Threads seems to be beginning to test ActivityPub federation, and since Kbin can be used for microblogging, this affects kbin.social. What are your thoughts on federating or defederating with them?
Meta is horrible. Betcha it gets slapped with massive defedding in no time flat.
Whelp, Pixelfed’s already out 😶
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568
defederate!We feel poorly about it.
The Fediverse is an experiment and should/needs to be robust enough to cope with large commercial instances. I’m happy to see how this goes before blocking if it goes badly
They’ll boil the frog slowly enough. Threads is huge compared to the fediverse, and will likely do piecemeal federation. Like sending account activity out but not sharing any fediverse voices, getting everyone here following and desensitized
They may. We’ll see. But us running around with our hair on fire before we see what actually happens feels a bit off
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 from someone on Mastodon, I don’t see an issue with it.
The only data they get is public facing data (public profile info and post contents). The only place your IP or email address is stored, is on the server you’re logged into or the site you’re on.
Though others might have some other reservations, that was my biggest concern.
I think it’s a possible change, It will bring a lot of newer people that rather haven’t researched or want to move away from ‘main stream’ platforms to be able to come to the Fediverse and could be really possible for the amount of people being able to interact in general across both platforms.
It would also allow me to move away from Threads and stick to one account for most of the Fediverse based Social Media usage, and I really hope other Social Media’s follow in METAs steps.
I would prefer not to federated with threads and will block if kbin federated. If I wanted Facebook content I would use Facebook.
How would you block threads? There are still many things about kbin that confuse me, so asking in earnest.
I’ll probably defed Threads itself, but there are a few accounts I want to follow.
No. Fuck Facebook, and fuck Zuck. There isn’t a world in which they would federate and respect our privacy.
See how they build internal user profiles for users not on Facebook through tags and other metadata scraping techniques. If people you know talk about you on Facebook, there’s a shadow profile about you out there, waiting to connect with you in real time. I have no reason to think they wouldn’t do the same kind of shit here.
you cant post publicly over time and expect anonymity. no one can.
you are easily discernible by a number of features if someone really wanted to track you down, so this idea that using a public forum has an expectation of privacy is confusing me.
whoami
My main concern is that this is just
FacebookMeta utilizing the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy that Microsoft used against Netscape in the 90s.I feel like our small communities here - which are just getting started - are going to be flooded by Threads users who don’t even know what federation is and then all the content, power & control will realistically be in Meta’s hands.
My gut says that is probably Meta’s goal, but what do I know? I’m just some internet person.
Threads, despite its name, is not a threaded discussion forum like the Threadiverse. It’s more like Mastodon, a microblogging protocol. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Threads users flooding here because the format of these communities isn’t really compatible with that.
How would power be handed to Meta just because Threads has more users? The communities are under the control of the instances where they were created, and Threads users couldn’t create larger communities to replace them either since it’s only a microblogging platform.
The concept is that overtime, communities and connections will organically grow. If Threads has a disproportionally large ubserbase, then overtime they will create a similarly larger number of communities. This then would give them a lot more influence over the fediverse and anyone federated with them.
For smaller instances that become accustomed to seeing those communities and content, the danger is that Meta can just “pull the plug,” defederate, and extinguish the competition, or at the very least hurt their competitor’s users experiences when interacting with content from Threads. The reason they might do this is purely because it fits into their business model which is selling user data to advertisers; it is in Meta’s interest to have as much data on their users as possible, and to have those users be based on Meta’s platform.
As I said in another comment, I could be totally wrong and this could benefit the fediverse. I just think the opposite is more likely because I do not trust Meta. I think they will play nice in the beginning, but then start to flex their muscles once they feel they’ve got enough influence.
Also, there is nothing stopping them from expanding Thread’s capabilities to include the threadiverse. Kbin has already demonstrated both are possible in one app.
If they pull the plug on ActivityPub and take their users back, things would just be exactly how they are now. Since they can’t create communities or magazines like we can (and it’s very unlikely Meta is going to try to implement this), if they want to participate in discussion here, they’ll be posting in our communities. Kbin’s magazines are uniquely suited to this as well because content gets sorted into them based on hashtags, so they wouldn’t even need to know that they’re posting to a magazine to do it.
We’re already in a situation like you describe though with lemmy.world’s near monopoly on large communities, which seems concerning to me as is.
I hope you’re right.
And I agree, lemmy.world does have a near-monopoly on large communities. I attribute that to lemmy being more developed and having apps ready and kbin simply not being completely ready in June (no shade thrown at ernest - he’s great and I like kbin better.) I hope overtime kbin grows some of its own large communities so it’s not so skewed towards a single instance.
Just to clarify what I mean, lemmy.world’s position is bad for the threadiverse as a whole. It’s where most of our users and largest communities we all post to are. If .world goes down, it’d be a major blow to our current, mostly stable, position and we’d be significantly worse off than if Meta were to come and go. Things are improving though and communities are slowly spreading to other instances! I also deeply appreciate that we have kbin as an alternative to Lemmy - thank you Ernest
I think you’re right though.
Right!?
Decentralized networks are a threat to Meta’s entire business model which runs on advertisements. That doesn’t work very well when your users can just jump to another instance without ads.
Meta wants to nip the fediverse in the bud now before it’s too late for them to get a foothold. I think they’re gonna do it by (trying) to port their massive userbase to Threads, make other instances dependent on their content and users, and then pull the plug so they can go back to selling everyone’s information to advertisers.
Edit:
https://i.imgur.com/4U0g4Bk.png
I saw this image floating around a few days ago that I think helps illustrate that even if a fraction of Meta’s userbase migrates to Threads it will be enough to dominate the fediverse. Instagram has two billion users, and the entire fediverse only has around 1.5 million.
I really don’t see the issue. So more users is bad? I thought our issue is the lack of users currently.
I’ve seen people complain about ads and data harvesting here. But instances can already do that. Meta joining would change nothing about that. Actually, being a proper legal company, it might be easier to sue them over misusing your data than random instances.
“Embrace. Extend. Extinguish”? Let’s stop between the last two steps then, not before the first one.
Kbin would be crippled by the amount of Threads content? I thought federation only happened if one kbin.social user is following a user on Threads? Should be as easily manageable then as Mastodon is currently. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
To me, big sites federating looks like a clear advantage. I don’t really get the big problem.
deleted by creator
My understanding of the EEE doctrine is that the large company/userbase pervades, overshadows, and quite literally takes over, so the fediverse wouldn’t really get a say in the matter.
So block them, block them hard, block them now and forever
I’m strongly against it because of Embrace Extend Extinguish.
I’d encourage everyone to read How To Kill A Decentralized Network like the Fediverse if you haven’t already.
I think Meta’s history reveals it to be a bad actor and I don’t think their intentions here are above board.
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked “OK”, you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
This is a great article describing exactly how Meta can control the fediverse and destroy smaller instances with anti-competitve practices.
Raise your hand if you think it would be okay for Meta to put your kBin/Lemmy content along side THEIR ads for revenue.
I mean fuck, how many of us left Reddit for their bullshit? Inviting Meta into the mix is an even worse proposition.
why do people support federation with big company that has bad track record
This is nothing like what I left Reddit over.
Nobody is “inviting” Meta in, ActivityPub is an open protocol. They can come in without any invitation. Being closed is what I left Reddit over. Closing the Fediverse to Meta would be more like the bullshit I left Reddit over.
is close for different reason
My hand is raised.
why
Because Threads presents an opportunity to grow the community on ActivityPub services, and because the Fediverse presents the opportunity to extend the community I’m involved in that’s on Threads right now. My hope is that if that group respects what the Fediverse offers, they will also start sharing the podcast on PeerTube
I would be… Anything I put on here, I know kbin.social will be sending out to thousands of other instances, and what those instances do with my content and how it’s displayed is completely out of my control. That’s just the nature of ActivityPub, and by posting here I think I have to be okay with that. There are already ActivityPub services that run ads, so it’s not unique to Threads either.
I mean, any Fediverse instance can already do this. Some already do. Nobody seems to have a problem with their content MissKey.io’s ads right now.
Sure. How does it harm me if they do that? I won’t even see it.
Ah the ole “Why should I care?”
You’re right, you won’t see it. After federation (when the bandwidth bill comes due) and kbin is shut down due to costs, will you care then?
If kbin.social can’t handle the bandwidth of federating with Meta then it will defederate. But I don’t run kbin.social, that’s up to the people who run it. The question is “how do we feel about federating?” As in we the users.
And that’s who I’m responding to here. A user who was concerned about the content that they posted being seen on Meta’s servers. They’re not worried about bandwidth costs, they’re just worried about some kind of bad magic happening when Meta users see their posts in the context of Meta’s instance.
I don’t trust meta to not intentionally kill us off, drown us out, or start trying to imposing their rules.
Then you don’t understand how ActivityPub works.
It should work on paper, but server hopping going to burn a lot of people out.
Did we not learn anything from Google and XMPP?
Refusing to federate with Threads would achieve exactly that outcome. Most people on Threads wouldn’t know the Fediverse existed any more than most people on Google knew XMPP existed.
The Fediverse is struggling to get a large enough userbase to be as useful as the mega-services it replaces. Threads can gift that userbase and make people more aware that the Fediverse exists.
FWIW this is exactly why Threads didn’t join the Fediverse until they’d overcome the legal obstacles to operating in the EU. If they’d federated first they risked losing all their potential EU users to the Fediverse.
The quickest way to lose this game is not to play it and the Google/XMPP example iillustrates why.
Alright, so the plan is to federate with Threads but to not implement any of their extensions?
