It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
-
Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
-
Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
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Defederate (wait and see)
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Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
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Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
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You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon.
But have you actually tried it? Here’s a sample. Go take a look. (EDIT: My link is worthless unless you are logged in to mas.to. Go look up username fediverse@lemmy.world in your Mastodon client of choice)
It’s a completely unmanageable firehose of comments, spewed only in chronological order.
Honestly, the link between incompatible types of social media like Lemmy and Mastodon could be severed in my opinion, because it’s mostly just novel with little benefit.
If you’re not on mas.to that link will just collapse back to a lemmy.world view.
You’re totally right. Edited.
It looks like you snipped some of your original comment in the process. It just ends mid sentence now.
We need to think this through from the standpoint of an instance admin who is trying to figure out how to use Threads to make their instance grow. That’s really the only motivation I can think of to federate with Threads. Otherwise it’s just all downside. As a corporate social media entity, they are entirely opposed to everything Lemmy stands for philosophically, and their scale is a massive threat to the culture and operations of the much smaller fediverse. Why would anyone ever want to federate with them? Because they see it as an opportunity. To ride the dragon, thinking it can be controlled. This is madness. Choice 4 all the way and if it becomes necessary, 5.
The beauty of the Fediverse is you do not need to make everyone else agree with you. It is important that mods know what you want; what you think other people should want is irrelevant.
No, you don’t need to go around making other people agree with you, on the fediverse or anywhere, really.
But if you are going to enter into a mutual risk/benefit relationship with another party, it does help to understand what their motivations are, so you can figure out if they’re going to line up with your own, or lead to conflict.
My post is about trying to understand those parties’ motivations. Not make everyone agree with me.
I’m starting to dislike the concept of ActivityPub. It gives power to the admins instead of to the users. Users should be able to decide what servers they connect to and what content they see. I hope another protocol like Nostr becomes more popular.
It gives this power to anyone willing to shell out a fiver a month.
…and the know how to set up and maintain a server, which is beyond most
There are hosting companies that offer managed mastodon instances. I assume they might offer managed lemmy instances as well in the future.
You can also use third party providers like these guys who can set up an activity pub centric website for you.
That looks like a pretty good starting point for people who have just a moderate understanding of servers and websites
Yeah that’s something I’ve not seen discussed here much. I get that people want control, but getting started with an ActivityPub centric site (like kbin) is now cheaper than ever. Get your own cheap hosting on a VPS and handle some traffic.
People can even create their own instances just to federate with everyone and absorb their content if they’re worried about the rules and regulations or “x server not connecting with y”
Overall I think it’s a pretty good system compared to a single silo like Reddit
Except when people choose option 5 from this list and defederate you because of who you are federated with.
Yeah dude people will absolutely defederate your ass if you federate with bigots or whatever. No one is owed federation or a platform of any kind.
Federation is not a right, it’s a privilege.
That’s one of the most glaring issues I see with activityPub. The Reddit style, I’m going to block you because your follow XYZ sub mentally.
I’ve got no solution for it besides hiding which places federate with who, but by looking at the content you’d be about to make an educated guess anyway
Until your instance defederated from big instances
I mean, if you yourself are your greatest enemy… Not much can be done there.
When the barrier to entry is technical in nature you get a selection of the competent in that space as your representation. It’s not perfect, but it beats zuck, musk and Huffman.
Each individual user, even though others disagree with them?
The only way to organise it so that all users get what they want is to make it easy to move instances. By and large, it is.
As an instance admin, lol.
I’m paying for the server. I’m handling all the maintenance, moderation, etc. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna allow nazis or whatever other horrible shit is out there anywhere near my instance. I’m not going to enable bigotry. Fuck that.
Everyone can see my instance’s TOS as well as who I’ve defederated and why. If they don’t like it, they can find another instance. They’re not entitled to an account on mine.
Nostr is the Bitcoiner protocol. It’s simple but inflexible and not that censorship resistant (if you don’t run your own relay you can lose data). ATP is more like Ethereum, way more complex but you can build actually useful apps with it.
They already got millions of users. Depending how they’ll implement federation, the sudden influx of millions of unmoderated users into the fediverse might wreak havoc to small instances. So personally, I prefer no. 3, defederate (wait and see).
So why is it important to not federate (or block) with Thread? Asking seriously. I read the article and while those are valid and real concerns. What is the net gain of that action? How does it help the fediverse? I cant see any way that it helps and lots of ways it hurts. At this point it seems like a lot of what ifs.
Edit:
If you need the reasons why to block Threads (meta) I think the answers below explain it better than most!
From what I understand, they’re likely trying to kill the fediverse by making it irrelevant (embrace, extend, extinguish) seeing how it’s finally starting to grow, since they can’t just buy it up this time like they’ve always done to competitors.
Even aside from that though, their algorithms designed to retain user attention by any means necessary are definitely going to seep into and poison the fediverse, at least indirectly, if they’re federated.
Not to mention they could easily run ads as normal posts and boost them artificially; they are an ad company after all. Wouldn’t put it past them.
Not federating with them means we don’t have to deal with all that, and the fediverse can just continue to grow naturally as it’s been doing.
Federating on the other hand means a very real risk of permanently halting the fediverse’s growth in favour of corporations’, like Google did to XMPP
That’s a good point. Would it not make more sense to block/de-federate when they start being bad actors rather than preemptively block? I’m not saying that preparing is bad, I think it’s very much need and valid to assume they will be bad actors. I would like to be wrong and believe that being good hosts is better for their bottom lines. I do not expect them to do anything good because it’s the “right” thing.
If there’s one company you should preemptively block, it’s Facebook. They have a track record of destroying anything and everything they touch and there is zero reason to think it won’t be the same this time. From this post:
They aren’t some new, bright-eyed group with no track record. They’re a borderline Machiavellian megacorporation with a long and continuing history of extremely hostile actions:
- Helping enhance genocides in countries
- Openly and willingly taking part in political manipulation (see Cambridge Analytica)
- Actively have campaigned against net neutrality and attempted to make “facebook” most of the internet for members of countries with weaker internet infra - directly contributing to their amplification of genocide (see the genocide link for info)
- Using their users as non-consenting subjects to psychological experiments.
- Absolutely ludicrous invasions of privacy - even if they aren’t able to do this directly to the Fediverse, it illustrates their attitude.
- Even now, they’re on-record of attempting to get instance admins to do backdoor discussions and sign NDAs.
This is the best response I’ve seen. Abso-fucking-lutely made it clear why it’s impossible to trust meta in anyway shape or form. Thanks!
They are already bad actors.
These companies are horrible. It’s the right time to block them right now.
Week 1, the entire global Page is Kylie Jenner pictures
Once federated, an instance get a ton of data about users and their actions. I am not willing to provide that to facebook.
Defederating is a one-way transaction. Any instance that defederates from Threads will only stop themselves from receiving data from it, but Threads will still be able to pull data directly from any and all instances.
With enough instances not federating threads thr data they can get will become spotty.
I understand it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s nothing on threads I want to receive.
I don’t think that’s true. Unless it’s a server side server denial rather than defederation, all posts on Lemmy are public. This means Threads will directly receive updates even from defederated instances.
Posts are public, yes, but you won’t be able to see a post from an instance you’re not federated with on
your owninstance. Yes, you can just load the instance url directly, but that’s just web scraping. All voting interactions, views, etc are not available in those cases.I understand that if we have a setup like this:
Threads / X A ----------- Bthen interactions from instance
Bon a post on instanceAwill, in fact, be available toThreads. But nothing happening onBwill.Interactions on posts/communities on instance
Bcoming from instanceAwill not be seen byThreads.Overall, I think Threads will not actually ever enable federation to begin with, and even if it does - Lemmy is a bit of a different beast compared to Mastodon.
CMV: The people who want to receive data from Threads should just…make a freaking Threads account. The whole argument to connect with them at all is weird. It’s like recording a Disney movie to your DVR box and setting up streaming from your smart TV to your tablet so you can now enjoy the movie you recorded in bed…when you could’ve just downloaded the freaking Disney+ app.
It’s also (somehow) like when you’re already in shorts and a t-shirt but still a little warm and someone else wants to turn the A/C off cause they’re cold. They can put on more clothes and be totally comfy, I cannot (politely) take any more clothes off.
Accessing threads from mastodon is significantly more private than downloading the official app.
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That’s something I had not considered, good to know. I think I need to setup an instance in my lab and do a deep dive into it. Thanks!
@ninekeysdown @jocanib i would say its because its meta trying to get a foothold on the fediverse and possibly take people away from here. people might just use threads instead of mastodon or lemmy since they can get the content on threads. my take
Wouldn’t more people using federated software be a good thing? EEE is a valid concern eg XMPP (GTalk). I’m not sure (not saying it’s impossible) how that would happen in this case. I see it being more like email than XMPP for instance. I could be way too idealistic & optimistic as well
Basically my understanding of the fear is this:
Meta joins.
Meta makes friends with everyone because they are playing the long con. They act nice to start, play by the rules, etc. nobody thinks they are nefarious.
Meta develops features that users want on top of the existing framework. These features are things everyone actually wants, not what meta wants because meta is hooking people -give them what they want so they use it, then walk it back later, perhaps silently as a “bug” that just never gets “fixed”- perhaps they suppress aspects of the platform, like make the community/individual finding hide the instance it’s on to make it feel more like centralized social media, perhaps they release entirely new features that enhance the experience. Either way, they make small changes because they can, which lowers the experience of those who interact with it because it’s intentionally buggy with FOSS versions. They likely have FOSS versions running so they can test compatibility to make sure they provide a slightly better experience (why wouldn’t they?)
Users join the meta instance for the enhanced features because they don’t actually care about how the fediverse works, they want a seamless experience (which currently the fediverse does not really offer, none of us can say otherwise)
Meta becomes the biggest instances of activity pub, but with enhancements that make other instances super buggy.
Nobody wants to be on the buggy instances so they switch to meta if they don’t care about privacy.
Meta pulls plug. Fediverse dies (they hope) or at least goes back to only being used by the small subset of the population that would never consider the giants to be options. They pulled all the people they could from what already existed.
Now whether or not that’s actually an issue for a platform that actively wants to be “counterculture” (which fedi absolutely does) is yet to be seen… but we already know what meta wants, which is money, and FOSS and money aren’t really compatible. Just on principle. So what meta wants and what they are doing are at odds currently, and I think it’s only a matter of time before they show the hand they have to play.
But I think that’s what the “defederate immediately” group is hoping to prevent. We all joined because we are sick of the hostile takeovers (even if the media companies technically have every right to do so with their own product) and to prevent being beholden to one of the major players. If everyone defederates immediately, meta won’t be able to actually embrace, because they aren’t being embraced back. At that point all they can really do is fork the software, but they would probably scrap it. It’s not exactly a great platform for a company that has their own.
Importantly, why else would they adopt it? What value does free and largely unmonotizeable software actually have for meta? If they wanted to for themselves, they could easily build a Twitter clone. They didn’t. They adopted a free open source platform. Why? What value does that hold for them over just making their own, if they don’t feel threatened by the alternative?
I was thinking, aside from EEE, just getting access to all this free content that they can put their advertisements next to was a major reason for them to join AP.
People aren’t noticing that they could just release a new app or mode for threads that’s Lemmy like and take our community info as their starting seed data. Tada! They also killed Reddit with the same move that killed twitter. I think meta would want to destroy this style of program more then copy though, so I’m not convinced they will copy a Lemmy app.
@ninekeysdown just more people using the fediverse isnt the main goal. or at least my goal. its keeping the stuff foss, privacy respecting, and etc. activity pub allows for federation but what is built on top of it can be proprietary as hell. as is the case of threads. im threatened by threads because its taking away peoples privacy.
I don’t think the Fediverse has privacy as a primary feature. If federating is enough to grab some hidden data, it’s a simple matter to set up a small dummy instance to get that access.
Excellent point that I had not considered. Thanks!
The whole point of the Fediverse is that people can use whatever platform they like to get content from Mastodon, Lemmy etc.
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I agree. All the Fediverse is to the Silicon Valley firms is the current buzzword. Like you said; if- and to me, it’s a question of if and not when- Fediverse integration gets built into Threads, it’s gonna be limited. My bet is that somehow they’re gonna make it so that Threads instances can only federate with other Threads instances.
And that’s if it exists at all. I feel there’s a considerable chance that Meta just throws away the Fediverse integration idea. Either it’s too much effort for too little profit, or some new buzzword comes along for them to chase.
4 is honestly my preference. I don’t see the need to defederate from instances that federate with Threads. But I do want to see a list of instances that federate with Threads so I can personally never comment or post there. I don’t like the idea of comments and posts I make being used to generate ad revenue for Facebook.
100%. It boggles my mind that we’re even considering this.
Only real threats of Threads federation are EEE and server overload. Not the people from there or privacy. If someone wants to see some content you don’t want to see, like some opinion you don’t like, they should be able to see it. I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time. I have heard Threads has a pretty good moderation, so that solves this problem anyway.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time.
A major point of the Fediverse is that you can choose instances based on their moderation policies. If you want fash crawling your timeline, join an instance which allows fash to crawl your timeline.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Site A hosts communities that serve vulnerable people. They see Meta as a threat to those vulnerable communities, as they are not well moderated, and have no issues with hate speech and harassment, so they defederate.
Site B federates with both Site A and Meta. They act as a pass-through for content from Site A to reach Threads.
Bad actors on Threads see content from vulnerable people on Site A and engage with it. People from Site A cannot see the bad actors on Threads doing this, but people on Site B do, and bad actors there get alerted to an opportunity to be proper shit stains. Now, vulnerable people on Site A get targeted by this induced harassment coming from Site B.
What does Site A do?
They defederate from Site B.
The question is just about whether they wait until the harm has been done or not.
Defederation is a one-way block of incoming traffic from the blocked instance. I’m on lemmy.world and can still see Beehaw content posted by Beehaw users even though they’ve defederated from lemmy.world, but if I comment on that content it will only be visible to lemmy.world users. Beehaw has protected its communities from lemmy.world commenters, but its content is still accessible by anyone for any purpose. Instances that federate with both sides don’t change this.
I’m looking at beehaw communities on both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org,and they’re totally out of sync with each other. There’s the rare post from a beehaw user that breaks through somehow - possibly boosted from a kbin or Mastodon instance? - but for the most part, you’re getting basically none of the content from those communities.
Because beehaw isn’t sending you any updates.
Is it that you’re seeing beehaw users who are posting to communities hosted on 3rd party communities? Because that’s absolutely possible.
And that’s absolutely the issue with federating with sites that continue to federate with instances you’ve defederated from. You’re blocking direct communication in both directions, but there’s a lot of indirect communication going on.
Like, this is literally the scenario I described.
No, Beehaw users posting in Beehaw communities visible on Lemmy.world. There’s no third party interaction on either of those posts (just the Beehaw OP and Lemmy.world comments). Whether or not Beehaw is doing the convenience of sending updates, their content is accessible through Lemmy.world. It might take some action on a user here to trigger a pull, but it’s entirely possible and you shouldn’t expect defederation to prevent an intrusive instance from continuing to get content if they want it.
I don’t know for sure there isn’t some pathway through another instance causing this, but in my understanding that’s not how federated communities work. There’s the owner instance that has the true version of the content and distributes it around and then local copies on each other server that feed their updates back to the main instance. You wouldn’t ever take a third party’s version of a community because you couldn’t trust its legitimacy.
I don’t get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Means the instance isn’t part of the hive mind and we obviously can’t have that!
I am a fediverse enthusiast and I am excited for Threads federating. I hope it incentivises Tumblr to federate also and then we actually finally have proper choice.
I see you’re not familiar with EEE. This is a classic move by enterprise to kill an open competitor.
I am. How could they kill the fediverse? If they tried to kill it, it would only return to how things was. Chances are tumblr could join in and then they couldn’t easily extinguish it.
Ever heard of XMPP?
If a single party participating in an open standard is large enough, they can go off the track, and then kill off interoperability.
The XMPP history going around Lemmy lately is kind of exaggerated.
It’s blatantly wrong. Google extended XMPP for their own purposes and when participating with XMPP no longer suited them, they left. The collapse of the “XMPP userbase” is a misnomer - those users were never XMPP users. They were Google Chat users. When Google left, XMPP was in the same state it was in before Google got on board. It returned to its status as a niche protocol for a service that, as @effingjoe@kbin.social points out, people didn’t really want anymore.
I completely agree with this take!
So is this suggesting we need more instances?
I feel like people read a comment that linked XMPP with EEE and keep parroting it while not understanding it.
XMPP still exists, but people largely don’t want “Instant Messaging” anymore. They don’t want to care about whether the person is online before they can send a message.
Google dropping support for XMPP didn’t do that, it’s what caused them to drop it. They moved on to what people wanted: asynchronous messaging.
This concern about the now overused “EEE” stuff is blown away out of proportion.
But this isn’t a single party. Mastodon and Lemmy and Kbin are well established
They’re well-established now. A behemoth like Meta entering upends everything. Especially if they gain traction over the next year.
I frankly prefer options 4-5. There’s no evidence that Facebook will play nice and a lot of historical evidence that they won’t. I want to be on an instance willing to take the nuclear option if it comes to it.
- Make your own instance, defederate from everyone, make 20 accounts, disable account registration, post from 2 or 3 accounts, upvote from the rest and make conversations.
/j on the 5… cuz it’s a bit extreme.
- Get put in a room. A rubber room. A rubber room with rats.
- Make rats.world lemmy instance for you and your rat friends.
and rats make me crazy.
Choice 2. 5 is ridiculous and more harmful to the fediverse than the worst case of EEE.
If 9 regular people sit down with a nazi without protest, you have 10 nazis. Threads will absolutely not stop nazis from posting nazi stuff. We know this because Facebook is full of nazis. Why would anyone want nazis at their table? Because they’re nazis. Anyone who wants to federate with Threads is a nazi. Do you want to federate with nazis? Option 5 is really the only way to keep the nazis away from the table. This is not an exaggeration. There are literal nazis given free reign on Facebook. There will be literal nazis given free reign on Threads. If you don’t stop the nazis because you want to interact with your friends who interact with nazis, you’re enabling nazis. Don’t enable nazis. I can’t stress enough they are literally nazis.
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What does Threads have to do with Nazis? We are talking about the new Twitter competitor from Meta, right?
I’m really worried that people are this ignorant about Meta/Facebook.
Meta enables nazis. I spelled it out right in my comment step by step. Did you read past the first line?
Apparently this guy thinks Nazis are everywhere. Almost reminds me of Russian propaganda, Ukraine is full of Nazis we need to go over there and clean house etc.
It sounds like they just don’t like people with differing opinions and anyone who doesn’t toe the line must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser 🙄
“literally” You might want to google that word.
Are you saying people who call themselves nazis and wear nazi memorabilia and fly swastikas and are antisemites and think the nazis were the good guys during WWII are not literally nazis? Because I’ve got news for you, buddy. They’re nazis. Literally.
From what I gather, EEE only works if:
- Fediverse users mass exodus to Threads
- Meta extends ActivityPub Standard so much that other FOSS projects couldn’t keep up.
I feel like defederating would not solve 1. If 2 happens, the fediverse would just defederate anyway.
(Ofc we have to think about the privacy risks of federations etc.
I hate to say it but we already need a better Twitter and Reddit alternative than what the fediverse has to offer, then. Each time a big company comes in, the communities will get thrown into disarray, eat eachother, and generally make the original ‘vision’ of the fediverse smaller and smaller. People will use what is easy, not what is best for their interests (at least for the vast majority). The solution is still open source, community managed and driven content, but it doesn’t look like the fediverse is a long-term answer.
5 is an absolutely horrible idea.
1 and 2 are best
I tend to agree but there may be some small and especially vulnerable communities which need the privacy. I don’t know but I’m happy as long as everyone gets to have an instance which suits them.
Not that 1 and 2 are best though. 2 and 3 unless you want to be drowning in swastikas and child porn.
If there’s no such thing as authentication when you view posts, you have no privacy anyway. Everything you post online can be seen by anyone and archived anytime. It’s not like you have privacy when you post now.
For many people, it’s not about whether people can take the effort to see what they’ve posted online. It’s whether people who would harass them have a friction-free path to do so, and Threads is such a path. It will be all but totally unmoderated with respect to hate and harassment, and will be the biggest Nazi bar on the block.
Protecting the vulnerable means keeping the assholes away. If we can’t care about the vulnerable, then I guess we deserve Zuck.
Why do you think it will be unmoderated? Keep in mind I have very little exposure to Instagram and less for Threads itself.
Because effectively moderating hundreds of millions of active users is expensive and unprofitable, and because we can look at Meta’s existing platforms to see what their standards of moderation are.
Anecdotal statements from people using Threads suggests otherwise.
I think you’re confusing “removes content that bothers the social hegemony” and moderation.
Because it already is.
Facebook (owned by Meta) has a clear history of allowing deadly medical and political disinformation to spread to the point where we elected someone that sold our state secrets to the highest bidder, and millions of people died from a SARS virus.
Why do people keep pretending data is what you choose to post publicly but not also your name, email address, phone number, health records, financial records, and web history?
Mastodon has no data to give them other than what I choose to publish on the platform.
This isn’t about privacy and data. This is about Meta creating toxic environments and making a profit off encouraging racists and bigots.
Taps the thread title.
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Doesn’t authenticated fetch kinda fix that? If users have the option to make their account private except to logged in other users, and if the server enables authenticated fetch to reject access from blocked / de-federated servers, then only logged in users from servers the server grants access to federate with will be able to view the content. That seems like some useful measure of privacy at least.
The whole point of this is that I want my instance to federate with threads. I want to be able to interact with my friends on there from the safety of the fediverse. I don’t want to have Mastodon for Mastodon and Mastodon for Threads. I want Mastodon for the Fediverse.
I want my instance to federate too. But I respect that other people want differently and that’s fine. We don’t need to tear each other apart.
But that’s exactly what option 5 would do, tear each other apart.
Not unless they send over spies to badmouth us?
… what? How will defederating help that?
