For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
I thought @dansup already committed to blocking federation with Meta. Why does he care if they’re shutting him out, too?
People make more complex decisions when they have multiple roles:
- As admin of pixelfed.social, dansup may have decided it is best for that community not to federate with Threads, at least at first
- As the lead developer of the Pixelfed software, he probably doesn’t like anyone censoring discussion of his software
- As an individual with an interest in social media, he has a Threads account and is participating in conversations there; he would probably like to be able to talk about the projects he’s working on
The Pixelfed team stated (https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/112138024510274956) that users were not able to reproduce the issue, so this is most likely a fake news.
it’s almost as if a company that helped incite an ethnic cleansing just a few years ago, hosts far right stochastic terrorists like libs of tiktok (despite the owner repeatedly breaking meta’s own rules) and actively suppressed the voices of Palestinians and posts that criticised Israel doesn’t make for a good instance to federate with.
it was immensely irresponsible for any instance to federate with them, let alone the largest one.
Im surprised no one has copy pasted libs of tiktok posts with info of mark zuckerberg, elon, etc to see if that breaks TOS and yell free speech and right wing censorship if the accounts are taken down
I followed the link to the mastodon post and saw this edit
“Edit: As mentioned below, it appears to be a bug, not intentional!”
Of course it was. 🙄
I know everyone loves having biases confirmed but we’re also not stupid, we know how the internet and evidence works. A random comment getting spam canned means almost nothing.
If this is true it’ll be incredibly easy to make a really good case for it which would be a potential news story - however I suspect that it’s just a glitch
I’m actually quite glad about this. Currently Pixelfed is absolutely beautiful, without me having to do any blocking at all. I don’t want spammy low-key commercial posts to start showing up on it, turning me cynical and sour trying to work out who is legit on it. The whole culture of mainstream social media is based on people commodifying themselves, whereas Pixelfed is about artistic expression for its own sake. That’s my own take on it anyway. For me, Pixelfed is the best thing on the internet at the moment and I feel protective of it!
I wonder if this means we can mention any word in their filter and our content will not be scraped by them? Something like a Meta filter signature on every post or comment like follows:
Pixelfed, etc, etc, etc…
No it just hides your comment as spam
Database poisoning spam perhaps?
Just switch to an instance that doesnt federate with them
Use this to pick one
I think my instance isn’t federated but I am under the understanding that the federation can still scrape data through other federated instances that mine is connected with. Something along the lines of ‘their data doesn’t come in but your data is still sent out’.
the federation can still scrape data through other federated instances that mine is connected with
That’s not true. If your instance is defederated from Threads, your content will never be sent to Threads. Other instances will not forward content for you to Threads.
Thank you, that’s good to know. Would you have a source that details these kinds of technical details so I can do a little more learning?
A quick search leads me to https://fedi.tips/ which has a lot of information. It mostly focuses on Mastodon but it generally applies to Lemmy and any other Fediverse app as well.
You probably won’t find any source specifically saying that “content is not forwarded from remote servers to other remote servers” because that’s just not how it works. The documentation will probably focus on what it actually does rather than all of the infinite things that it doesn’t do.
Awesome, thank you!
And this thread goes straight to my Masto admin circle. Ta.
I just…
I just do not get the twitter framework for social media. Like I appreciate you mastodon bros, but what the hell is actually going on over there. I had the same issue with twitter. What the hell even is this?
It’s an convenient way to post about some trending topic, without creating a whole new community for something temporary. For example the eurovision sing festival, or some natural disaster that happened.
And on the other hand, it works for expressing some personal thoughts or memes without having to adhere to a specific topic. But with random strangers instead of only your facebook friends.
I think for these kind of needs, no other social media framework would comply better.
I guess I get it, but like, sorting by all or new kind of does the same thing…
I do see that it is popular, but the ‘feel’ is just that its a bunch of people shouting at each other across a cafeteria.
This is basically how I feel about Instagram. I just can’t understand why people use the platform, or even how they do.
Every time I try to use the app, I just end up closing it in frustration a couple of minutes later. What’s the point in following people when the algorithm is just going to show me a randomized assortment of their posts from the past week where every one is followed by a “suggested” post from somebody I don’t follow and then a “sponsored” post (ad). And then it stops after like 20 posts and refuses to load any more because “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!”, even if I haven’t opened it in 5 months.
I guess following people whose content you’re interested in has gone out of style in favor of consuming whatever the algorithm vomits up in front of you. I feel like even Tik Tok does a better job of letting you see content from people you’re following, and that thing is basically all algorithm.
And now I sound like my parents in the 2010s trying to figure out why people use Facebook…
You don’t like a bunch of people shouting at each other across a cafeteria? It kind of explains why I never got twitter either.
It’s not. You have the “explore” tab which is more like “today’s viral toots” (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy’s “All/Top 24h” since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn’t really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It’s not a cafeteria, it’s your RSS feed.
Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that’s only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.
diatribes
I learned a new word today
Yet another day where I get to use the “sound cleverer than I am” cheat code by just randomly inserting French words in my English.
viral toots
This is… its a thing.
I really valued twitter for the ability of an individual person or groups of people to share their experiences of world events happening in real time. This is less about following individual people and more about being able to get meaningful analytics out of the mass of posts in order to spotlight “things” – a political movement, an earthquake, a lawyer who cant turn off zoom filters – whatever. But, it did always have a lot of noise. I usually ended up there when somebody linked to a post.
I never really got the Twitter model either. Following a specific individual is a weird one for me; I’d rather follow an idea or a topic instead (Reddit/lemmy/forums). I honestly don’t care enough about any individual user to the point where I want to know what they have to say about… anything, really.
twitter was made for famous people to spew short thoughts at the masses in a long term plan of selling advertising.
What’s a pixelfed?
In my experience it’s like Instagram but with no one to follow or to react to your posts.
If I am not mistaken, it’s an open source Instagram alternative.
Ah I see. I am now suitably enraged.
(/s I hate Meta vehemently of course)
I didn’t know either so I looked it up for you.
Hey, that actually looks neat!
I barely take any pictures, but I agree with you.
Behold unfettered capitalism in all its glory.
“We only stay successful if we hide evidence of alternatives”
Im SOOOO surprised. /s
mEtA wOnT dEsTrOy ThE fEdIvErSe. wE sHoUlD lEt tHrEaDs In
Let’s just give them a chance guys. They haven’t done anything bad yet. It will help the fediverse grow. We need their content
wE cAn AlwAyS dEfeDeraTe lAtEr. It dEfinIteLy WoN’T bE tOo LaTe tHeN
Yeah because that’s an opinion people have
The largest lemmy instance (lemmy,world) is federated with them. I assume their mastodon instance also is.
You can search for threads and literally see these comments yourself buddy
Had that argument yesterday. It IS an opinion people have.
Oh no, it was everywhere, and I got into some decent arguments with those lovely people who ask you to show them how it’s going to have any effect on the fediverse at all, complete with citations.
WeLl hOw Do YoU KnOw?
All anyone has to do is log in to their gmail or fucken m365 email and you’ll see the future of corporate federation. Its “the same thing”.
Buddy, search for Threads related posts from a few months back. This was seriously in question.
It still is. I think more folks percentage-wise are OK now than were then. Had the argument just yesterday. I’m not seeing nearly enough pitchforks, and it worries me.
I have to post this again sorry
I remember you from the Reddit post!
Highly unlikely. I dont post on reddit
Hahaha the post ABOUT Reddit. Posting the same image. Sorry, when I reread my comment, it comes off absolutely NOT how I intended!
Ah. Ok.
Repeat after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.
I will not mederate with any Feta products.
after me: I will not federate with any Meta products.
I’m kind of stupid and more here just because it tends to be better discussion than Reddit: what does “federate with” mean in this context??
Thanks!
@Minotaur @henfredemars @technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That’s federation. We’re all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they’re in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
Servers can block, or “defederate from” other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.
Wait did I miss something big? Does Lemmy now federate with Mastodon somehow? How does that work?
Always has. Anything using ActivittPub can interoperate
I was under the impression that it theoretically could but wasn’t set up in a way that made this possible. But perhaps I was mistaken.
How do I access Mastodon content using my account here then?
You can’t use mastodon from Lemmy, but you can from some threadiverse software like Kbin.
Threads hasn’t had federation enabled until now, but you’ve always been able to interact with Mastodon… sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn’t really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don’t tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
I see. So functionally it doesn’t really work, at least in this direction.
You’ve had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:
You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they’re treated the same way as a “group” on Mastodon in general.
You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual “users” and Lemmy doesn’t have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.
As far as I know it’s always been this way. At least since I joined during the whole reddit fiasco
How do you access Mastodon content in Lemmy?
It doesn’t work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of content that isn’t posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it’s available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn’t exist.
FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.
Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn’t be as effective. They’d cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.
I didn’t fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):
We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that’s only as long as they’re made under Lemmy posts
@LibertyLizard @technology It always has. They both speak ActivityPub.
The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won’t federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That’s because Mastodon doesn’t push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.
To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don’t recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can’t do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.
I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You’ll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy won’t make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it’s a reply, but I’m going to check just to be sure.
Hi there! Your text contains links to other Lemmy communities, here are correct links for Lemmy users: [email protected], [email protected]
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn’t a revenue opportunity, it’s a potential front for which they’ll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying ‘engagement is containment’?
But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.
And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.
I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a (comparatively) niche competitor like Pixelfed
I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.
That’s exactly why Threads is incompatible with the Fediverse. Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.
Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.
Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?
Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked “accidentally”, how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.
Serious question: how do we - the end users - stop federating with Meta?
Migrate away from instances that embrace Meta to those that do not. Choose an instance that aligns with you.
Or in the extreme case, if you’re the first who can’t find such an instance and you’re technically inclined, there’s your room for a new instance. It’s how the fediverse works and partly why Meta is so intent on destroying it.
How does one find a list of instances that aren’t federated with meta?
Replied in another comment, but here is is again. https://fedipact.veganism.social/
What’s the difference between blocked and fedipact?
The tooltip for fedipact says: “Agreed to block all communications (their blocklist is private)”
To me that says, they’ve agreed but it’s not confirmed that they’ve gone through with it because the blocklist is private. Blocked on the other hand says “All communications are blocked”
Thanks! I was on mobile and couldn’t see the tooltip
I think fedipact actually sign the pack to block and the others just blocked.
Thanks for this. Looking to make an account on a better server now
Appreciate the link! Glad to see that both my mastodon and lemmy instances have already blocked their content.
EDIT: removed comment due to outdated and inaccurate information.
I don’t know,but you can check individual instances by going to the/instancessubdomain and searching for threads.shjw and blahaj are defederated, world isn’t.
This can always change, but I have confidence in my admins.Edit: Thanks to [email protected] for this link
Move to an instance that won’t.
Burying your head in the sand doesn’t change the fact that whatever LW does will affect all of Lemmy. They’re too big.
That sounds like a problem for instances federated with Meta. Empathy is cool but they are not our problem.
whatever LW does will affect all of Lemmy
Uuuh no it won’t? The fact that they federate with Threads doesn’t mean that my instance does. How does it affect me?
You posted this to a LW community, so your content and data will end up in Meta’s hands as well.No, that’s not how federation works. My instance sends my content directly to everything my instance federates with. No instance takes content from other instances and sends it further - that is not a thing. I sent my content to lemmy.world and it is free to be there. Lemmy.world will not forward that to Threads.
This is a strange response for me because de-federating is an active step on behalf of its admin, usually after a vote amongst its users, at creating a virtual boundary between the two entities. How is that burying your head in the sand? And yeah, lemmy.world is big, but aside from the obvious loss of content/users, what other effect will that have on the mass of de-federated instances?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta.For example, this discussion we’re having right now is on [email protected]. So it doesn’t matter whether our own instances have defederated meta - our posts and comments here will bring them value. Directly, in the form of content. And indirectly, in the form of processable data for machine learning, shadow profiles, etc.but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta
Your understanding is wrong. Instances don’t forward stuff from other instances to other instances. Instances only send their own content directly to the instances they federate with.
So on a different instance that’s not federated with Meta I can see LW content but not Metas?
Thanks!
Not sure anyone posted this in direct reply to you - https://fedipact.veganism.social/
You can search/filter for your instance there. As an example, if you search lemmy.world you’ll see they currently do federate with meta.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products.
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
I will not federate with any meta products
