Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
They’ve also carried out experiments manipulating people’s feeds to make them happier or depressed…
Not only did they play a crucial role in election misinformation, but they’re largely responsible for the radicalization and violence in the alt right.
We know they mine/monetize all your data they can…
Fuck FB/Meta/Threads. People are going to bitch about reddit and them simp for Meta? Give me a break…
Anything that lands on Meta’s servers is open for Meta’s use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we’re anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that’s helping them.
If by algorithms you mean things like GPT, all data on the fediverse is effectively public and arguably even easier to be collected than the likes of reddit, and is almost definitely going to be used to train models whenever or not the fediverse federates with threads.
There’s still significance in defederating though, specially when it comes to preventing “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”
What “IP theft”? By using a service built on ActivityPub you are inherently and deliberately broadcasting your posts to the public. Meta has just as much right to read those posts as I do.
I’d counterpoint by saying that Meta isn’t a person - up its not really a apples-to-apples comparison here. They’re trying to get in here to make money. Pure and simple. I’d wager we aren’t - we’re here hour community.
Our wants and needs are opposed, that’s why I’m not comfortable with letting them commercialise/monopolise whatever they want - especially somewhere that could offer us a more healthy online experience and upset their business model long term.
Isn’t it subject to the same GDPR rules that the whole of fediverse pretends they don’t exist? All it takes is asking facebook what they have on you and unlike some “depersonalized” identifier you can ask for your data based on the activitypub id. It’s actually much easier to go after a big corp with such a request as opposed to some random mastodon or lemmy instance.
I would suggest you to sent a GDPR request to facebook (if you’re in a position to be covered by GDPR and have a facebook account) and to your lemmy instance (being lemmy.world).
Facebook will have a bunch more data on you, undoubtedly, but it will take no time for them to process the request.
Lemmy? Good luck with that. First try finding their privacy page and see what data they actually collect on you. Whom they send it to process. Try reaching the admins maybe? Lemmy has no tooling whatsoever to help with that so they will have to get their hands dirty with postgresql, too.
I like fb no more than anyone in this thread but let’s be realistic. They do have a much better story of complying with GDPR specifically than anything in fediverse.
I’m pretty sure the parent company knows how to deal with GDPR between facebook, whatsapp, and instagram. Whatever issues they faced in EU (most probably the EU’s Digital Markets Act) isn’t directly related to GDPR, because if it was for GDPR compliance alone I guarantee they’d be in the appstore by this evening.
That’s a great example! I am actually aware of this case. Mind that the article quotes:
Meta’s sanction is for breaching conditions set out in the pan-EU regulation governing transfers of personal data to so-called third countries (in this case the US) without ensuring adequate protections for people’s information.
And we discuss the GDPR in the context of the data requests retrieval in here. So you’re absolutely correct in that they suck about following it to the letter, but I don’t think this particular one applies to this discussion.
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO’s actions. The last thing we’re interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
I would add as most important: psychologically unhealthy behaviour their algorithms are promoting.
It starts normally, but algorithm is rewording unhealthy posts and soon whole network is full of it, it happens since they are just hunting “engagement”, click, time in the app and basically addiction.
Sure, but their algorithm in their app will be steering their users to content across the fediverse chosen specifically to engage enrage those users. Even if the broader fediverse isn’t being fed directly by their algorithm, the worst of the Threads user base will be showing up in our communities and comment sections.
As far as privacy and tracking go, can you unpack that a little more? Isn’t everything you post on the fediverse totally public to begin with- isn’t even already likely that they have spun up servers to test ActivityPub integration with, that have already pulled your fediverse posts? This just seems like a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Yes, my posts can be scraped easily, but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation. All they can do is scrape me saying things like:
“Targeted or general advertising for any product indicates to me that the company paying for the ad makes a low quality product that is over priced to pay for spam marketing. I will always seek out the better priced or better quality alternatives that do not fund advertising like this. I have never click or followed direct marketed advertising, except when it interrupts me in an annoying way. Then I will duplicate the tab, click the ad, go the the landing page, let it load, click a link on the page, and let it sit in the background while I use the old tab to go about my day. I close their tab and automatically wipe all cookies at the end of every browsing session or after leaving the tab open for a few minutes to ensure it costs an order of magnitude more than the ad impression did. I will make sure I cost them a full ad click for pissing me off. I never use my browsing/social media devices to make purchases. They are not even on the same network and VPN.”
Data miners are more than welcome to scrape this post, and show it to all of their advertisers please.
I think you’re mistaken, as far as I understand, any server that federates with your home lemmy instance has access to what posts/comments you’ve up/downvoted: https://lemmy.world/comment/704895
This by itself makes it very easy for “malicious” server operators to profile users.
kbin makes it very clear through the /votes/up/votes/down pages attached to each post/comment - lemmy doesn’t show this information in the UI, but you can get it easily by federating your own server with the instance of the user you want to profile.
but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation.
You’re under the mistaken impression that lemmy.world actually gives a shit about your privacy. They don’t. One day, they will do the same thing to you that Facebook does to its users. And disconnecting from lemmy.world and signing up to another instance won’t change the data they already have.
Don’t trust Facebook. Don’t trust any of the corpos. Don’t trust Lemmy, Mastadon, KBin servers you log into. If you want privacy, keep that shit to yourself, in your own home, under lock and key.
Drop the tin foil dude, and go touch grass. I’ve been around since this thing was tiny. Lemmy isn’t even relevant in what you just ranted. Ruud seems like a good guy to me. He hosts this. It is hosted on a cloud server. I’m sure that service is probably collecting data, just like others are doing on several layers of the internet. This place just makes it a good bit harder and more aggregated. Everyone is not out to get you. Like Ruud hosts a bunch of federated servers. His ability to scale as this place grew is impressive. The guy is a mod in the Self Hosted community and as best I can tell, his priorities align well with my own. Maybe they don’t align with yours. I’m okay with that. My priorities don’t align with reddit, that is why I came here. Maybe there is a better place. I hope you find your place. Please don’t troll me with poorly informed ranting and paranoia.
I don’t understand why are people so fixated on facebook and twitter, if you want it just go there and have account there.
If we think that lemmygrad is bad, but facebook/instagram is not (even thou there are a lot of research papers showing that those are socian networks worst for psychological health) we are in big problem.
Let them do their thing and let’s have some space put of it.
For the user experience, blocking meta just means that we won’t have random people who are into baking and casual consumers of social media randomly stumble upon and
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam.
Nope. It is because the admins of the instance have decided to do so. It might be for the reasons you list, for completely different reasons, or for no reason at all.
Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use, and eventually removing support for the open standard entirely, forcing other users to enter their walled garden because that’s where all the people are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).
Large numbers of people are saying that Meta is doing this. And then people are quoting each other saying that, linking to the same article over and over, and whipping themselves up into a frenzy demanding that everyone defederate with anyone who’s not defederating with Meta (even though it’s not even possible to federate with Meta yet - Threads still hasn’t implemented ActivityPub).
It’s currently just a big moral panic and I’m awaiting some kind of actual evidence that there’s a real problem here.
I’m wondering what they could possibly even Extend in a way that the Fediverse can’t keep up? The most they can do is to gatekeep people who are only in their ecosystem, but… they already do that. Whoever is only on Facebook and Instagram is only on Facebook and Instagram, and it didn’t stop the Fediverse from existing.
I’m on kbin.social and when I go to /d/threads.net it is very active. I would not be able to go there if they haven’t implemented activitypub and federated.
Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use
While I wish ActivityPub was GPLv3, it is at least under the MPL, and they are going to have a hard time introducing proprietary closed-source features on a communication platform that requires them to share the source code.
EEE is definitely the SOP, but I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work here. I don’t think there are that many users to steal away from Mastodon et al, compared to how they did with XMPP, for example.
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Facebook will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.
The reality is that it probably won’t accomplish anything at all, particularly for lemmy users whose fediverse is structured considerably differently than mastodon.
You don’t tend to see people from that side of the fediverse over here.
Yep. On one hand, I’d be super-concerned if Reddit decided they were federating with Lemmy. Reddit would create /c’s on their instance for all of their /r’s and completely torpedo all of the existing Lemmy communities.
Mastodon is just users though. You don’t generally see users in your feed unless you actively follow them – or if you decide to drink from the firehose and go look at the All feed. And it’s not like Meta can “take over” Mastodon hashtags like Reddit could take over communities. Hashtags are server agnostic.
And unless you sign up on their server, I honestly don’t see how Meta can pilfer more data than they already can by just scraping public servers.
Just please don’t let Meta diddle the ActivityPub protocols. They need to adapt to the protocols. Nobody should be adapting the protocols to them.
It would still be nice to be able to use the All feed though, and not have it filled with giga-engagement posts from hundreds of millions of Threads users.
The all feed is already just porn every time I open mine (Lemmy.world) - I’ve already more or less written it off as a useless part of the site (through nobodies fault)
You can disable NSFW on your profile for now (although not perfect - it also removes non-porn NSFW).
You can manually block all porn communities that pop up on All, which although tedious will eventually work.
Hopefully better content tagging and filtering, along with the ability to block instances on a user level (such as lemmynsfw.com) will mitigate this in the future.
Still, just because something isn’t working well at this stage due to a lack of features (Lemmy is still at an early stage) doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Saying “fuck it, All doesn’t work well right now so let’s let Meta fill it” seems a bit rash.
I need NSFW enabled for a few communities that use it as spoiler tags unfortunately.
I just don’t see the point in an all feed. I’m perfectly good with using my local feed. That’s why I’m on Lemmy.world. I have little to no interest in most instances and just stick to the one I signed up on. As it is now, if threads federated I’d likely see no change. Id have to go specifically looking for that content.
If I wanted to use Facebook and subject myself to the community that includes, I’d use that. I prefer a less hostile/more thoughtful place, which Lemmy.world is to me. If Threads becomes accessible to Lemmy.world and brings that community within this sphere, I will very likely move on.
Honestly, I feel like the bigger issue is the immense flood of content that’s going to pour out of Threads. I’m not sure if many of the self-hosted instances will be able to federate with it and continue to function.
My (limited) understanding of ActivityPub is that it functions on a publish-subscribe model. If you and I both ran instances and federated with each other, every time a message was posted to my instance I’d send a message to you and vice-versa. Now, let’s say a new person comes along with their own instance and they want to federate with us, but they have 1000x more users than we do. If we federate with this new instance, we now both have to handle 1000x more traffic.
This is effectively a Denial Of Service attack.
Threads currently (supposedly) has 70 million users. If only 0.001% of those users are interacting with federated content every second, that’s still 1000 messages every second. Smaller instances are likely not configured or tuned to handle this level of traffic on top of their existing traffic.
I’d say the biggest reason is culture and identity. The threadiverse is small at present - about 120k - and the microblogverse is bigger - 8m - but still smaller than the Threads.net 70m already and potential 1bn if meta leverages instagram. Why would a smaller and growing new independent social media platform want to be swamped by a commercial tidal wave? There isn’t really a benefit to the independent parts of the Fediverse.
It’s better for the independent parts of the fediverse to grow organically, remain independent and grow it’s own identity rather than disappear into useless oblivion.
Also if I understand it correctly, the Threads.net is a microblogging site so while they may both use ActivityPub, Lemmy does not support microblog content. For Lemmy, it would mainly be the Lemmy content appearing within Threads.net. Federating with Threads.net is more of an issue for Kbin (which does both Threadiverse and Microblogverse content) and Mastodon (which does Microblogverse content) - the content would be visible in both directions. So for Lemmy it might be a big influx of users so may be manageable, but for Kbin & Mastodon it may also be a flood of content which might not be mangeable. But correct me if I’m wrong on that.
I fully agree. I’ve seen the XMPP EEE analogy used a lot, but I don’t think it is the real objection
We’ve got a nice respectful community, of people who want to see community-driven interaction and sharing succeed - Threads offers nothing we want or need
I think it might accomplish more to wait a few days or hours for them to do something that egregiously violates community standards, then defederate en masse—and use the defederation as an event to draw media attention to their practices.
Threads is already 30x bigger than Lemmy and many times bigger than even Mastodon. Mass defederation won’t be making any sort of large media news outlets. We wouldn’t have any sort of significant numbers at that point.
It would be nice if there was some kind of open Internet code of conduct that could be pointed to as a reason for defederating, which journalists could reference in their coverage.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Regardless of what they MAY do, let’s take a look at what they HAVE done and ask ourselves if these are actions that are acceptable in our community.
I say that disseminating misinformation and propaganda around elections in the US and elsewhere is bad and fuck ‘em.
They’ve also carried out experiments manipulating people’s feeds to make them happier or depressed…
Not only did they play a crucial role in election misinformation, but they’re largely responsible for the radicalization and violence in the alt right.
We know they mine/monetize all your data they can…
Fuck FB/Meta/Threads. People are going to bitch about reddit and them simp for Meta? Give me a break…
The biggest threat IMO is being exposed to Meta-curated content. They definitely use their algorithms to push narratives in their interest.
Being exposed to their users is being exposed to them by proxy.
Don’t you think we already deal with them a lot afk?
Anything that lands on Meta’s servers is open for Meta’s use, however they see fit. Providing free training data for their algorithms just isn’t something everyone here is ok with.
Many of us are here consciously because we’re anti-corporate exploitation, not merely because our previous hangout spot fucked around, and Meta is king shit of corporate exploitation, and we want nothing to do with anything that’s helping them.
If by algorithms you mean things like GPT, all data on the fediverse is effectively public and arguably even easier to be collected than the likes of reddit, and is almost definitely going to be used to train models whenever or not the fediverse federates with threads.
There’s still significance in defederating though, specially when it comes to preventing “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”
Being publicly viewable doesn’t make it public domain. We each maintain our copyright. Our posts are our personal intellectual property.
We can’t stop them from using them, but that doesn’t make them theirs, and it doesn’t mean we should just hand them over freely.
If they’re going to use them, they can at least make the effort to take them.
2032: did you or a loved one use lemmy? If so you might be entitled to a settlement.
Defederating from Meta changes nothing in this regard.
They can take. That doesn’t mean we need be ok with giving. Just because they’re ok with theft IP doesn’t mean we need to be ok with them doing it.
What “IP theft”? By using a service built on ActivityPub you are inherently and deliberately broadcasting your posts to the public. Meta has just as much right to read those posts as I do.
I’d counterpoint by saying that Meta isn’t a person - up its not really a apples-to-apples comparison here. They’re trying to get in here to make money. Pure and simple. I’d wager we aren’t - we’re here hour community.
Our wants and needs are opposed, that’s why I’m not comfortable with letting them commercialise/monopolise whatever they want - especially somewhere that could offer us a more healthy online experience and upset their business model long term.
Isn’t it subject to the same GDPR rules that the whole of fediverse pretends they don’t exist? All it takes is asking facebook what they have on you and unlike some “depersonalized” identifier you can ask for your data based on the activitypub id. It’s actually much easier to go after a big corp with such a request as opposed to some random mastodon or lemmy instance.
you funny
I would suggest you to sent a GDPR request to facebook (if you’re in a position to be covered by GDPR and have a facebook account) and to your lemmy instance (being lemmy.world).
Facebook will have a bunch more data on you, undoubtedly, but it will take no time for them to process the request.
Lemmy? Good luck with that. First try finding their privacy page and see what data they actually collect on you. Whom they send it to process. Try reaching the admins maybe? Lemmy has no tooling whatsoever to help with that so they will have to get their hands dirty with postgresql, too.
I like fb no more than anyone in this thread but let’s be realistic. They do have a much better story of complying with GDPR specifically than anything in fediverse.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/22/facebook-eu-us-data-flows-decision/
There’s a reason Meta can’t operate Threads in Europe. They don’t abide by the GDPR.
I’m pretty sure the parent company knows how to deal with GDPR between facebook, whatsapp, and instagram. Whatever issues they faced in EU (most probably the EU’s Digital Markets Act) isn’t directly related to GDPR, because if it was for GDPR compliance alone I guarantee they’d be in the appstore by this evening.
Meta ordered to suspend Facebook EU data flows as it’s hit with record €1.2BN privacy fine under GDPR
That’s a great example! I am actually aware of this case. Mind that the article quotes:
And we discuss the GDPR in the context of the data requests retrieval in here. So you’re absolutely correct in that they suck about following it to the letter, but I don’t think this particular one applies to this discussion.
It is mostly tracking, privacy, and FOSS related. Most of us are here because of a centralized asshat CEO’s actions. The last thing we’re interested in is a guy with a much bigger hat.
I would add as most important: psychologically unhealthy behaviour their algorithms are promoting.
It starts normally, but algorithm is rewording unhealthy posts and soon whole network is full of it, it happens since they are just hunting “engagement”, click, time in the app and basically addiction.
The Algorithm only happens in their app, though. They aren’t forcing it on every Mastodon server, and definitely not on anything Lemmy.
And, yes, The Algorithm is truly awful.
Sure, but their algorithm in their app will be steering their users to content across the fediverse chosen specifically to
engageenrage those users. Even if the broader fediverse isn’t being fed directly by their algorithm, the worst of the Threads user base will be showing up in our communities and comment sections.Unless Vermin Supreme decides to host his own instance on the fedi, I wholeheartedly agree.
As far as privacy and tracking go, can you unpack that a little more? Isn’t everything you post on the fediverse totally public to begin with- isn’t even already likely that they have spun up servers to test ActivityPub integration with, that have already pulled your fediverse posts? This just seems like a symbolic gesture more than anything.
Yes, my posts can be scraped easily, but not my IP, dwell time, what I voted for and how, what I read or didn’t, who I’ve blocked, the communities I follow, where I came from, what else I am doing, where I went next, fingerprinting my connection, my device sensors, and especially the way I react to suggested content and echo chamber manipulation. All they can do is scrape me saying things like:
“Targeted or general advertising for any product indicates to me that the company paying for the ad makes a low quality product that is over priced to pay for spam marketing. I will always seek out the better priced or better quality alternatives that do not fund advertising like this. I have never click or followed direct marketed advertising, except when it interrupts me in an annoying way. Then I will duplicate the tab, click the ad, go the the landing page, let it load, click a link on the page, and let it sit in the background while I use the old tab to go about my day. I close their tab and automatically wipe all cookies at the end of every browsing session or after leaving the tab open for a few minutes to ensure it costs an order of magnitude more than the ad impression did. I will make sure I cost them a full ad click for pissing me off. I never use my browsing/social media devices to make purchases. They are not even on the same network and VPN.”
Data miners are more than welcome to scrape this post, and show it to all of their advertisers please.
I think you’re mistaken, as far as I understand, any server that federates with your home lemmy instance has access to what posts/comments you’ve up/downvoted: https://lemmy.world/comment/704895
This by itself makes it very easy for “malicious” server operators to profile users.
kbin makes it very clear through the
/votes/up/votes/downpages attached to each post/comment - lemmy doesn’t show this information in the UI, but you can get it easily by federating your own server with the instance of the user you want to profile.Agree with the rest.
You’re under the mistaken impression that lemmy.world actually gives a shit about your privacy. They don’t. One day, they will do the same thing to you that Facebook does to its users. And disconnecting from lemmy.world and signing up to another instance won’t change the data they already have.
Don’t trust Facebook. Don’t trust any of the corpos. Don’t trust Lemmy, Mastadon, KBin servers you log into. If you want privacy, keep that shit to yourself, in your own home, under lock and key.
Drop the tin foil dude, and go touch grass. I’ve been around since this thing was tiny. Lemmy isn’t even relevant in what you just ranted. Ruud seems like a good guy to me. He hosts this. It is hosted on a cloud server. I’m sure that service is probably collecting data, just like others are doing on several layers of the internet. This place just makes it a good bit harder and more aggregated. Everyone is not out to get you. Like Ruud hosts a bunch of federated servers. His ability to scale as this place grew is impressive. The guy is a mod in the Self Hosted community and as best I can tell, his priorities align well with my own. Maybe they don’t align with yours. I’m okay with that. My priorities don’t align with reddit, that is why I came here. Maybe there is a better place. I hope you find your place. Please don’t troll me with poorly informed ranting and paranoia.
I don’t understand why are people so fixated on facebook and twitter, if you want it just go there and have account there.
If we think that lemmygrad is bad, but facebook/instagram is not (even thou there are a lot of research papers showing that those are socian networks worst for psychological health) we are in big problem.
Let them do their thing and let’s have some space put of it.
A sense of pride and accomplishment?
For the user experience, blocking meta just means that we won’t have random people who are into baking and casual consumers of social media randomly stumble upon and
Yes among many many other things I don’t want Facebook mouthbreathers ruining the nice open communities we have around here…
Guaranteed there will be an avalanche of spam and hate
“ownership over my audience”.
:vomit:
Nope. It is because the admins of the instance have decided to do so. It might be for the reasons you list, for completely different reasons, or for no reason at all.
Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use, and eventually removing support for the open standard entirely, forcing other users to enter their walled garden because that’s where all the people are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Large numbers of people are saying that Meta is doing this. And then people are quoting each other saying that, linking to the same article over and over, and whipping themselves up into a frenzy demanding that everyone defederate with anyone who’s not defederating with Meta (even though it’s not even possible to federate with Meta yet - Threads still hasn’t implemented ActivityPub).
It’s currently just a big moral panic and I’m awaiting some kind of actual evidence that there’s a real problem here.
I’m wondering what they could possibly even Extend in a way that the Fediverse can’t keep up? The most they can do is to gatekeep people who are only in their ecosystem, but… they already do that. Whoever is only on Facebook and Instagram is only on Facebook and Instagram, and it didn’t stop the Fediverse from existing.
I’m on kbin.social and when I go to /d/threads.net it is very active. I would not be able to go there if they haven’t implemented activitypub and federated.
Neat, this is news to me. Last I heard they hadn’t pulled the trigger on that. The sky doesn’t seem to have fallen as a result, yet.
/d/ is a domain, not an instance
If you look at the activity of https://kbin.social/d/threads.net those are hyperlinks to threads.net
While I wish ActivityPub was GPLv3, it is at least under the MPL, and they are going to have a hard time introducing proprietary closed-source features on a communication platform that requires them to share the source code.
EEE is definitely the SOP, but I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work here. I don’t think there are that many users to steal away from Mastodon et al, compared to how they did with XMPP, for example.
Facebook can bootstrap their product with federated content made by users who are in the fediverse because they don’t want to support a company like Facebook. By not defederating, you would be helping Facebook every time you post a comment or make a post because you would be giving Facebook free content to further their for-profit goals.
Facebook will also be taking fediverse content and displaying it next to ads.
Defederation is one-way. An instance you defederated with still has access to your instances posts.
The reality is that it probably won’t accomplish anything at all, particularly for lemmy users whose fediverse is structured considerably differently than mastodon.
You don’t tend to see people from that side of the fediverse over here.
Yep. On one hand, I’d be super-concerned if Reddit decided they were federating with Lemmy. Reddit would create /c’s on their instance for all of their /r’s and completely torpedo all of the existing Lemmy communities.
Mastodon is just users though. You don’t generally see users in your feed unless you actively follow them – or if you decide to drink from the firehose and go look at the All feed. And it’s not like Meta can “take over” Mastodon hashtags like Reddit could take over communities. Hashtags are server agnostic.
And unless you sign up on their server, I honestly don’t see how Meta can pilfer more data than they already can by just scraping public servers.
Just please don’t let Meta diddle the ActivityPub protocols. They need to adapt to the protocols. Nobody should be adapting the protocols to them.
It would still be nice to be able to use the All feed though, and not have it filled with giga-engagement posts from hundreds of millions of Threads users.
Even now, All/Federated is just way too overwhelming to be of much use.
Depending on how big your instance is, Local is still viable. And Meta won’t change your Local feed at all.
The all feed is already just porn every time I open mine (Lemmy.world) - I’ve already more or less written it off as a useless part of the site (through nobodies fault)
You can disable NSFW on your profile for now (although not perfect - it also removes non-porn NSFW).
You can manually block all porn communities that pop up on All, which although tedious will eventually work.
Hopefully better content tagging and filtering, along with the ability to block instances on a user level (such as lemmynsfw.com) will mitigate this in the future.
Still, just because something isn’t working well at this stage due to a lack of features (Lemmy is still at an early stage) doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Saying “fuck it, All doesn’t work well right now so let’s let Meta fill it” seems a bit rash.
I need NSFW enabled for a few communities that use it as spoiler tags unfortunately.
I just don’t see the point in an all feed. I’m perfectly good with using my local feed. That’s why I’m on Lemmy.world. I have little to no interest in most instances and just stick to the one I signed up on. As it is now, if threads federated I’d likely see no change. Id have to go specifically looking for that content.
If I wanted to use Facebook and subject myself to the community that includes, I’d use that. I prefer a less hostile/more thoughtful place, which Lemmy.world is to me. If Threads becomes accessible to Lemmy.world and brings that community within this sphere, I will very likely move on.
Honestly, I feel like the bigger issue is the immense flood of content that’s going to pour out of Threads. I’m not sure if many of the self-hosted instances will be able to federate with it and continue to function.
What kind of sever requirements are needed?
This seems like a more viable argument than much of the EEE stuff, in regards to Threads v Mastodon.
But I simply don’t understand the ins-and-outs of how Threads stuff gets federated, and how much toll it would actually put on other servers.
My (limited) understanding of ActivityPub is that it functions on a publish-subscribe model. If you and I both ran instances and federated with each other, every time a message was posted to my instance I’d send a message to you and vice-versa. Now, let’s say a new person comes along with their own instance and they want to federate with us, but they have 1000x more users than we do. If we federate with this new instance, we now both have to handle 1000x more traffic.
This is effectively a Denial Of Service attack.
Threads currently (supposedly) has 70 million users. If only 0.001% of those users are interacting with federated content every second, that’s still 1000 messages every second. Smaller instances are likely not configured or tuned to handle this level of traffic on top of their existing traffic.
I’d say the biggest reason is culture and identity. The threadiverse is small at present - about 120k - and the microblogverse is bigger - 8m - but still smaller than the Threads.net 70m already and potential 1bn if meta leverages instagram. Why would a smaller and growing new independent social media platform want to be swamped by a commercial tidal wave? There isn’t really a benefit to the independent parts of the Fediverse.
It’s better for the independent parts of the fediverse to grow organically, remain independent and grow it’s own identity rather than disappear into useless oblivion.
Also if I understand it correctly, the Threads.net is a microblogging site so while they may both use ActivityPub, Lemmy does not support microblog content. For Lemmy, it would mainly be the Lemmy content appearing within Threads.net. Federating with Threads.net is more of an issue for Kbin (which does both Threadiverse and Microblogverse content) and Mastodon (which does Microblogverse content) - the content would be visible in both directions. So for Lemmy it might be a big influx of users so may be manageable, but for Kbin & Mastodon it may also be a flood of content which might not be mangeable. But correct me if I’m wrong on that.
I fully agree. I’ve seen the XMPP EEE analogy used a lot, but I don’t think it is the real objection
We’ve got a nice respectful community, of people who want to see community-driven interaction and sharing succeed - Threads offers nothing we want or need
You said threadiverse a couple of times when I think you meant fediverse.
They sad threadiverse to distinguish it from the microblogiverse, both are part of the fediverse.
Twitter, Instagram, & Mastodon = microblogging.
Reddit, & Lemmy = threaded discussions.
I think it might accomplish more to wait a few days or hours for them to do something that egregiously violates community standards, then defederate en masse—and use the defederation as an event to draw media attention to their practices.
Threads is already 30x bigger than Lemmy and many times bigger than even Mastodon. Mass defederation won’t be making any sort of large media news outlets. We wouldn’t have any sort of significant numbers at that point.
It would be nice if there was some kind of open Internet code of conduct that could be pointed to as a reason for defederating, which journalists could reference in their coverage.
The code reads: moderate your own instance however you like.