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”.
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.
Let users decide because we’re fucking adults.
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.
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think jerboa lets you block instances
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.
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 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.
:3
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?
🙄 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.
That one is actually public record, with
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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
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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
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They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
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Their direct fault? No. But they sure as fuck share a lot of the blame in pouring gasoline on the fire.
Because it was totally and we have the receipts? Imagine being that ignorant of world events.
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 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.”
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.
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.
How about adding a feature to “unlist” an instance, where you could interact with it normally, but its posts wouldn’t show up in All, Popular, etc.?
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.
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 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.
Do you think any users would populate a place that’s over-run with trash?
If there are, would they be the type of users who would populate communities you would feel comfortable in?
You will only see the “trash” if you subscribe to users from Threads.
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!
lemm.ee already made the decision, based off of the voice of the community yo defederate from Threads
Lemmy.Ca admins blocked Threads about 5 months ago: https://lemmy.ca/comment/901551
You can confirm that Threads dot net is still blocked by Lemmy.Ca by going to https://lemmy.ca/instances and clicking on the “Blocked Instances” tab.
Thanks, I actually forgot that one can check!
lemmy.dbzer0.com also blocked Threads
Currently, I think there are two main branches of ActivityPub implementations: Microblogs(Mastodon and its forks, the microblog portion of kbin), which are user centric, and group based aggregators(Lemmy, Kbin, peertube, future Pixelfed), both of which are valid implementations, however, they don’t really work well with each other.
So, I believe that the threat of Threads to Lemmy instances is really overblown for the simple reason that there is no way for a Lemmy user to browse microblog contents through federation to begin with, whether it be Mastodon or Threads.
Kbin actually does let you look at and browse microblogs as well as threads.
You mention kbin/mbin, but you do not understand its power!
https://lemmy.world/comment/5715981
This person who responded to me didn’t think so. Maybe you can talk to him about it.
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.
In favor of defederation. If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances. I don’t want Meta pushing their divisive, hateful, misinformation all up in my feeds. Meta will kill fedi. We don’t need them.
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.
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
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Today no.
Come make your instance on Meta™ it’s free™!! Its fast! It’s yours!!
Then later they’ll wreck havoc on our small servers making them slow and unreliable, making their servers even more interesting for people. And so on.
And that’s just one way among lots of ways.
I love that your fear is they will be successful and the lemmy devs and admins don’t have their shit together or a plan to handle anything but a small niche headcount.
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All activity pub needed to do was create a user rights guidelines that prevents profiting off the data. Meta wouldn’t have touched the Fediverse with the 10-foot pole, if that were the case.
Lololol and what legal mechanism are you going to use to enforce that?
My sweet summer child.
With a network that big, they have to be very careful, and really try, if they don’t want our servers to just go kaboom.
Or we just defederate from any of those attempts.
Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.
This is an excellent point. Thanks!
in that case considering meta is saying that it would take nearly a year to federate the platform we probably should defederate them.
What point in that linked blog swayed you? The circumstances are quite different. XMPP was dogshit when Google started working with it. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
I really don’t know enough to say one way or the other, but the fact that this is an established Microsoft practice swayed me. I can actually believe google didn’t intend to do what it did to xmpp as a log of google employees from the 2000’s speak highly of the company, but these executives are traded like nfl players, and i know enough about meta’s history to believe they may do this. Besides I’m still new to development, but i don’t see many other reasons why it would take meta nearly a year to fully launch federation.
Actually this just occurred to me, but isn’t it interesting which accounts were linked first?
Just think:
Meta has literal billions of users.
The entire fediverse has about 1.5 million.
Less than a fraction of a percent.
Why in THE FUCK would meta notice, or care, at fucking all? The entire fediverse of traffic ported over to meta wouldn’t budge their advertising bottom line.
But, it’s a comparatively small group of smart people, having conversations, and profiles they don’t have tabs and near total control over.
There’s news about cop city and gaza I have seen here that I’ve seen NOWHERE else.
Don’t let them control the narrative here
Well, then, let’s make our point I’ll just email the holders of the instances I’m on and let them know I support defederating threads
But that’s good. Meta doesn’t care about Lemmy or Mastodon because they’re tiny. Threads is a threat to Twitter. They want to integrate with Mastodon just because Twitter doesn’t. That’s it.
They’re not going for “total control” of your conversation about Gaza. You are not important to them. You are not the main character in some David and Goliath story. There are only Goliaths.
Do you know why Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram? Instagram wasn’t worth that much. It wasn’t generating a billion dollars in revenue. It probably still doesn’t.
Facebook bought Instagram because Instagram was a growing app that was popular with a demographic Facebook wanted to control. They spent a billion dollars to eliminate a growing threat.
Mastodon and, to a lesser extent, Lemmy, represent a growing threat. Not a very big one right now, but it could become a bigger one. It could become another billion dollar problem for the goliaths on the Internet, in a few years. They need to have total control, if a social media app starts to fragment it just collapses instead as users decide to go wherever the other users are.
Facebook’s 1000:1 user ratio would make Lemmy irrelevant and stave off that billion dollar problem for Facebook down the road. An incredibly cheap way to kill a tiny but growing competitor.
Facebook’s 1000:1 user ratio would make Lemmy irrelevant
That’s the case whether or not you federate with Threads. But if you do, that’s not going to matter because you can freely communicate with people on Threads.
They don’t want to federate because Twitter does not.
But neither to “extinguish” Mastodon or so. They need it as a defense like Google uses Mozilla, showcasing that not only do they enjoy competition, they in fact actively support it, by making their content available over there, too.
Because like you say, the entirely metaverse is so tiny compared to meta, thy could not give a flying fuck whatever the reason if it’s about anything competitive. But they can utilize the tiny underdog as a shield from criticism. And that’s valuable to them.
Threads doesnt have that much users I think. Fb, insta and whatsapp do have a lot of users but I dont expect a lot of users comming from there
There is one big reason why they would care - antitrust and EU regulation protection. They have no intention to destroy the platform Rather they want to please the regulators as they are leveraging the open standards. The EEE strategy is a conspiracy theory. Government regulations are the most probable reason for this change.
Dude, even if it isn’t straight out EEE they’ll just drown us, and eventually kill us because if whatever reason. It doesn’t even have anything to do with Lemmy, they have to manuver carefully if they want to let us live.
Do you have a Lemmy server that can take the load off of a billion user network? I have one and it for sure can’t.
Your server has users that all follow every single user on the entire fediverse? I will admit, that’d be a real concern in that case, but it also sounds a bit weird. What kind of users do you invite to your instance? O.o
If 99% of the network is meta (probably more) then every user will follow stuff on meta instances, instances like Reddit, will have an enormous load of content. You don’t need “everyone following everything” to get that, just imagine a “Reddit all” instance it will bring any small network to its knees.
It’s all in the numbers, and the usage IMO. I don’t want 10000 soul less posts a day, I want to see what people are up to, working on etc. those concepts are quite incompatible, at least on Lemmy because we are just small servers, not a uniformed giga billion network.
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Meta will be okay making money off lemmy indirectly for a while. Then, if they grow, they’ll want more than a toehold.
When it’s Facebook, trust that greed and power are the goals.
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.
this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.
We should tread lightly!
As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
Is it even true? I doubt XMPP was ever popular outside of google’s talk.
Xmpp’s popularity isn’t the point.
The point is google intentionally killed it
How do you define if a communication protocol is dead? I use XMPP everyday, it works just well.
Also, I doubt that Google wanted to destroy XMPP. They simply needed a chat then noticed it’s crap for mobile devices. They wanted to offer their users seemless migration to the new proprietary protocol.
I was sad that Google stopped to use an official standard, but there are many better free options left.
XMPP works great on mobile devices today. Google could have easily developed and published such extensions themselves.
Not even a little bit. XMPP was rubbish.
Why? It works great for me and my contacts. I use it for all my personal messaging.
When Google started using XMPP in Talk, 20 years ago, it was crap. I haven’t used it in probably 15 years but it wasn’t great then either.
Then it must have gotten a lot better in the meantime then. I discovered it ~2020 while searching for alternatives to WhatsApp and realizing that other walled gardens cannot be the answer since they have the same problem as WhatsApp. I think we should revive the idea of an universal internet standard for instant messaging.
No it’s not in the least bit, but because people keep reposting that angry blog post by someone who was personally involved and wanted someone to blame so they blamed Google (as if XMPP needed any outside help to fail to catch on, they could do it on their own perfectly fine), people believe that narrative and then get sold on Meta wanting to the same with the Fediverse. As if they could give a flying fart (just like with Google and XMPP).
If they don’t care about Fediverse they wouldn’t join it in the first place. It isn’t just meaningless but actually harmful - people can gain access to the content on their service without being subject to their extensive surveillance and ads. Add to this all the regular problems with federation.
As for Google and XMPP, back in the days it was happening Google were playing good guys - they had infamous “don’t be evil” motto, supported various open standards and open-source projects (they still do so to some extend of course). I think for them it wasn’t really an intent to ‘kill’ XMPP, it just XMPP was too dependant on google so they suffered a lot when the company decided to stop federation.
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This. I don’t care what Google or Meta do, I will never use their services.
@Creatortray
You’ve just written it : their negative reputation for easaly understandable reasons. We can already foresee Threads will very soon be used to spread the most toxic campaigns on the net and that will undoubtably harm the Fediverse. One of the most valuable trait of the Fediverse is its decentralization and consequently, the potential accountability of any server administrator. Why should we take those risks when it’s so easy to avoid it? #BlockThreadsOut
@mypasswordis1234@Nelfan @Creatortray @mypasswordis1234 if my server federates with #Threads and it creates a problem, I’ll stop supporting it and move to one that doesn’t.
@boiglenoight @Nelfan @Creatortray @mypasswordis1234
Great toot, Nelfaneor, but to use the word ‘risk’ with respect to the probability of #falseBook creating harm in the #fediverse network, is a mistake — it is a “certainty”.Boiglenoight if you value the free and open web we have news for you, your instance is having its HTTPS intercepted by Cloud(G)lare (change ‘G’ to ‘F’). Move to a different one, if you want us to continue dialog with you.
It’ll be successful and the current devs will lose the ability to unilaterally control the project.
So competition, that’s what they are afraid of.
All of you saying ‘Just Wait and See’ are wrong. FB/Meta has a DECADES long track record that already shows us what that company will do.
Anything it can do to profit at the expense of anything else.
They absolutely 100% will EEE the Fediverse and the content coming out of Threads will be the same exact trash that comes from Facebook.
DO NOT TRUST META UNDER ANY REASON.
There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/
That site is an assault on my eyes.
Graphic design is my passion.
Web 1.0 always was a good lookin kid
The design convinced me to give meta a chance.
Oh jeez how do I turn off all the moving stuff
0.19 allows users themselves to block instances…
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True
Meta is a threat to the platform though.
We should avoid making blanket demands like this to the fediverse as a whole. I happen to support your position, but we should take into account the diverse nature of the social web.
Instead of making demands, explain your reasoning and leave each community to make up their own mind. This is the beautiful nature of the social web; we have broken decision making down into many smaller units instead of one mega instance/corporation.
Find a community that resonates with your own thinking on this issue, and over time a thousand different servers will gather experiences and a picture will start to form; was federation with Meta a good or a bad thing?
If you don’t subscribe to threads you’ll never see it.
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Because threads doesn’t have communities. All threads people can do it comment.
They can post to communities by mentioning their handle, mastodon users do it all the time. They’re certainly not going to be as much of a problem for us since it’s a deliberate process, but it’s also not that far fetched that users will sign up there to abuse it, especially if threads has poor moderation (it’s not looking good as it is).
will i see (negative) culture change
Undoubtedly.
*everyone doesn’t
Great and such, but the large majority that might come to the Fediverse will never look nor use that function. If we don’t defederate with our instances now, we never will.
The thing you don’t get is that more common people will find the lemmy servers for the first time. Additionally it is more of a Twitter clone and doesn’t threaten much.
What do you mean by “find Lemmy servers?” I mean, can you describe how that will look like from the perspective of someone that is using threads? And how that will motivate more common people to change the platform or browsing behavior?
Lemmy.world is a server running lemmy software. It’s federated so you can subscribe to lw communities of Mastodon and comment as well. Threads and Mastodon don’t support communities though so all they can do is subscribe and comment. There is no negative to lemmy servers of Threads being federated. Threads users will subscribe to lemmy communities, but stay on Threads. If you’re on a lemmy server it doesn’t change anything. You’ll just see posts and comments with accounts ending with @threads
From my understanding of your earlier comment you said casual Threads users will find out about Lemmy servers for the first time and I asked about how that will work out from the perspective of a threads user. I hoped for an answer of that.
Aside from the “moral” argument, can someone ELI5 what harm can a federated threads.net do on other users (like me) and/or instances?
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.
