I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.
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I can see it playing out fine either way, although it’s certainly more turbulent federating if we are to see their content and it washes out the other communities (which to my understanding is unlikely since it’s user based content like Mastodon). As others said, they already have our data, too.
Instead, I just wish the more… extreme communities didn’t defederate already. I’d love to see Meta users react to Hexbear or Exploding Heads in an unfiltered, unadulterated way (or those much much worse instances that everyone defederates from). Instead they get us relatively tame, generally nerdy Lemmy users. I didn’t even know what a Tankie was back in the before times!
Exploding Heads gave up on Lemmy a few months ago.
Defederating and deplatforming works lmao.
We went to Nostr. Probably else where too, now. I haven’t been on Nostr in a long while so, yeah.
I must have joined after they left, what was it? I’m just familiar with hexbear.
Alt-right troll instance.
Huh. Well, wouldn’t know. Kind of the point of defederating, I guess, you just stop thinking about them.
This is like saying “my email provider should block all emails from Gmail”.
And they can hoover your data right now. Like, you think bots aren’t spidering the site already? It’s a public website.
Well gmail already blocks any non cabal emailaddresss so yeah we should all block gmail.
Is the cabal in the room with us right now?
I’ve got my own SMTP server set up on a VPS and I can send to GMail addresses just fine. Am I part of the “cabal”?
I actually think this demonstrates the exact problem. The reason you can’t do that at the email level is because Google has taken over the entire email space. Ideally, we don’t let threads do that.
Nowadays you have services like Outlook blocking emails Tutanota for “spam protection”. I’d really rather threads not get so big that they can start dictating how the Feduverse operates in that fashion.
As I said down thread, the easiest way to get information with the structure of activity pub is to have a bunch of users and that is because the only way information gets transmitted to a server is by caching it based on post interactions.
That is exactly what millions of thread users in the Fedeverse would accomplish.
Would email be better if you couldn’t send/receive emails from people with Gmail accounts?
It would objectively be more secure in terms of data privacy.
Better, in that regard, is subjective. It sure wouldn’t be more convenient, but that’s why we left Reddit and came to Lemmy in the first place. It sure wasn’t because of convenience.
objectively be more secure in terms of data privacy
Please elaborate how email would be objectively more secure if you could block Gmail.
You can already block Gmail today from any other provider by putting a filter on incoming @gmail addresses. How does that make email more secure?
Yeah I’m not going to criticize anyone for not liking Google. Google’s done plenty to sour people on them. But this is just the height of ignorant flailing.
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This is the real world and people won’t “just ditch gmail”.
Right, but we have a chance here to keep things fragmented as opposed to coalesced around Facebook
Wait wait wait. This is the real world?
We do this all the time. Email providers block millions of domains for spam.
I don’t see any spam from threads.net.
I consider most content on Facebook owned sites to be useless spam.
Not yet anyway. I wouldn’t expect that to stay the same forever though. Especially considering the amount of spam that’s already on Facebook.
Facebook does not have good very good moderation on their platforms (it’s only good enough to keep up their image in the public eye), and I don’t think threads will be an exception to that.
I feel like it’ll probably be one of the bigger sources of spam and hate speech on the Fediverse, at least for servers that don’t block it.
That’s entirely different. As an individual, I have the choice to send emails to, or block emails from, Gmail.com.
But on Lemmy, if I am on an instance that federates with Threads, and I don’t want Threads.net to get a copy of my content or posts (or have my content or posts show up on Threads.net in the future), then tough shit for me, my only option is to either go silent or move to an instance that has defederated from Threads.
People keep making the email argument, but it is not the same thing at all. I don’t think it’s fair for a large percentage of lemmy.world’s users to not have a voice in a decision that will absolutely impact them, nor is it fair to have a stance of “then leave then.”
If a user blocks a domain I suppose their content isn’t send to that server anymore I hope?
It is. The user just won’t see any content from the server they blocked.
How do you know? We should fix this on the software level.
They won’t see any communities from the server they block. Users are not blocked in domain blocking.
Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.
Nope Lemmy’s blocking system is cosmetic only. It’s very much useless against defending from real malicious users. I assume the purpose it was built for was under the assumption that it was going to be used exclusively by easily offended snowflakes, which is backed up by the way that most users treat a person’s claims regarding a malicious user or malicious instance.
Yeah, let’s defederate from a major player that wants to participate in the decentralized nature of this protocol. That way we further fragment Mastodon and guarantee its failure in the long run! Good call!!!
Threads content won’t show up in your feed unless you go out of your way to follow a threads user. All defederating does is deny your users the benefits of activity pub. If twitter is anything to go by then Threads content will be on this platform through screenshots anyway.
By that logic, and I’m not disagreeing, then any time we defederate, like from explodingheads.com or hexbear.net, then we are just limiting options.
The flip side to Federation is defederation. It’s not Federation if there isn’t the option to defederate. It’s one of the core features of the protocol.
No that’s different because hexbear and exploding heads posts and users will show up in our feeds and users have to block. Now that lemmy has instance blocking on an individual level there is much more room for federation.
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No I’m talking about how lemmy doesn’t show things in the feed. We are federated with mastodon. Social yet their content doesn’t dhow up in our feeds unless we go out of our way to follow that person. Threads will be the same.
I mean, they can easily flood the ratings and sure All is just Threads content, then you’re not getting involved in Lemmy/Mastodon content, you’re just talking and engaging on content sustaining Threads and your comments are probably helping engagement next to adverts displayed to users.
It isn’t a good proposition, at all.
Meta doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit their bottom line, especially for their ad business.
Meta should be fully jetisoned from the entire federation. If people want threads, join threads. edit: If people want their sports and brand posts then aggregate using RSS for corporate and non-corp social media. The whole purpose of the fediverse was to be NOT linked to tech bro empires.
Any admins of Lemmy.world reading this? Can we tag them?
Why can’t it be as simple as fuck Facebook! I don’t want a multi billion dollar corporation playing in my sandbox.
On one hand: great, federated tech is catching on.
On the other hand: fuck these clowns, they’re not participating in good faith. If Meta wants to join the fediverse they need to interoperate fully with other instances instead of using activitypub to poach fediverse users.
I’m 100% convinced Meta is pulling a classic embrace, extend, extinguish move here.
Last thing they need is our users. Threads is already bigger.
Honestly, I think they see the idea of the Fediverae a threat, and want to embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s no way they see it as a threat. They have millions more users. They’re just not as engaged or active perhaps as we are. But by the same token most of us are very against meta and other companies like them. There is no reasonable or logical way in which they could extend, embrace or extinguish it. Though I would be very interested to see you try to explain how. And it’s especially funny to see all the people being manipulated. Who have no idea what really went on trying to claim that Google embraced extended and extinguished XMPP. The XMPP work group just finished up their 2023 Google Summer of code for Christ’s sake. Google didn’t kill them and they’re not dead.
There’s no way they see it as a threat.
So why they are expending dev time to partially integrate with activepub? What they earn? Cause this would not make them a dime, not in short term, and even less in long term.
Easy. Because Twitter is their biggest closest thing to a competitor. And right now under the shepherding of the petty little man child is floundering. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. But they sure can be useful.
Threads launched to the audacious soft squishy thud of a freshly fallen turd. Millions of potential users who don’t give a shit about it. On the other hand. Feddiverse users though fewer are wildly, passionate and engaged. So much so that people on a largely disconnected feddiverse system are losing their ever-loving minds about meta even coming anywhere near them.
Right now, realistically we’re nothing to reddit or Twitter. I love the feddiverse. I’m a jabber/XMPP advocate since the 1990s. But let’s be honest, we’re still a pretty small group compared to social media over all. Meta however thinks it’s worth while to form a coalition to topple the twit. That it’s worth while to them to tolerate to some extent a den of lefties, Marxist, and even murderous leninists that couldn’t be more anti them. I’m with them as long as it takes to topple musk. And then we’re coming for their user base. To Free them from their algorithms and pro-corporitist censorship. Coalitions go both ways.
Probably because of the Digital Markets Act.
Is it? After the initial account register, it looked like it was running out of steam. I’d be surprised it lasted long without something new.
Mastodon was immediately dwarfed from the very first day Threads was launched. Total Fediverse MAU has been hovering a but under 2 million, Threads first day user signups totaled more then 30 million. Threads’ growth has leveled off now but it’s still orders of magnitude more massive.
Threads users didn’t sign up, it used their Instagram account. Even if they used it once, they click across, and boom, account there and they cannot delete that Threads account after. An initial day registration does not mean a MAU. It’s like saying MySpace is huge now because everyone had an account…
Edit: Usage plumetted massively- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/14/threads-app-slump-daily-active-users-twitter-competition
Threads’ daily app downloads have universally been in the range of 350k-700k for the past month. Mastodon’s MAU for the same time period has been 1.1 million.
More people downloaded the threads mobile app in the past three days then have interacted with Mastodon in any capacity for the past month.
Edit: Even your cited source pegs Threads’ lowest recorded daily active users at nearly half Mastodon’s monthly active users, and that was from before the app was made available in India and the EU
Seconded. Fuck Meta.
I thought Threads was supposed to be a competitor to twitter? I don’t understand how they’d even integrate with Lemmy instances. I’m here to see posts from boards/forums/subs, not from specific people. Would posts from random Threads user profiles start showing up on the main page?
If meta wants to data farm lemmy, what’s to stop them from hosting a 1 user instance, being federated with lemmy, and…? Profit?
I’m not worried about information going that way, it’s an open source deal, information is already going that way.
As for getting more content from another instance? I’m not against it, as long as it’s regulated, and at risk of defederation if it gets out of hand
So my understanding is that the way Federation works in the activity pub standard is that information is not cached on a server unless it interacts with another piece of content. It’s basically a web of users, and one user cannot reach far on that web. That would mean the easiest way to collect mass amounts of data is to sicc their users over here by the millions.
Although if my understanding is incorrect, I would be happy for someone to educate me.
No, they don’t even need an instance, all of the data is public and freely accessible.
Whichever way instances decide to go there’s a few things people should remember:
- We’re lucky to have this option even if it’s divisive at times.
- It’s not always about what we know will happen, sometimes it’s concern over possibilities we couldn’t even imagine at the time.
- Growth is great but there’s infrastructure, moderators and policies that can be overwhelmed.
- Defederation can be reversed at any time if things change.
Federation can also be reverted at any times if they misbehave. Why should we block them in advance?
Historical precedent and #2/#3 on my list above make the case for erring on the side of caution. That and we’ve got far more to lose than to gain.
Track record.
I will absolutely change instances to one which has defederated from FB.
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It’s encouraged to not stay on lemmy.world anyway
I’m not worried about Threads joining the fediverse. They can’t even properly implement hashtags and trending topics, which already puts them far behind Mastodon and X.
Also, how would users on a microblogging platform be able to interact with a Lemmy instance? I’m a bit confused about how ActivityPub works in that respect.
The ‘they can farm our data’ argument is a bit moot when Lemmy is already publicly accessible, and it makes us no better than Spez if we are trying to combat people for 'data scraping"
I’m in favor of federation. The point of federated networks isn’t that there are no evil corporations, but rather that they can’t cause damage.
What Facebook can do:
- read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
- let their users publish content to other Fediverse users
What they can’t do:
- serve you ads
- serve you an algorithmic feed
- impose their ToS or rules
- collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
- force you to use a certain client
- make changes to the protocol or design
I think this is mostly relevant for Mastodon servers due to the format of the content, but the arguments are the same.
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It’s perfectly possible to create a watertight federated network excluding both federation and scraping from Threads/Meta on Mastodon using authorized fetch and whitelisting.
Authorised Fetch is not supported yet by /kbin
This is exactly the case. There are so many more users than threads that even though we aren’t directly being fed their algorithm, what makes it to the top of our posts will be content that are at the top of their algorithm.
It’s Facebook’s algorithm with extra steps.
Easily incorporated into the posts themselves
We should definitely block instances who insert ads into the content. However there is no evidence of threads.net doing something like this.
Not now… But they can easily do it if they get a majority market share. Don’t behave like they want? Defederated from the majority of the content.
They could threaten to defederate from us so we should defederate from them? It makes no sense.
Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP?
XMPP works great, I use it everyday. It doesn’t have to be popular, you only need to convince some of your friends to use it.
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I’m not sure I understand your question or why you think of those statements as being exclusive. I will try to answer separately.
is the fediverse a service that should allow Threads/Meta
The good thing about the Fediverse is that it isn’t a single service, but many federated ones. For any single instance, I think not defederating maximizes user freedom: A user who wants to interact with Threads can do so while a user that doesn’t want to see any content from Threads can block their domain.
is it like XMPP and doesn’t have to be popular
I think it’s a little bit different from XMPP, in a sense that the Fediverse is a public space where I communicate with strangers, so I would like it to be popular at least among people with shared interests. For instant messaging I just need my friends there, but sure it would be easier if I didn’t have to show everyone how to create an XMPP address and what client to use.
Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP? If not, I’d say that’s pretty much what Google did to one of the first big federated chat networks.
No one is. Not even you. It’s not a thing beyond it being a thing uninformed people repeat.
XMPP literally just finished their 2023 GOOGLE summer of code. Go check it out. The info is on the workgroup blog.
I personally started to use jabber about 2000-2001. The bridges/transports were ultimately great idea, but flakey as hell. Being purposefully broken constantly by AOL and Microsoft. Beeper anyone ? Not something reliable enough to pull people away from those official clients. Nor a service that could gain a critical mass in its own right. Also keep in mind back then, there was no jabber.social or jabber.world equivalent. And not just because those TLD didn’t exist. There were a ton of different small servers, generally run by strangers you had no real clue about or real trust in. There was no official or semi official flagship servers, professionally run. That the average person could place any trust in. There was hope with Google chat that they would be that flagship server. They weren’t. Google “defederated” and shot themselves in the foot several times. XMPP kept on trucking. What really happened to XMPP, besides me being logged in 24/7 365 for the last 20 years. To this very minute. Was they pursued a standardization path. They now compromise 10 to 12 IETF RFC. The standardization path meant slowing the speed of development WAY down. This is what killed the BUZZ behind jabber/XMPP. Not jabber/XMPP itself. Burdened with the requirements of standardization XMPP developed much slower in comparison to Skype discord etc all.
Truth is, these days tons of people use it without even knowing. It’s in IOT an SIP systems outside it’s original scope of personal IMs.
