users.
By dint of Facebook’s greater number of users, lemmy users will see the most popular content that is fed algorithmically to Facebook users.
Conclusion: lemmy users are being fed content by the Facebook algorithm (in this still, thankfully hypothetical, scenario).
Like imagine Facebook promotes some viral post and it gets a thousands of upvotes. Any lemmy user on a federated instance, sorting by upvotes/hot/etc, is going to see that post.
That’s the kind of top-down reach that is so alien to the fedi
Facebook could just create fake users that post ads as content
Hopefully fediverse admins are sensible enough to ban users who are blatantly posting advertisements. I know that a lot are, but I also know that a few of the bigger servers tend to turn a blind eye to that kind of thing.
See Grrgyle’s reply. That would be mine If I could explain things as good as them.
Nobody is forcing you to follow users/communities on Threads.
I like to browse by “all”. And nobody is forcing me to use an instance that federates with facebook either, like I said, I’ll migrate if I have to.
You’ll never get the tech iliterate people to switch to the rest of the Fediverse otherwise. Defederating Threads is about making it as bad as possible for its users - it’s about hurting Meta and stemming its bad influence on the web.
It’s not about looking what’s happening in the garden, it’s about entering in the garden. It’s two very different situations.
I agree, and I predict people will eventually pick instances that are doing what you suggested.
My understanding is that the defederation is to prevent MetaFacebook from getting to a point where they control the entire thing and then destroy it.
I don’t think defederating is the right move for that, but it’s a move
I think most people simply just don’t know how federation works and they imagine that defederating blocks Facebook from accessing your content when in reality it’s the exact opposite; it places one way mirror between us from which only they can see thru. There’s also some great irony in the fact that they’re talking about genocide while advocating for using the nuclear option to block Facebook despite the massive number of innocent casualties it’ll cause.
EDIT: Turns out I was mistaken. Defederation indeed does stop the flow of data both ways.
Brother these things are in no way the same. One is a tech giant knowingly aiding and abbeting governments who are ethnically cleansing their country and another is not being able to see posts from a different instance. The only great irony is you calling them innocent casualties.
It’s a comparison. By definition they’re not the same thing but there are similarities; you’re doing something that affects 100% of the userbase because you have an issue with 2% of them.
You should think of a better comparison cause this one sucks.
Also no. You’re doing something that affects 100% of users because the node these users use is malicious. The problem is the underlying structure not the people using said structure. Maybe this makes them stop using said structure.
Its like being upset that I dont answer unknown numbers. “Well only 10% are scammers so you’re affecting 100% of calls”
This is like comparing requiring students in schools to wash their hands to genocide. The scale is the same but the impact is vastly different, and if you don’t want to wash hands (or be defederated) you can just move. Except for changing activitypub instances is even easier than changing schools and both are easier than leaving Palestine.
What do you mean by this? Even if Meta would collect data from defederated servers (I don’t think they would), it would be massively more complicated than if they were federated.
Federarting means there’s a two-way road between your instance and threads.net and traffic can flow both ways. When you defederate it stops the traffic flow from threads.net to you but the traffic from you to them is unchanged. Even if every single instance defederates them they can still see all the content that’s posted there. Nobody else just wont see any of theirs. Only your instance admins know your email, ip-address and so on but all your posts and messages are publicly available to anyone and you can’t stop them from accessing it.
It’s basically the same thing as blocking an user. You wont no longer see their messages but they will see yours.
EDIT: Turns out I was mistaken. Defederation indeed does stop the flow of data both ways.
No, that is not how defederation works. One server defederates, traffic stops in both directions. It’s not comparable to user blocking.
There’s a big difference between the posts being available publicly on the Web and them being sent to Threads via federation.
I hate to admit when I’ve been wrong but this seems to be one of those cases. I tried to use my lemmyNSFW account to view content on a instance that doesn’t federate with them and I indeed can’t see any. I stand corrected.
Good on you for admitting it - we’re all wrong sometimes :) take it as a learning opportunity
Sir/Madame, not being able to see some online content is nothing at all like having your family members murdered in real life.
Read A Death Sentence For My Father sometime and you will see.
The thing is your article blames meta for not doing something that would be impossible on lemmy by design. Meta didn’t act to silence messages calling for violence but there is no mechanism to do this top down on lemmy only by defederating instances or individual communities/instance admin banning posts. Exactly the same thing could happen here, if the user base ever got large enough.
@VirtualOdour the point of me sharing that article was just to try to put a human dimension on genocide for that callous person above.
Meta have been implicated in at least two genocides now and openly obstructed the International Criminal Court in their investigation of one of them. I think people are only pointing that out to show how evil Meta are.
But if you want to know what specifically they will do to ActivityPub, the other article I shared has more direct relevance: How to kill a decentralized network.
Let’s stick to one topic for now.
If lemmy was as popular as Facebook then exactly the same thing would have happened. Lemmy is designed not to have the top down control which the article says Facebook should have used to hide posts.
You can’t blame Facebook for something if you support an alternative where it wouldn’t even be possible to avoid that thing.
If you’re willing to acknowledge that we can move on and you can try and say in simple terms what you think meta did to obstruct the ICC, try to be accurate and concise.
Your topic’s a false premise. First of all it’s totally valid to criticize someone for something that couldn’t apply in the current situation, because what’s being criticized is the decisions and attitudes that their actions reveal.
Meta’s refusal to moderate a website they control after multiple warnings that it was being used to incite genocide speaks to their institutional values, accountability, and culture.
By contrast, plenty of instance owners have shown responsibility, accountability, and good faith about admins moderating the instances they control.
Lol that’s condescending, and it’s also a bit offputting. I come here to bloviate thank you very much. :)
The thing is though, I’m not part of the wider conversation about facebook above. You glommed onto a very simple, very specific point I made to someone else about the human impact of social media incitements to genocide.
What Meta did to the ICC isn’t even related to my above link (which is about the Tigray genocide, not the Myanmar genocide). But it’s well-documented, and I’m not interested in rehashing it here.
It’s a comparison. By definition they’re not the same thing but there are similarities; you’re doing something that affects 100% of the userbase because you have an issue with 2% of them. Like Israel fighting Hamas and the entire Gaza population having to suffer because of it.
It’s a really inappropriate comparison tho.
the crochet(?) veggies are adorable
Sean, I think your article is missing the most important section: alternatives to Fedi Garden.
Can you at least list a few at the end of the article?
common Fedi Garden W
The entire point of the Fedi-verse is so that one person or small group of people can’t ruin the entire platform for everyone else. Anyone who tells you how to moderate your content, backed up by a threat can screw off.
Finally someone with enough balls and brains.
I’m kinda against defederation or blocking anything at an instance level, unless the instance causes straight up legal issues or is literally created for the sole purpose of harassment
When they have a track record like this?
Well, I think Threads meets your litmus test requirements.
It is a certainty that Threads will heavily influence the future development of Activity Pub. This will inevitibly lead to the corporatization and enshittification of any service Threads can affect.
The only resistance we can offer against this is defederation and noncompliance with the will of the behemoth.
You’re missing the point. Fedi Garden is threatening to defederate from anyone who doesn’t defederate from Threads.
Imagine if other instances start doing this about things that aren’t threads. “Delist from db0 or world will delist you”, “delist from Lemmy.ca or Lemmy.ml will delist you.”
I understand your “what if” scenarios, but this is an existential crisis that needs to be resisted against with all instances working in concert. This is not a “what if” scenario. This is the actual iceberg and it is big enough to ruin the fediverse for all instances, no matter their affiliation with the garden.
So, we either unite to defend the independence of the fediverse, or we let a corporate giant take it by ovewhelming us with their “important updates for your security” until we are all assimilated.
Ngl, this screams “think of the children.”
The beauty is that people can do what they want with their own instance, and I can move and still be in lemmy/mastodon.
Is this the last migration?
Seems like a way of bullying community leaders into running their instances how Fedi Garden feels is appropriate. Which is intrinsically against the nature of the Fediverse, in that instances are meant to have their own autonomy.
Fedi Garden’s position in this space is to be a directory, not a dictator. This feels like an overstep.
I think communities/sites etc. on the fediverse should live and die by their decisions. They can make this decision if they want, time will tell if its the correct one or not. That is the nature of the fediverse!
The nature of federation is that you can make your own instance with your own rules independent of a single walled garden and still participate with the other members. Create your own index if you don’t like this one.
And that is exactly what Fedi Garden is going against here. This is not letting each instance to decide who they want to federate with and who not. They’re telling instances to defederate threads.net or else… That’s forcing their values onto others and bullying them to do as they say. That is dictatorial.
They only list instances that share their principles. The only “forcing” being attempted here is the two of you insisting they need to list instances they don’t want to list. The point of federation is that you can start your own list if you don’t like their policies.
Sure, but Fedi Garden is seen as the de facto “primary” hub for this sort of information. There’s a certain power dynamic at play in this sort of situation that is being weaponized.
It’s like if LemmyWorld decided “We’re exclusively a furry community now”, after being the “main” Lemmy instance. Sure, they’d be within their right to do so, but it does a disservice to the Fediverse at large when things that can be seen as critical parts of the Fediverse’s social infrastructure are suddenly slanted in any one particular way.
If it helps bring perspective. I’ve never even heard of Fedi Garden before this post. I did a lot of puzzling over choosing instances for Lemmy and Mastodon when I first joined and never saw a link to them. I’m not sure why they’d even be seen as a trusted list for a new users, since at joining the user also doesn’t know anything about them or their values, reliability, or reputation.
Plus, once you’re in the Fediverse you then learn you can just change instances. Once someone points out that [other instance] can talk to Threads users the individual can just switch or stay depending on their preferences.
Seen by who? I’d never even heard of them and I’ve been on mastodon for ages
You cannot prevent power centers from leveraging their influence, but with federation you can route around it.
It’s their server. If the instances don’t like it they can leave.
Fedi.garden also has their own autonomy. They have the right to make whatever rules for their website they want. If you don’t like how they run their list, then don’t use it. Make your own. If people like yours better, they’ll use it instead.
It’s funny to me how many big flare-ups and popular issues have been about defederating or controlling other instances but we’ve not really had a single popular event where users work on anything together to benefit community.
Individuals have made tools but there’s not been calls to action and mass cooperation events for anything beside silencing unpopular groups. No community design discussions devising and implementing tools or features, no group efforts to catalog or document or display useful data…
I don’t know if it’s just that people here haven’t considered the possibility of doing something positive or that outrage about others is just so much more compelling
Every time something like this gets posted, there are always Lemmy users crying to defederate their Lemmy instances.
But remember, the current concern is with Mastodon, NOT Lemmy. Lemmy can’t actually view the post types that Masto and Threads make. Wendy’s can post all the Threads ads they want - we’re not going to see them here. We can’t. That hasn’t been built.
Try it. Go view someone’s Mastodon account in Lemmy. You don’t see their posts.
@Ghostalmedia
It has been partially built insofar as Kbin and Mbin can see Mastodon posts here and Mastodon interacts with us. Wouldn’t surprise me if Lemmy eventually gets some of that functionality too.
If Meta starts to EEE ActivityPub that will affect all of us.
To illustrate even more: I follow a Lemmy privacy “group” with an Akkoma account.
You will in fact see their posts if they reply to Lemmy comments. They’ll then appear as comments in Lemmy. I believe Mastodon users can also post to communities by using hashtags, though I’m not 100% clear on that.
When you @ mention a community from Lemmy as a user on Mastodon you can post to that community from Mastodon. The first sentence of your Mastodon post will be used as the title, which is why they often look so strange on the Lemmy side.
You can also follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but it gets a bit messy as every comment will be shown as a boost Mastodon side.
I hope the groups addition that Mastodon is working on will fix that mess.
@Ghostalmedia @deadsuperhero I think the fact that I was able to see and reply to this comment of yours from Mastodon proves this idea false, if you check the Post history of this account you will also find that content posted in Lemmy is visible.
They absolutely do interact, lemmy is way more Mastodon friendly than most people give it credit for, considering the fact that communities/groups, automatically boost every post and comment for visibility.
So people on Lemmy being concerned about poorly moderated or cesspool microblog instances is indeed a valid concern.
I post stuff on lemmy via my mastodon account so I don’t have to deal with image hosting on my lemmy instance, so its not quite that simple. You’re not wrong, but they do interact
It’s not us seeing Threads that’s the problem, it’s Threads seeing us (and thereby trapping all of us in their sticky web we tried to escape, what with their shadow profiles and whatnot).
So what would stop them from shadow profiling you by scraping content, or using a different domain? Most lemmy instances are configured to federate with a blocklist, meaning any unblocked instance can download data. Facebook can just make an instance under a different domain and download the data that way. Or they can just scrape user data from the web facing interface.
Posts and comments on lemmy are public. If facebook wants your publicly accessible data from the fediverse, de-federating from threads isn’t going to stop them.
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The guy who runs the growyourownservices network despite seeming very professional is extremely emotionally biased and hates Lemmy as a software (and seemingly any instances that will choose to run that software, regardless of their affiliation towards the developers).
So he basically refuses to acknowledge the existence of Lemmy and by extension a large portion of the threaded fediverse, and when he does acknowledge it he’s talking shit about it.
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