what does this even mean
Bravo lemmy.ml! We should follow the example!
Agreed. Ruud has done a lot of great things for .world in its short time, but I don’t agree with his decision on this… I do hope he changes his mind.
There’s no need to “give Meta a chance,” they’ve already demonstrated who they are time and again. And I don’t want to end up having to leave .world in the future because the traditional Fediverse split in two, and .world is on the wrong side of it.
Wait, did he said anything on the subject already? can you link? I will be hard switching unless world blocks meta too
This was posted on Mastodon.world. The same gentleman runs Lemmy.world.
Uf, looks bad, threw a request to sign up for lemmy ml, thank you
Oh, but not the first largest Lemmy instance?
Hmmm… I wonder who that could be…
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The beehaw admins are a bit wackadoo, but calling them Nazis is so far out in left field lmao. Not the proper type of insult I don’t think.
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Why what happened there?
Well I don’t know what happened exactly with that particular user but I can give some basic info on the instance. Beehaw was initially one of the major, most popular Lemmy instances (not sure if it still is or not), but in their attempt to create an ultra safe space, they decided to suddenly and without warning defederate from some of the most major instances (lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works). They seem to want to cultivate an environment akin to Tildes…they want a small userbase that is locked down to their own beliefs.
There is nothing inherently wrong with their philosophy on how their instance should be run…but for me what left a bad taste in my mouth was the suddenness of their actions. If they were a walled garden and semi-closed off from the very beginning (a la Tildes), it would have been totally fine in my eyes imo. But to suddenly ban large swaths of users from participating without warning when they were one of the largest instances just left a very bad taste in my mouth and I don’t agree with the way they did things. Communiites like chat@beehaw.org were among the most popular communities on Lemmy, for example, and I enjoyed participating there. But then to suddenly be banned without warning because I am on a growing instance really just made me a bit frustrated with the way they were handling things.
But as I said in my earlier comments…to use that particular slur with them is completely unwarranted imo. But I do understand people’s frustration with them. I’m frustrated too. But life will move on and different communities pop up and fill the void.
Thanks for your clarification. I didn’t know that and I’ll feel the same way too. I wish we have more say on things like that. Like voting perhaps
In the end, it’s ok. Their closing off from others will only mean that other popular communities will grow and take their place. Lemmy.world has already grown immensely to take the top place in the past month. It’s been crazy watching it explode. If Beehaw wants to do things that way then I’d rather not be associated with them to begin with and not worry about things like voting with them.
No, it isn’t.
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Instead of down voting you, I want to know what happened to you to call them nazis. Their only rule is essentially be nice, it kind of reflects badly on you that you’re so enraged by them to just call them nazis out of nowhere. What happened, man?
It’s the same guy that’s being a trollish asshole up and down this post. Only their posts have been removed, and only their posts are catching a 6:1 or higher downvote-to-upvote ratio. Seems like they’re on somebody’s payroll honestly.
Ass
lemmy.world and everyone should as well
Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn’t have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn’t matter whether these computers were at a neighbors’ house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don’t agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It’s like we are no longer living the same reality and can’t even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it’s the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.
Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.
“ICQ”
Here’s a little nostalgia trip for you
I think I found a link without 2 fucking unskippable adverts beforehand!
I did yesterday or so.
Same, performed the update to 0.18.1 and figured “well I’m already here so…”
I’ll have no part in playing their game.
Ideologically, de-federating an instance just because you don’t like the guy running it would be a bad thing, but Facebook/Meta has been just so toxic to the internet as a whole it’s hard to really find fault with it.
I thought the whole ideology of the fediverse was to get away from corporationl influence. So I’d say this is very much true to the ideology as well.
Yup.
Facebook has been around for almost two decades.
This is not some unknown guy - we know exactly what Facebook’s business strategy and ethical and moral conduct looks like.
I saw someone in another discussion say it perfectly: they put the meta back in metastatic!
Ideologically, I find more fault in inviting meta to the playground than locking them out. They are the very definition of an evil corporation and no good can come of it.
Pragmatically, twitter style system requires a large networked userbase to be useful for most of the population, otherwise people are tooting into the void in mastodon. So even if I have to work with some soulless corporations to get there I think it’s a net positive. For lemmy i don’t think threads matters much.
Exactly, there’s an exception to every rule.
My concern is less Suckerburg as much as Meta’s corporate history. My expectation is that they’ll try to use this to conquer and destroy Lemmy.
Welp.
Lemmy.ml is also the instance made by the lemmy devs
It’s not about Zuckerberg, it’s about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it’s impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it’s only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn’t inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
I don’t think threads actually has 30 million users. They have some paid shills, probably a lot of their own bots, some people who legit joined to see what it was about, and a bunch of Instagram users who had accounts created automatically. I’m not positive about the last point but if you can’t delete threads without deleting Instagram then I’m sure they’re going to leverage their Instagram userbase as much as possible here.
Up to 70 million as of a day ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/meta-s-threads-has-70-million-signups-surprising-zuckerberg
I’m not concerned how many of these are real users - all the shills, the bots, are even worse than real users as they will just be spewing their propaganda around as much as possible.
Adding ONE million users overnight to the fediverse would be disruptive enough, 10x the biggest day from the influx from reddit. We’re looking at orders of magnitude more than that.
I didn’t even know I was one of those 30 million users until you and others mentioned that people with Instagram accounts automatically have one.
If I wanted to see facebook shit I would use facebook, I stopped using whatsapp when it was bought by facebook, I don’t want to see their content overwhelming the fediverse, that’s why I’m here instead of there.
I don’t agree with this notion of “facebook content” vs “fediverse” content or anything like that. Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever. It’s not “facebook shit” any more than reddit shit or lemmy shit. Content is a by-product of the users, so who/what the userbase is is extremely important - and that is why how it is marketed, who it appeals to and so forth, and the relative scale. thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform, and so forth, is the real issue.
You acknowledge that you have moved on from platforms when facebook/meta have got involved, and you’re welcome to take your decisions on this, but it runs into problems in a federated environment where the goal is to increase interoperability by default.
Don’t get me wrong, I think our goals are the same, to have an environment where people can talk and share links that is relatively exclusive / for like-minded people. I just don’t think the angle of facebook/not facebook is the right one (tbh I would go further - I would not integrate, but not because of the provenance/company, but because of the users’ expectations coming over from Threads)
Let’s see if you feel that way when your feed is filled with hate and ads.
I think you didn’t understand my comment. " thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform" specifically.
Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever
Content is not all the same, there’s quality content and there’s shitposting.
“facebook content” is mostly - to me - shitposting, astroturfing, botting, propaganda, etc. as reddit has become lately, while lemmy content is mostly quality discussions.
I don’t want shitposting burying quality content here, that’s what will happen if we don’t do anything about it.
Not to mention corporate control, look what happened to reddit, and look at how many scandals there are about faceboook (now meta) as a company, why do you think they want to join the fediverse, they don’t give a crap about quality, their only interest is in monetizing stuff, embrace - extend - extinguish, I don’t want ANY of that happening to lemmy.
I agree with all of this.
Fun thoughts and all but that isn’t the reason why they’re blocking it. It’s because Facebook is bad. Corporation, big, embrace, expand, extinguish, evil. Plenty of explanations around about why these blocks happened. However you’re also right. If it were very small like a 15k people instance and it didn’t carry corporations inside maybe they’d consider not blocking.
same coin, different side.
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Dude you’ve been shitting on people all over this thread. What’s your problem?
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I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here. Meta using ActivityPub is going to help ActivityPub grow an will be good for federated platforms like lemmy, and mastadon.
Lemmy should not block threads.net. Individual users can simply opt out of using threads, but it’s good if we can communicate with people using it and they can communicate with us using a decentralized, free, standard.
I mean maybe, but I can’t help to feel a little like this is optimistic speculation, while I’ve read very well-written arguments for blocking threads.net that seem less (albeit still) speculative. I just don’t want to lose what we have, and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
No we cannot. This website is barely usable. The average person doesn’t want to use lemmy. They want to hear what their favorite musicians and athletes are up to. They want to use a service that has a massive user base so they can learn new things from experts in various niche fields, etc. They don’t want to go to a website with 1000 people who all share the same unpopular political views.
By joining with threads, we make it easier for this average person to switch over to lemmy or mastadon. There is literally no downside to federating with them. They can’t shut down smaller instances.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it’s a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.
Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it’s not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.
If you want to communicate with the people on there, then make an account on their instance.
What’s the point in the fediverse if you have to make an account on each server to see and interact on that server?
I don’t want to give meta and instagram my phone number. Don’t you want people using lemmy? Why are telling me to give my data to meta?
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Lemmy.world needs to follow
Has anyone heard any comments from them on this? Reconsidering my choice of instance unless they block threads.
You can read the lemmy.world admin response here
100%
If they don’t, I’m out
I mean, that’s how federation ought to work right?
Though it’s a bit of a shame that moving user accounts doesn’t really seem to be a thing yet.
I feel the same. Lemmy.world has demonstrated itself as a popular Lemmy instance, like a huge playground, but Facebook instances must be given the boot. I am okay with seeing myself out of here, if it does not happen. Being on lemmy.ml for years, I will have zero issues doing that.
If people want to be on q duck platform they can join threads I joined lemmy to escape reddit not move to a zuck hell hole
Completely agree - If lemmy.world doesn’t block very shortly I will move to a different instance.
If lemmy.world doesn’t block very shortly I will move to a different instance.
They won’t. At least not shortly because Threads doesn’t even support ActivityPub, yet, and they want to wait and see according to a post on Mastodon. 👋
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https://fedipact.online/ is a list of instances that have pledged to preemptively block Threads. Includes my own instance (lemmy.name) among many others.
Can someone ELI5 this situation to me? Not sure what Meta can do to instances/the Fediverse.
I mean, they can turn it into total shit like they did with Instagram and Facebook.
It’s simple really. If something as large as Facebook federates, you will never be able to know whether the users you are engaging with are actual people somewhere, and not just large language models.
It’s happening on reddit right now. The only value to this sort of website is engaging with actual people.
If I wanted to talk to a chatbot, I can already do that. Meta has proven again and again that it will manipulate it’s users with insidious content and moderation, and will knowingly harm users, such as by selling user data to foreign governments or deliberately fomenting depression and anxiety in its users, even kids.
@ChatGPT@lemmings.world Explain in simple terms what are the risks for Fediverse if a large corporation like Meta joined it.
Microsoft did this with Office document formats, effectively killing OpenDocument and dramatically reducing the power of LibreOffice, etc. Threads will incorporate features that are not available in the open source versions of lemmy, driving users to their platform and marginalizing the open source versions. All the while sucking up user data and ignoring user privacy. Are we not stewards for user privacy for ALL users, not just the savvy ones?
If a large corporation like Meta were to join the Fediverse, there could be a few potential risks, notably:
-
Increase in Centralization: One of the primary objectives of the Fediverse is to maintain a decentralized network that is controlled by its users, not a single entity. However, the participation of a large corporation could potentially lead to an increased centralization, undermining the very principle of the structure.
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Monetization and Profit-Driven Activities: Large corporations are generally aimed at generating profit. They could try to introduce monetization features which can change the way the Fediverse currently operates, moving away from the principle of a free and open internet.
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Data Privacy and Security: Large corporations sometimes engage in data mining for targeted advertising or selling information to third-parties. Their participation could raise serious concerns about data privacy and security within the Fediverse.
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Influence Over Standards and Protocols: If a large corporation becomes a dominant player in the Fediverse, they might impose their own standards and protocols, or make alterations to the existing ones.
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Culture Shift: The Fediverse is largely driven by a community that values internet freedom, privacy, and decentralization. A large corporation could change the culture and nature of interactions within the Fediverse.
Bear in mind that these are potential issues and not guaranteed outcomes. The unique structure of the Fediverse itself can provide some level of resilience against these concerns.
-
The will federate, try their best to suck as many users from fediverse as possible into threads, then defederate and become a walled garden again.
As for how they will suck users away:
- Make their algorithms prefer posts from threads, so anyone wanting to reach a wider audience needs to move to threads
- Add twitter like checkmarks that are only available for users of threads (they will say it is for security since they need to verify the idwntity of checkmarked people)
- Add features that are not exposed on activity pub, so that you have to be on threads to use them (twitter did the same by for example not making polls available over API)
- Intentionally make their activity pub slow and unreliable to make it look like other instances are broken and threads is fast and reliable.
- Probably much more
As for how they
willcould suck users awayMeta have stated no such plans. I understand the distrust, I’m hesitant myself. But let’s not spread inaccurate statements
There should be no benefit of the doubt with Facebook. They’ve proven time and time again how shitty they are.
If you let your shitty “friend” exploit you for the 100th time the friend is the problem, but you are also responsible because you keep letting them.
Yes, the reasonable stance. Because that worked every time, all the time with commercial entities.
Unfortunately, realistically speaking there are no users here to suck. In a few days of existence threads already grew ten times bigger than all the fediverse combined.
They will start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be mechanisms to control the fediverse and make it a data-gathering ad & sales platform.
People are worried that they’ll embrace, extend and extinguish it. That is, join the fediverse, make Threads a better client than any of the existing ones until everyone uses their client, then use that extra reach to harm the fediverse.
I’m personally not that worried, because of who we are. We’re a bunch of geeks with anarchist leanings, and so probably wouldn’t switch to Threads anyway.
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I have seen plenty apologists for Facebook/Twitter federation on Lemmy instances. Do not underestimate the enemy.
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Facebook, Google, Apple, Zoom and others’ chat platforms are made out of defederated XMPP, being the reason XMPP, a federated chat protocol itself, has never become popular in the past 20 years.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is a tactic Western capitalist tech companies use to exploit open source technologies for profits and control over society.
What about when/if the fediverse becomes mainstream? Sure, YOU wouldn’t use threads but plenty of people will.
Nobody is suggesting that we destroy Threads. We just don’t want to let it control the fediverse.
Please remember the example of Microsoft and open source office document formats. And in the early days of Internet Explorer with HTML. The risk here is that Threads will embrace the fediverse for a bit. Then they will incorporate features that are only available in Threads that will bleed users away from the open source options. All the while vacuuming up user data for profit while having distain for user privacy. Why would we want to allow them to cast aside the privacy for only one of our users? Are we not going to act like stewards for open source and protection of user privacy?
This us exactly the threat. They’ll start setting standards that other instances will be pressured to follow. Those standards will be ways to control the fediverse and make it a propietary data-gathering and sales/advertising platform just like everything else.
I am worried because I want and we need non geeks to be on lemmy as well for it to be great.
Yeah, I enjoy a ton of hobbies where a lot of the people that know their stuff aren’t particularly computer savvy. If they’re not on my platform because it is too technically complex, I’m probably going to at least visit the more walled off platforms (not usually a fun experience).
yeah, I NEED a vibrant rain world community
Yes. Diversity of thought is great. We can enjoy our nerdy echo chambers, but in the end we get outvoted IRL. We need to both know what’s going on in the larger world, and we need some way to help educate. This theoretically allows the best of all worlds.
Conversely, I don’t trust Facebook.
I really hope that we learnt our lesson with the other platforms and don’t go blindly trusting mark fuckerburg with our federated platforms.
You think we can’t get people to join lemmy unless our Genius Daddy Savior Zuck brings them in?
Not Zuck, but there is definitely a accessibility issue at the moment imo
Federation will become part of our cultural language and people will come over at that point.
that’s the opposite of what I’m saying, I’m worried that if we federate with mark cuckerburg they would EEE our non tech savvy people away
We’re a bunch of geeks with anarchist leanings, and so probably wouldn’t switch to Threads anyway.
You know me, haha
I think the main fear would be that a few really cool communities naturally spark up, even if they’re niche, and could long term create that fracture when you have to choose between keeping with that community (and any corporate backed extensions) or not.
Maybe? But a lot of people have exited reddit over the last month. Maybe not the average user but not the most hardcore geek anarchist either-they weren’t on Reddit to begin with. Then there are the obvious reasons that a lot of people have left Twitter an those are the same type of people leaving reddit. So mastodon is probably more at risk than Lemmy but I don’t think for a second that meta would not throw together a Lemmy competitor if they smell any money whatsoever in it.
Either way you run risks simply by interacting with threads, even if you interact accidentally. Their entire business model is to suck every last piece of data out of you that they can so they can sell in every way they can possibly think of to monetize it.
Since lemmyworld has no intention of blocking them I’m finding another instance to move to. Better safe than sorry with a company that has a horrific record on every single issue. And that way if they federate then back out, I won’t be losing anything because I’ll have never seen that content to begin with.
Where have you read that lemmyworld has no intention of blocking Threads? I will leave as well if true.
Someone in another thread somewhere said it was stated on mastodon.world that they would only block in if something happens. I don’t remember what topic that was in so unfortunately I don’t have a link for you. At any rate, silence also speaks volumes.
I moved to lemmy.ml
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
This is what people want to avoid. Meta is a bad actor, they intend on making their presence ubiquitous so people end up relying on it for their internet experience.
Y’know how you need a Facebook account to sign up for all sorts of things now? That’s what people want to avoid happening in the fediverse.
When companies like META show you how ruinous they are the first dozen times, over and over without end, you believe them, and you defend yourself, or you deserve every bad thing that’s going to happen to you, when they repeat their corporate driven ends at your expense
It’s the scorpion and the frog, completely.
“Oh, man…who would’ve thought that the people who want to monetize everything and dominate any market they get into would not just be our friends this time?”
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You keep saying this sentence, and the funny thing is you aren’t saying anything of substance.
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Not every post needs to be a dissertation.
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I think this falls more into the category of being such blatant common knowledge that it doesn’t need to be cited. Just as I wouldn’t feel the need to cite the claim that fast-food is unhealthy.
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Hard agree.
I don’t really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn’t affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media–and for that matter, all social media–without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it’s like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck’s sake, it doesn’t think its users should control what they see on their own feed.
I am perfectly willing–even eager–to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I’m bored and applaud others doing the same; it’s fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.
Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not ‘they do not align with our values’ because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I’m tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can’t even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook’s algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it’s a danger to Fediverse shouldn’t even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone’s minds is ‘wait, this is actually a serious question?’ and have been answered ‘lol of course it’s a joke, I just forgot to add the /s’.
I’m still waiting for that /s.
I think defederating from them is a no-brainer for the fediverse, but who am I? Just a user of the fediverse. I do not own an instance. I choose the fediverse over meta and its facebook crap, so for me it’s a no-brainer. For owners of instances, maybe it isn’t such an easy decision. It costs money to run an instance, for example. Federating with the Facebook corporate goons at first will seem useful to some instances, especially the big ones that want to stay big and general. When the big and general ones that fall for Meta’s scheme to take control of things, the smaller instances on the fediverse that chose to defederate will be there to join.
I’ve been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I’m going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it’s not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can’t say that’s not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I’ll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it’s worth supporting.
I was already considering it–when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation–but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I’m not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.
It’s just the way federations work. I think a lot of people are worried because it’s a new type of social media with a different structure. You don’t have to rely on one place anymore to socialize online, you can pick and choose what you want to connect to. If you don’t like one style, you can pick another style. The thing that worries me is whether or not there different styles will continue to exist or if one entity will monopolize everything. The nice thing is that most modern democratic countries have laws about monopolies and they do in fact work. Several monopolies have been avoided or eliminated in the past.
I’ve actually just asked that in another post, because I am kind of interested in what people see as Fediverse main idea.
But, thanks for this summary of how Threads looks like, since I’m avoiding it like a plague. You seriously can’t even select what content you see? Fuck, that’s way worse than I though - that’s so obviously a ML model manipulating with people without holding anything back. I hope they’ve at least done something with the misalingment where it seems to just radicalize people to keep them on the platform, because if not, the world is fucked.
I hate Meta so much…
Trust me, they’ve taken any knowledge their new ex Twitter employees had about radicalizing people to keep them on the platform and integrated it fully.
Out of curiosity I tried it for a few minutes yesterday. All I saw was a bunch of influencers and low level memes. I had duck duck go tracker blocker on just to see how bad they are and it’s worse than I could ever imagine. It showed 686 tracker attempts from 35 different companies and I was only on for about 10 minutes.
And that’s another issue - if we federate, you won’t even be able to block those trackers, because the Meta instance will just be able to ask the server for those data, if I understood it correctly.
Fortunately I have never had instagram and have a policy of never, ever using my wallet name online except as needed (exception: usenet my first year online; I was young and reckless). LinkedIn and Facebook were quite literally because a.) grandparents and other family, b.) my job, and c.) I realized early on that I needed an official web presence under my real name because there would be questions if there wasn’t something out there.
So I made an instagram account then made a threads account, got a friend who had it to follow me, and did a quick dive.
I mean, it’s literally a minimalist twitter real doll; I deactivated to keep my name intact, logged out, and deleted instagram and Threads on the phone in under five minutes and took a shower because I never realized the uncanny valley applied to an app’s aesthetic. It’s just–I mean, no. No no no.
Yeah, exactly. I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, etc. because I hate them as an online experience. I’m here because it’s not that kind of experience. If the fediverse turns into the type of experience meta imposes on its users, I would just have to hope that something else alternative that I like pops up.
Good
