A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
I don’t think we should defederate threads. It would only give Meta a walled garden which we will be outside of. Let them embrace us here and encourage everybody to scatter across instances so they can’t defederate reasonably
That actually sounds like a good idea. Are there any drawbacks to this that we’re missing though?
The drawbacks is that we aren’t showing mastodon as an alternative. If we defederate we cannot tell people it’s “threads without the ads”. I know people talk about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish with Google, but Meta have been rather keen on decentralisation recently, even claiming that they want their “Metaverse” platform to be decentralised
Drop that trash
Here’s Eugen Rotchko’s thoughts.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
What an excellent article. Informative and to the point.
Recommend everyone read it.
I’m going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.
There’s no persuasive argument I’ve heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.
I’m brand new to Lemmy (guess why, lol) and federated systems in general. How do I block all things Meta? And what does that even mean for Lemmy, where it’s an entirely different site from Facebook?
As of now, there’s no built-in means to block entire instances as a user. The only way to keep them out are to use an instance that is 2 levels separated from them, that is an instance that doesn’t federate with another instance that federates with them.
Alright, that kind of answers the “how do I block Meta bullshit?” question, but what does that mean for Lemmy? Lemmy is an entirely different site from Facebook or Threads or whatever. Or is Lemmy more like a browser to view anyone’s federated community? Then I’d get the EEE thing everyone’s talking about. You usually see your communities on Site A, but Site B offers what Site A has, but also free beer! People migrate to Site B, Site B slowly introduces ads, poisons the beer, kills your cat, and steals your wife, but Site A is a shell of it’s former self and dies out, so…you can’t unfuck what’s been fucked.
ActivityPub is the protocol that Lemmy/kbin/Mastodon use, and is the basis behind the fediverse. It’s also the same protocol that Threads uses. They’re all different site/services, but they can all interact with each other through the ActivityPub protocol, assuming they are federated to each other.
At the moment, Threads is entirely separate, as they haven’t federated with anyone, but eventually they will want to join the fediverse, and the question is whether or not to federate with them. They will always be able to view our content as it’s public, but if we federate with them we will see their content and they will be able to post content here. Keep in mind that Lemmy currently has about 70k active users, and that Threads just got 30 million+ sign-ups. We don’t know how many of those are active users, but it’s certainly more than all of Lemmy put together. If they come here, that’s going to be basically impossible to moderate.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another. The worry then is basically seeing and dealing with Meta’s bullshit here, and them more or less taking over through EEE tactics. That makes sense now.
Lemmy communities aren’t federated with Meta threads by default, right? It’s opt in. So just…don’t federate with .meta or whatever they’ll use? Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another.
There’s a bit more to it, but essentially yes. For example, beehaw.org has defederated from lemmy.world, but we can still view their content. We can interact with their content and reply to their posts, and other instances that they are federated with can see what we do there, but beehaw users can’t see any of it. Basically federation is a one-way street. You can federate with an instance, but they don’t have to federate back.
Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
That’s kind of the motto of the fediverse in general. It’s supposed to be de-centralized and de-corporatized. There are no built-in features for advertising, for example. It’s meant to be a place that is safe from the things that we’re afraid Facebook is trying to do. Overall, it mostly is. They can attract people out of the fediverse and into their garden which they plan to wall off, but they can’t quite shut down the independant instances.
Ahhh, now it makes sense, thank you! So…do we panic because Zillaberg is making a federated Twitter sequel, or…?
I’m somewhat undecided here, because ultimately I don’t care for federated services to become dominant at all costs, nor do I care if they shrink slightly. I want the users of these services to voluntarily choose them based on the principles that federated social media stands for right now. My personal opinion right now is let them federate, but defederate the minute the “extend” starts. But we’ll see.
It’s worse off if we don’t federate with them. That way they get their walled garden and people don’t bother to use mastodon as it’s incompatible. Federation gives everyone choices.
Large numbers is not the same as quality content. I submit as my evidence … well … Facebook. And Twitter. And pretty much every corporate “the numbers go up!”-based social media site.
Here is how to block threads on Mastodon, if anyone has any ideas for how to do it on Lemmy, that’d be great.
Right now? Have a Lemmy account on an instance that defederates anything Threads.
Is there a list of these somewhere?
Turns out there’s this: https://fedipact.online/
Of either Threads instances or instances that defederate Threads, not that I know of, but I expect it’ll be a thing in short time.
I feel like the EEE attack is inevitable at this point.
Why else would they even be willing to federate?
They saw the threat that decentralized non-profit social media is and want to kill it before it has a chance.
All Lemmy servers and especially the largest ones need to defederate from it immediately.
They’re “willing to federate” as an end-run around certain antitrust laws in the EU. By supporting ActivityPub, Meta has plausible deniability in claiming they’re not a monopoly, despite being a de-facto monopoly being their final goal.
Meh, federated or defederated, threads poses only the first challenge to the fediverse. There will be other players with their own incentives that will join via ActivityPub, add their own custom features incompatible with the broader world, and entice users with slicker interfaces. Fediverse will need to show it can weather it, especially hard with the network effects of the larger corporations’ user bases.
My hope is the pressure will keep open services innovating to better compete and result in a richer experience for everyone.
That’s an excellent take on the platform.
Excellent take.
Best thing that could happen is that reddit would respond with a surprise “we too” will federate with you all, and implement activity pub. Then you have two big actors competing on an open playground. And we grab a drink and enjoy the light show.
I mean Tumblr also wants to join the fediverse. They are smaller than Twitter, but still large to have some amount of influence.
Honestly, the reason I left Reddit was the 3rd party api bullshit. If they suddenly federated and I could use Lemmy to subscribe to some of their communities / subs again without needing to be subjected to their bullshit ads and 1st party client bullshit, I’d welcome that.
Competition drives innovation. If something from a walled garden fediverse comes to the broader world as a result, awesome. I mean, if we could federate with Reddit for example, and I could access their subs content but not be subjected to their 1st party app and ads and karma and that’s the stuff on top of their instance, I don’t care what they do on their server.
If anything it may introduce people as a gateway into the fediverse to begin with so when something happens on a corporate instance that pisses them off, they might feel compelled to look into the broader world around them. Not all, but some.
I guess the only big concern most people have here is the Microsoft EEE.
There needs to be a Mozilla-like foundation that builds a competitive product platform for Fediverse that looks slick, is free of bugs, and matches any additional features that Threads might come up with
Wikipedia had that insanely named Wikitribune that has now turned into Trust Cafe which is a better name with an awful site name. https://wts2.wt.social/en/auth
The Wikipedia foundation could be a good player in the fediverse, but they don’t seem too proactive in integrating with us right now.
Yeah, they would be great here but I think they would want more control and is why they have their own. I’m sure they’ve gone through the mistake grinder and have a lot of knowledge that would be ignored here.
Same thing we do about reddit. They are free to do their own thing in their own corner as long as they don’t bring us into it.
we shouldn’t do anything.
Isn’t the whole promise of the fediverse that whatever the policies of one instance are, that doesn’t necessarily affect all the other instances, and each can do their own thing. If an instance doesn’t want to accept traffic from threads, good for them. But to try to organize a fediverse-wide response to threads seems a whole lot like the centralization the fediverse is supposed to not be.
I’d like to add to this that there’s no particular benefit to defederating preemptively instead of defederating in response to a problem.
Also, is this a problem we need to deal with? I think it matters for Mastodon instances, but I don’t think Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy.
Agree, by design the fediverse should be able to resist whatever the supposed harm is from META, I don’t really agree with privacy concerns since everything on the fediverse is public, especially on kbin and lemmy, almost everything is already available to whomever eants it, there is no need to set up this hugr machination since they can already accomplish it so much easier.
Well the resistance isn’t without reason:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
What worries me most is how this has shown me how how wildly insecurely ActivityPub seems to be storing and sharing user data.
What’s the DNS I need to block to never inadvertently get sent to anything Threads related?
You can block Meta at the AS level for your instance firewall, and also at federation level so that you can defederate from second order offenders.
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Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E’s, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It’s good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it’ll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
Could we get John Oliver on board with the fediverse?
I’m doing my part here by promoting “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
This is my instance now.
“I’m a Barbie girl, and this is MY Barbie world.”
