The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).
(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)
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Alright, out of all the comments in this thread, this is the one I’ve reported to the mods. I will accept your arguments (even though the same ones have been made over and over) but what’s up with all this hate? Who hurt you so much that you have to throw paragraphs full of insults at someone?
What on earth is Plume?
What exactly is Threads?
How does any of this work?
I thought I had a handle on what Mastodon was, but then there was this threads thing, and Lemmy is apparently also part of the Fediverse but not Mastodon, I assume, and Threads is its own thing, and calckey and kbin exist, maybe, and I’d never heard of Plume until this post…I don’t understand any of this. Reddit and Twitter are how I would generally follow this sort of happening but Mastodon and Lemmy are ghost towns I don’t really understand how to use. I’m so utterly lost I don’t even know where to begin with finding answers. I don’t even have known unknowns, just unknown in unknowns.
Lemmy is a piece of software. Lemmy software is a link aggregator - same as reddit.
So you’re signed up to an instance of Lemmy which is installed on the server at lemmy.ml - this means that the server you signed up to (lemmy.ml) is running a copy of the Lemmy software. Other servers also run the Lemmy software making them also instances of Lemmy. As well as you being able to talk to users in Communities on the lemmy.ml server, you can talk to users in Communities on other Lemmy instances. For example, I’m registered on the server at lemmy.world
KBin is also link aggregator software, just like Lemmy and Reddit. Same things apply there, same software on multiple servers, all able to talk with each other.
Mastodon software is a microblogging service - same as Twitter (and Threads). Just like instances of Lemmy, instances of Mastodon can talk to each other. So a user on mastodon.world can talk to (for example) a user on kolektiva.social which is also running the Mastodon software.
Plume is blogging software - like WordPress, but just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it can be installed on multiple servers, all of which can talk to each other.
There’s also Pixelfed (Instagram), PeerTube (YouTube), Friendica (Facebook) and a large variety of others.
Now, as well as all these different types of software (Lemmy, Mastodon, KBin, PixelFed etc) being able to talk to other instances of the same software on other servers, because they are all underpinned by a single method of passing information called ActivityPub, each type of software can also talk to each other - so you as a Lemmy user can also see posts (like the one you and I are responding to) from a user on a server running an instance of Plume. Some people here are commenting from a Mastodon instance. All these things are loosely joined together making a joined (federated) universe - the fediverse.
Lemmy is apparently also part of the Fediverse but not Mastodon, I assume, and Threads is its own thing, and calckey and kbin exist
The wiki can help here: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F
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Mastodon = Twitter Lemmy = kbin = Reddit
No idea what Plume is, but I may Google it once I post this.
Threads is Metas (Facebook parent company) attempt to grab a share of the Twitter market share as Elon does his best to decimate his company.
If I understand correctly, Threads uses the same/similar publication method as Lemmy or kbin or Mastodon so the data can be freely shared between them all. So in that sense, you could argue that Threads was just a Mastodon instance being run by a company that has shown little regard for its users, and far more regard for its profits.
Note: this is a very, over simplified view of the landscape that isn’t technically correct however is an attempt to convey a picture that helps put the pieces together in a somewhat relatable way.
Plume = Wordpress I think?
Yeah, I had a bit of a browse and that seems right.
don’t lose your head over this. lemmy, kbin, mastodon and apparently threads (the new twitter alternative by facebook/meta) are all part of the fediverse, which means they all follow a decentralised approach. mastodon and threads are microblogging platforms, while kbin and lemmy have a similar format to reddit. because they are all part of the fediverse, all these platforms communicate with each other and you can use kbin to subscribe to microblogs such as mastodon and have them appear in your feed. defederation basically means cutting the link between one server and another, so they can’t communicate anymore.
you can use kbin to subscribe to microblogs such as mastodon and have them appear in your feed.
How does that even make sense? They’re completely different types of content.
If Threads is just another Mastodon instance why does anyone care?
If everything is just decentralised instances what are kbin and Lemmy, exactly? They’re not instances in themselves, are they?
@koberulz @murphys_lawyer
Threads isn’t just another Mastodon instance. Threads uses a similar format to Mastodon, and they may communicate with each other, but the similarities stop there. Threads will probably have some proprietary features to make it “stand out” from the others. Also, if many people jump on board Threads, the thing is that Meta will then have a monopoly on the Fediverse, which is the exact thing the Fediverse is trying to extinguish: Monopolies controlled by corporations.The “monopoly on the Fediverse” argument is something that I explicitly wanted to counter in my post. The fact is, Threads will become one of the largest if not the largest instance in the Fediverse, if we federate with them or not. Their users don’t sign up to Threads to talk to us, they sign up because it’s the hot new thing from Meta. If we defederate right away, they become their own bubble, their users never know we’re there and they can do to their platform whatever they want.
But if we federate with them as long as they play (relatively) nice, their users will get used to being able to talk to us which gives us leverage. They will be bound to use the same protocol as us or their users will complain about not being able to talk some of their friends anymore and maybe even migrate to an open alternative. And if they still want to go through with a change we don’t like, we can still refuse to implement it.
Our choice is not between Meta having a monopoly on the Fediverse and everything being as we want it. It’s between them having an alternative to the fediverse that will overtake us within weeks and having a slim chance at being treated as equals.
While I agree that it is probably better to not defederate them right from the start, I believe that the Fediverse might not have that much leverage. This recent blog post about the history of XMPP describes it pretty well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
Of course it’s different because this is social media and not just 1:1 privat messages. But for us to actually have some leverage/impact we have to generate a lot of (good) content so that Threads users will actually notice and complain if that content “vanishes”. And at the same time we must not become too dependent on their content
This is more of a warning against monopolies than access. Businesses applying resources to the Fediverse can only help it grow as long as it does not completely take over. Competition, whether it be individuals, businesses, or government, can help keep it healthy and guard against anticompetitive behaviors.
As I said elsewhere: this would still have been the case if Google hadn’t used XMPP in the first place. All those people you have lost when Google defederated either wouldn’t have been on XMPP at all or care enough about privacy and open source to have both. It’s not like you have lost anyone who had been there before Google started using XMPP. Same with Threads. Every single user who is on the fediverse today will still be here if they defederate (unless they leave for other, unrelated reasons of course). Considering our existing userbase’s interests, I don’t see many people giving up their existing accounts in favor of a Threads account.
Mostly answered in my other comment but for visibility and completeness, I’ll try to answer it here again.
The content may look different on the surface but that’s mostly because the different applications present them differently. Under the hood, it’s almost identical. Users create posts, other users can reply or like. What differs is the details. Mastodon posts are by default limited to 500 characters, Lemmy/kbin posts can be a few thousand, Plume posts can be even longer. Mastodon and Plume only have likes, Lemmy and kbin add dislikes (downvotes). Posts and comments that come from a different application may look a bit weird in whatever you use but at least they show up in your feed and you have the option to click a link to see them in their original form. In facht, @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno’s reply to your comment came from a Mastodon instance and they will see my reply in their Mastodon feed.
As for the difference between kbin and Lemmy, they’re two different pieces of software that interact with the Fediverse in a very similar way. When someone wants to setup a Reddit-like fediverse instance, they can freely choose between them based on personal preference (I chose Lemmy for my instance because kbin is harder to install and update). Imagine them like being able to choose between a phone by Apple, Samsung, Huawei or Nokia. All those phones have their own specific pros and cons but because they communicate through the same protocols, they can still talk to each other. An instance would be analogous to your Samsung phone or my Apple phone or my partner’s Nokia phone. There are many fediverse instances that use Lemmy as their software same as there are many Samsung phones in the world. The fact that most of them have very unimaginative names (looking at you, https://lemmy.ml/ and https://lemmy.world/) doesn’t help but as positive examples like https://beehaw.org and https://feddit.de. Both use Lemmy and can talk to any other Lemmy instance but their names make it clear that they are their own thing.
What people call “the Fediverse” is a collection of web applications that talk to each other through an open standard called ActivityPub. ActivityPub defines what users, groups, posts, comments and likes are, how you can subscribe to them and how they travel between instances. People have built different software packages that all use ActivityPub but have different user interfaces to feel similar to different “traditional” platforms. Mastodon is like Twitter, Mastodon and kbin are similar to Reddit, PeerTube is similar to YouTube, Pixelfed is similar to Instagram or Flickr and Plume is a long form blogging platform similar to Medium or older versions of Wordpress. Because they all use the same protocol under the hood, they can generally talk to each other. The user experience isn’t great yet but you can already use your Mastodon account to post to a lemmy community or to comment on a Plume post. Imagine it a bit like email where Gmail’s web interface, MS Outlook, Thunderbird and dozens of other clients exist as well as several different Mail servers. They can all talk to each other even though they were written by different people and all have their own interpretation and extensions to the SMTP and IMAP standards that define how emails work
Threads is a new microblogging Application by Meta (Facebook / Instagram) that will probably work very similar to Mastodon. In contrast to most other fediverse applications, Threads won’t be open source but will still use ActivityPub so it will be able to talk to existing open source applications. People here are afraid that they will abuse that to spy on people or systematically archive everything that happens in the fediverse in order to sell your data or train AI with it. They propose that we defederate from Threads (meaning we block our instances from talking to Threads’ instance). My post contains my thoughts on why that isn’t as useful as people think it is.
Hope that helps. If you still have questions, I’m happy to answer them to the best of my knowledge.
I understand a lot of the arguments made and in reality you’re right, if they want our data, they’ll get it.
However, I also think that making it as difficult and therefore expensive as possible for them is a legitimate way to respond and make it clear to them that they are here on sufferance and not welcome. That might be seen as immature and pointless and maybe that’s so, but I do think it’s important to defederate from Threads to demonstrate our collective unwillingness to become their commodity.
Your argument is fully valid and defederating might be the right thing to do for you.
In the end, I have to weigh their cost to scrape my data against my cost to access content that I need. As someone who has built scrapers for scientific purposes before, I can tell you that building something that scrapes Mastodon and Lemmy instances is not a single cent more expensive than getting my data through federation. It’s also probably a lot more reliable because they can get everything, not just what their users subscribe to. On the other hand, my cost for accessing my friends’ and family’s posts as well as corporate social media accounts if I don’t do it through federation is creating an account in their proprietary app. And then they will be able to get a lot more of my data than they could ever scrape from my Mastodon profile.
I take your points entirely and I do understand why you feel the way you do. Maybe what I’m saying is more symbolic - a gesture - than a realistic chance of fending them off but I do feel it’s important to send that message, even if it costs them nothing financially.
I only use one Meta product (FB) and only that because its a way to stay in contact with family and friends that are just not technically able to migrate to a healthier platform but I don’t use their app. I use the website, with Social Fixer, in a Firefox Container and use Frost on my phone. I have managed to get all my family and some friends to switch to Signal rather than WhatsApp and I have zero interest in Instagram. I think using mitigating methods and technologies like these, in conjunction with defederating from Threads (is it going to be one central instance?) is a viable way forward.
I don’t see who this gesture is aimed at. Meta execs won’t care. They lose nothing. The result will be the exact same as building a closed platform from the start. And the users won’t even notice because the mainstream doesn’t even know that the fediverse exists.
I agree that getting people away from Meta should be our priority. But we don’t do that by cutting them off from the fediverse and then begrudgingly making a Threads account to talk to the people we haven’t won over yet. We do that by showing them that there alternatives that they can use without losing access to the content they already follow.
Sure, Zuck isn’t going to give two shits that you and I might defederate from Threads and maybe it is just a gesture but I still think it’s one worth making. The crux of it is - do they care enough about getting the data from .world or .helios42.de to go to the trouble of building a scraper? If they don’t, then defederating is the right thing to do, in my opinion. If they do then you’re right, its pointless.
I’ll tell you a secret: they care enough to scrape everything. Not only the fediverse, every single website that’s accessible. And that’s not a thing for the future, that has been a reality at least since google became popular. Do yourself a favor and look into the server logs of an average webhost and you will find a whole bunch of crawlers. Some are for search engines, some are for other purposes.
I wrote my M. Sc. thesis on specialized crawlers (back in 2015) and you wouldn’t believe how much research has gone into that and how effective modern crawlers are at finding every single thing that ever got uploaded to the net. The only thing needed is enough hardware to throw at the problem and that’s exactly what Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the others have. As a rule of thumb, if archive.org or your favorite search engine has indexed it, everyone else has it as well or has access to someone they can buy it from. There is no such thing as unscraped content on the internet (unless you lock it behind access restrictions and those would apply just the same to federation).
Edit: I don’t have access logs enabled on my instance and obviously can’t see what happens on other instances but I would bet that this very thread will be picked up by at least five different crawlers before the day is over.
Yeah, I know. My own access logs on all the VS I have control over are disabled. I still feel something, even if that something is purely symbolic, is better than nothing.
There’s also the case where it is ILLEGAL for them to try to procure our data through non-consensual means. This is why threads is not launching in Europe.
Its interesting that everyone focuses on the privacy and the EEE risk of this, but my reasons for leaving Facebook were that Facebook is actively-allowing-the-promotion-of-genocide-because-not-moderating-is-better-for-their-bottom-line Evil. I left facebook because I’m not willing to provide the (even infinitesimal) boost to their network effects that my account had. For the same reason, Threads is an instant defederate on launch.
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I won’t be sucked in some other big tech social if I don’t intend to. The moment my posts are accessible from Thread is the moment i will burn all my posts to the ground, just as I did before. My stuff can stay on my Hard drive for all i care.
Interesting take on the matter. Right now, I’m not sure which way I sway, since there’s valid points on both sides. On one hand, I’d hate to tolerate Meta, and I don’t doubt they have some plan for trying to bend and twist the Fediverse to suit their own interests. But on the other hand, as of right now, forcing them to play by the rules of the open source software we collectively use is leverage against Meta, and allows us to safely access their content without having to download their apps.
Definitely going to have to think on this a bit more, myself.
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The whole point for me moving to the Fediverse was to get away from companies\platforms like FB\IG,and Twitter. Federate all you want with Meta I just hope there’s a running list of which instances does and doesn’t federate with meta so I can join the latter. Not sure why people are so hot on looking at pictures of people’s ugly kids on 2 platforms.
See, that’s the nice thing about a federated solution. I can use my personal instance that federates with Mata and you can use one that doesn’t and we can both be happy and still talk to each other. Being able to pick an instance that suits your preferences is the biggest selling point of the fediverse.
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This is why I use a paid host for Mastodon. Six bucks a month gets me my own instance with a custom domain and full admin rights.
There are three of us on said instance, and only two of us are active. It’s easier to build a consensus that way. Absolutely none of us want to federate with anything Meta/Facebook. I preemptively blocked threads.net yesterday. To quote Khan Noonien-Singh:
“Let them eat static.”
Very nice!
Which host are you using btw? If you don’t mind sharing that is.
I use masto.host for my instance. They even give you a web GUI for all the settings. Makes hosting so much easier!
Interesting take, but I am still defederating them to hell and asking others to do so. Facebook’s moderation approch is to allow the most hateful cingeng under the guise of fair political speech and I won’t stand for it
Thanks for laying this out. You persuaded me.
Not my original intention but glad you liked it.
As a newbie to the Fediverse, thank you for this!
… could you argue that federation content from a cc-by-sa licensed instance would be in violation on a commercial instance? Meta is a us corporation after all
defederating means that people who want to connect with someone on the platform are forced to install it. fuck that. not defederating gives people an alternative and shows them using the fediverse means they don’t miss out on anything regardless of platform.
if I want to access threads content and I can do it using my existing fed account without installing their app and giving them access to my heartrate, microphone and bowel moton stats then frankly that’s a win for us.
Here’s my problem/concern have you read their privacy policy? I want no part of that, would being federated with them mean that they get to siphon up all of my data too? If so I don’t think the defederating goes far enough…
They can siphon your data no matter what you do. As I’ve said in other comments, everything on the internet has been crawled and scraped for literal decades. This post is already indexed by a bunch of different search engines and most likely by some other scrapers that harvest our data for AI or ad profiles. And you can do nothing about it without hurting your legitimate audience. Nothing at all. There’s robots.txt as a mechanism to tell a crawler what it should or shouldn’t index but that’s just asking nicely (mostly to prevent search engines from indexing pages that don’t contain actual content). You could in theory block certain IP ranges or user agents but those change faster than you can identify them. This dilemma is the whole reason why Twitter implemented rate limiting. They wanted to protect their stuff from scrapers. See where it got them.
Most important rule of the internet: if you don’t want something archived forever, don’t post it!
Maybe a separate fediverse instance defederated from the rest of them, and the rest of them defederated from Facebook, would be a better way to go about it, if we really must connect to them. Cut them off from the main fediverse, but still interact outside their platform.
“It forces them to play by the rules”
They will play by the rules because that’s the Embrace step of EEE, not because anyone forced them to.
I’m going to go against the grain here and say that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta’s instance.
Federating with Meta’s servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.
It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don’t federate, things will remain the same. Don’t try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.
That’s not what gatekeeping means.
I don’t know if gatekeeping is the right word but some people treat you like traitors if you even suggest that federating with Meta might be a valid option. Just look at the upvote/downvote ratio of this post and some comments I got. Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.
Indeed, that is not gatekeeping. It’s applying social and moral pressure. Similar to a boycott campaign, protest, etc. Such methods are intended to discomfit and inconvenience. They’re used in situations where being nice and getting along are determined to be nonviable strategies for getting the desired result.
Those methods in themselves are morally neutral; the question is, are they employed for a reason which justifies and necessitates them, i.e., how serious is a thread does Facebook pose to the fediverse. (I think it’s reasonable to take facebook as an evil seriously and to not give them an inch.)
Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.
That’s definitely already happening. This is a normal part of federation, tbh. Instances block instances that federate with bad actors because they want to limit as much as possible their exposure to/involvement with those actors, as well as to place pressure on others to do the same. Obviously not everyone considers facebook to be a bad actor, but it’s not surprising that those who do would act accordingly.
There’s peer pressure going on right now encouraging Mastodon instance owners not to federate with Meta’s Threads. How is that not gatekeeping?
Gatekeeping is keeping someone without access/power on the outside. People who are already running instances have by definition passed the gate.
It’s people’s choice to earn the ire of others. It’s their choice to federate with Threads, and it’s my choice to defederate from them as a result.
And that’s within your right too. It goes both ways.
Its your choice as instance owner to do that
Visit https://fedipact.online/ to see a list of instance owners who will defederate their instance from Threads
Heads up: its a long list
