Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
People are overreacting.
I really don’t think that’s the case.
This is a nice little place, meta barging in Will fuck it all up
They aren’t barging in. You need to follow the threads user. Only on mastodon are they “barging in”.
No we’re not. Read up on what happened to xmpp. Google joined it, made the service much slower for people not on their servers, everybody joined their servers, they shut their service down for their own proprietary stuff.
Edit: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
That doesn’t make sense. If Google was making xmpp worse then the servers could just defederate. At this moment threads has not done anything to warrant defederation.
Embrace
Extend
Extinguishmade the service much slower for people not on their server
I call bullshit. People not using Google servers were unaffected. The problem is people using walled gardens instead of making XMPP compatibility a requirement.
Just because you have no experience, you think it’s overreacting.
Compared to you who has so much experience with threads joining the fediverse.
Too bad people on mastodon don’t have the ability to block an instance they find objectionable for themselves-- oh wait.
Not sure about Lemmy, but we can do this on mastodon. I don’t need someone else deciding for me.
Tldr? Couldn’t disagree more
lemmy very recently got this feature.
Yeah, another fail from the design team.
Kinda stupid how much we value having power taken away from us and given to random people on the internet.
thats what big companies do
I agree, I don’t want a blanket ban on Threads. I know Meta is a horrible company, but we shouldn’t decide in advance.
Honestly, I’d be very happy to be able to follow people on Threads through my privacy-respecting Mastodon/Lemmy app. Because, let’s be serious: we’re just a bunch of nerds here. If I want to follow famous people or companies, I’m going to find them on Meta’s platforms, not here.
ActivityPub lets me follow those accounts without using Meta’s apps, which are famously riddled with ads, trackers and whatnot.
It might take time but why not naturally wait for these famous people to expand their network and consider being on lemmy/mastodon? Without having to interact with Threads at all? I feel it would just be a matter of time, and we can adjust on our own terms instead of having to let Threads in.
Famous people need regulars to follow them. Get more people like you and me and celebrities will follow.
why do you want to follow famous people and companies
Why not? I want to keep up to date with their announcements and products. Famous people could be writers, journalists, whatever.
Following famous people and companies is what 99% of users of “normal” social media do.
you can join threads
I don’t want to use Meta’s apps, because they’re a privacy nightmare. Full of trackers
There is no point to defederate threads.
If folks find the content on the instance I maintain interesting, I want them to join from whichever platform they feel most comfortable with. As long as they don’t cause problems, that is.
The fediverse’s worst enemy is itself. The persistent paranoia that people are out to ruin it is going to drive all the rational people away.
Nope, just ban threads and anything to do with facebook. All servers will defederate Facebook.
Have you actually tried using Lemmy from Mastodon or Twitter-like-focused ActivityPub server? It technically works, but through no fault of Mastodon nor Lemmy, it’s a pretty miserable experience. The feed is nearly impossible to use for communities that get frequent comments through the day.
There is a 0.00% chance Lemmy has anything to worry about. If Mastodon isn’t a tolerable client for Lemmy, Threads’ substantially worse feed management will be much more miserable and enough of a deterrent by itself.
We will not take the risk. All servers must defederate Facebook
No I don’t think I will
If Kbin defederates from Threads, I’ll just leave Kbin, and stay with Threads. Defederating over vibes is not how the fediverse is supposed to operate. And for everyone advocating for this dumb idea, I’m just using this thread as a honey pot.
I’m pretty clear that meta has more problems than “vibes”.
Bye felicia.
Please let the door hit you in the ass on the way out
No, the entire point is that you’re free to go to whatever instance you want and/or host your own with your own rules. You’re more than welcome to go to one that doesn’t defederate, just as every instance owner/admins are free to defederate. It’s not how “the fediverse is supposed to operate” because a standard for how the fediverse is supposed to operate doesn’t exist.
Once they can interact with your account, they can pull your data into their server and analyzing it to deliver ads campaign.
They can already do this by hosting a small instance and going unnoticed.
They can get the data, but they need the federation so people see their content/advertisement.
And whenever an account from Threads upvote/ downvote or reply to your comments/posts or vice versa, Meta will analyze that and they can sell ads based on your political leanings, gender, geo-location, hobbies, marital status etc.
That’s the options from what I saw from fb ads dashboard years ago. If you’re from US, that options are broader and more detailed.
fediverse isn’t supposed to have most users concentrated in one instance also
Bye then!
Here have a glass of boot juice for the voyage.
Big tech is a cancer on the internet. It makes sense to avoid it.
I’m not too worried about Threads joining the metaverse. What Mark Zuckerberg has failed to realise is just how barebones his Twitter clone is.
Mastodon has support for trending topics and hashtags. Threads doesn’t. Lacking such an absolutely basic feature that any microblogging platform would otherwise support is why Threads dropped from 500M active users to just a fraction of it.
I joined it near launch, made a few posts and then stopped. There is nothing worthwhile on Threads and I don’t think leeching on to the fediverse.
Also, I can kinda understand why you all rushed to defederate from Gab when they tried to jump on the federation bandwagon, but not Meta.
Zuckerberg doesn’t need us to overtake X. He needs to actually make a functional social media app first, then put more resources into moderating it.
X is still on top despite Elon Musk’s stewardship because his competitors are either too small (most federated instances), require too big of a technical hurdle for the average Joe to use (the fediverse in general), or are downright incompetent (Threads.)
I’m worried because it’s only gonna be a matter of time before fakebook is able to play around enough to get threads to be functional enough for the average user. They may be evil, but they aren’t dumb.
This take is riddled with naivety.
Not only will Meta read, train AI on, aggregate and datamine, and correlate this data with your real identity, but when Meta announces that “the easiest way to be on the fediverse is to just use Threads” then all the people who avoided Mastodon because it was “too complicated” to sign up, all the people who are basically already signed up because they scroll Insta all day, will go with Threads instead of spreading the load out.
As smaller instances start to drop off under the load, under the lack of interest as threads grows and they shrink, merely mirroring the traffic of a centralized corporate entity, users start to flock to threads for its reliability and speed.
Then Meta pulls the plug, since “no one really used this ActivityPub thing anyway, it was too technical”.
Threads isn’t about beating “X” (lol X is in a death spiral, it’s only a matter of time), it’s about ensuring the Fediverse never rises up.
See what happened with Google Talk and XMPP.
Not only will Meta read, train AI on, aggregate and datamine, and correlate this data with your real identity
They undoubtedly do this already. There’s nothing stopping them from setting up an instance that looks like a personal one and pulling all the data the Fediverse has to offer.
I don’t like Meta, but that’s far from the worst corporate rights record. I say wait and see how it turns out first.
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no one cares if you leave. literally no one.
I’m all for defederating, but only until we know what their intentions are. I’m more worried about Mastodon than Lemmy, but still, that’s not the point. The only power any of us have is to file an official complaint with the FTC and make a distinct point, not just “I hate meta/Facebook and want them to go away” it has to be a logical complaint such as “their terms of service are overstepping their boundaries and taking ownership of data on competing platforms that they do not own to lock out competitors.” It’s really the only thing anyone in the US can do.
I would hate for the fediverse to die by zuck the cuck’s hand, but the sad truth is open source is the enemy of corporate platforms, and it’s encouraging enough that ActivityPub is enough of a threat to Meta that they’re willing to go to these measures to make sure their bottom line isn’t harmed. The real fucked up thing is their intention to farm other platforms users with their consent and that’s the real problem.
By all means, fuck Meta to the moon and back, but for goodness’ sake, users on federated servers can choose to block the domain with the same result, not to mention that admins can simply restrict it (see social.coop/@eloquence/1115888…). It just isn’t so black and white as people are making it seem.
Federation with a bigger platform is realistically the only way for Fedi to become mainstream, and at the moment Meta seems at least to be trying to be communicative. And with their quite unvaluable userbase they really don’t have enough leverage against the privacy-concious Fediverse to turn AP into MetaPub. For now.
But I don’t want the fediverse to become mainstream!!
I know, I know, most people think it’s the best thing.
But I selfishly prefer the fediverse to be as it is now. Actually, as it was a couple of months ago. Lemmy is already being filled with rage-baiting bullshit, which is one of the reasons I decided to leave reddit.
It really depends on the instance. There are many cozy, non-mainstream corners on the Fediverse. For instance, beehaw.org is as pleasant as can be.
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It really is rather selfish
Uh, yeah. I already mentioned that.
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We disagree, and that’s okay.
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I am 100% with you. Becoming mainstream is what ruins most good communities that end up ruined. Hell, even Facebook was a 1000x better before they opened it to non-college users.
Adding more people would dilute some of the excessively frequent ragebait posters…
It’s like the same 2-3 dozen people.
Good to know. I’ll start blocking, then.
Have you been on Facebook (or Xhitter) recently? Where “recent” is defined as “within the past decade or so”.
Yes, but the point you’re trying to make doesn’t make sense. The content subscription model for both of these are completely different.
On Twitter (erm, I bounced shortly after the X shenanigans…) you subscribed to people and mostly saw tweets of people you follow, and the tweets they re-tweet, so it’s heavily individual-curated.
On Facebook you “subscribe” to people and groups. Because your feed is mixed between people and group posts, you’re still getting a mostly-curated feed from friends, with algorithmic posts from groups. In the last few years they started blending in posts from groups/pages you aren’t in if your feed doesn’t have much content.
Lemmy is entirely different. You only subscribe to communities. The curation is moderation style and upvotes. Individual people can guarantee their way into everyone’s feed by posting to the most active communities.
You completely missed the point.
There’s a HUGE number of ragebait posters on Meta/Xhitter because that’s what causes “engagement” and thus that’s what the Meta algorithms will foster. Bringing in Meta won’t dilute the ragebait. It will amplify it.
I haven’t missed the point, I simply disagree with your assertion. The advocacy to preemptively defederate from Threads is grounded in unsubstantiated FUD.
19 years of unsubstantiation.
How much does Meta pay you to shill, I wonder?
So then we shall propose to let them in at our own terms ?
That’s quite reasonable to me, and less radical in my humble opinion.
But I also see how one may arrive at such a conclusion, as all parties may not be as welling to accept such terms and conditions, or even be able to make such terms and conditions enforceable.
One instance may accept favours from meta, and then it spreads out uncontrollably… And then … Its gets more complex.
Perhaps the safest option is to limit their present shares to a maximum of 40% in our servers. That is, they cannot be allowed to have more than a set amount of API exposure to the feeds - and they must allow us to reciprocate, like wise, by being able to have access to theirs by more than 40%. The value of assets can surely be established and estimated par costs of maintenance and OA, etc…
You’re playing the classic “it’s the individual responsability” game. It’s how you deregulate everything and the consumer losses every right.
We have to acknowledge that we have systemic or/and societal issues. This is a systemic issues so a common thing.
I’m just saying that even on federated instances the users can choose to block Threads, and that that gives the same result for them. There’s no need to force the hand of the user; there are more than enough corpo-critical people on Fedi for it not to be taken over by Meta.
Edit: And I understand that allowing interaction with Meta is very risky business. Which is why I like the approach of instances like social.coop which restrict interaction from Threads but still give the user a choice.
Not quite the same result. Blocking the instance stops you seeing their posts, but not the comments coming from their users.
No, that’s just Lemmy. On Masto it blocks all interactions from users (including prohibiting them from following you and therefore fetching your posts).
Fair. But I’m on lemmy for discussion. I don’t want threads’ bobbleheaded userbase fucking up every discussion thread on lemmy. So I will stay on instances that have de-federated that shithole and urge other instances to do the same.
But they won’t. Seeing how little even the relatively federation-conscious Mastodonians interact with Lemmy, from Threads it will be close to zero (especially since the devs are very “careful” with federation and probably won’t display article-formatted posts anytime soon).
I’m not comfortable with assuming the dregs of Facebook will leave Lemmy alone. I’ll stick to instances that have defederated and I’ll actively block instances that don’t.
I’m not out here trying to stop you from being on federated instances or anyone else. But I will not personally support instances that allow that monster into the ecosystem.
We are on lemmy. So they are right in this context. I really couldn’t give a crap about anything like Twitter because I hate everything about that type of medium.
The thing is, you don’t really see anything from the Microblogging Fediverse around here at all, do you, so why would you from Threads? And Meta will only explicitly collect your data if you follow one of their accounts, which is impossible from Lemmy. So in a Lemmy context it is quite irrelevant.
Also,
We are on lemmy.
I’m not ;)
I didn’t actually know that. Thanks for mentioning it
My pleasure. TMYK!
It’s a similar situation as with the unions. We can all manage to have a pay rise by ourselves. Or, we unionize and ask together for the pay rise.
Defederating the instance is like unionizing. We all go forward instead of individually to have weight. This weight is in form of killing asap the federating attempt, as threads.net users will have nothing to see in the Fediverse. If you let each user manage the situation, threads.net can do whatever they want. There is no individual responsibility in this case. We have to play collectively.
We need to play collectively because the Fediverse isn’t one monolithic network, unlike Meta. It’s a federated network. It’s each instance and Meta. This is why unionizing is important. It’s the Fediverse and Meta. This is the magic of activity pub. You can let others use the protocol but say no to the interaction with them.
The second aspect is that Meta is relying on “cognitive capitalism”. Meta will use free cognitive time from the Fediverse to capitalize. This has huge implication on mental health and all kind of minorities relying on the Fediverse for various reasons. We can say all together no to this, what isn’t possible individually. I recommend the book “The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. It’s a good book to understand the issue with Meta and others.
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Nah
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Aside from the “moral” argument, can someone ELI5 what harm can a federated threads.net do on other users (like me) and/or instances?
threads has more users than fediverse on one instance
is cause centralization
I got a number of answers that sound very weak to me, and basically point to a “fail” of the fediverse in its own nature if threads joins. Kind of disappointing.
To me, the key idea of the fediverse is that it’s federated and should work as a whole, no matter who joins. Most of the answers below support the opposite. They are basically saying that the fediverse should stay within the “fediverse”, which is exactly what non-federated social media are doing. Meh.
Competition and success. They are just paranoid that it’ll be successful and they can’t control where the project goes without including the majority of users and then developers.
It’s not necessarily about a threat to instances or users. It’s more an issue with how Meta could potentially hijack the protocol the whole thing is built on, and do damage in the long run. There’s a write up here on how similar things have happened in the past;
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is what it’s about, right here. I wish more people would understand this. This is not some loose anti-coporate sentiment or senseless alarm sounding. We have example after example of how corporations like Meta, Microsoft, and Google leverage their power to consume and destroy. To say “we just need to be proactive about stopping them” is naive. We’ve said that so many times, and every time we’ve lost.
The only way to win is not to play their game. We can’t let them in in the first place.
Edit: a word
They can absorb large numbers of users and communities and after a while close themselves to the outside. Meaning that once people “need” those communities they’ll have no chance other than go threads.
the general strategie is called “embrace, extend, extinguish”. This strat is the reason, why everyone uses MS Office today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
As opposed to Threads stealing all brands companies and users anyway?
There’s still advantages to a fediverse and ways to defend against “embrace extend extinguish” if you plan ahead.
We can’t complain about proprietary networks if we don’t allow others to join our own open ones.
As opposed to Threads stealing all brands companies and users anyway?
The extend-phase is when people migrate to threads, who would have stayed otherwise.
Why are people not allowed to do that if they want to?
You think groups that came here largely fleeing Reddit and Twitter are going to be tempted to go to threads? I doubt it very heavily. Threads is more likely to loose people to here if anything.
that reminds me of Apple with iMessage
A failed messaging system that nobody in the world uses except for the Americans?
How sweet.
I think you upset the americans 😆
I’m not American and I still downvoted the asshole. Sorry. Assholes.
I’m not following… who is american and who is an asshole
That’s absolutely in your right to do so.
Would you mind if I ask you what did I say that’s considered an asshole move?
Well, yes, I think that’s the one.
You should look into Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I think the biggest fear is that they have so many users that they will just flood all instances with their stuff. This can, in time, lead to a situation where they can defederate from everything else and bring a lot of people with them, since most of the content will have come from Threads.
I feel though that if they were going to do that they should have done that from the beginning. A lot of the other instances now they kind of solidified themselves as big players. It would have been easy to just use Threads at the start but people have put the effort into creating accounts on other platforms now, I can’t see them going back what would be the point it would be more of it again.
No, you need some fire before you can extinguish.
So that plan at this point seems to be as far as I can understand it to be to register to a service wherever every single other user will be federate from them.
I’m sure that will work brilliantly.
… solidified themselves as big players …
You understand that the entire fediverse is a rounding error against Meta’s user base, right?
No one’s going to drop thir instance to use Meta. The whole reason that most of the people are here is because they don’t trust the big sites.
You are missing the point. And by this point I’m pretty sure you’re doing so wilfully.
@tedvdb@feddit.nl Hey :)
I haven’t defederated anyone yet, I don’t intend to defederated from Instagrams new failed Twitter clone.
