Threads seems to be beginning to test ActivityPub federation, and since Kbin can be used for microblogging, this affects kbin.social. What are your thoughts on federating or defederating with them?
Kbin has settings to block entire instances. Unless threads is implemented as a ton of different instances it should be easy to just block threads.meta or whatever their instance is called.
I have a few instances like lemmy.ml on my block list already.
Nobody is "inviting" Meta in, ActivityPub is an open protocol. They can come in without any invitation. Being closed is what I left Reddit over. Closing the Fediverse to Meta would be more like the bullshit I left Reddit over.
If kbin.social can't handle the bandwidth of federating with Meta then it will defederate. But I don't run kbin.social, that's up to the people who run it. The question is "how do we feel about federating?" As in we the users.
And that's who I'm responding to here. A user who was concerned about the content that they posted being seen on Meta's servers. They're not worried about bandwidth costs, they're just worried about some kind of bad magic happening when Meta users see their posts in the context of Meta's instance.
i dont understand why people are upset their public information might be seen within faceshits walled garden. its like no one understands what that word means.
i dont want to see a firehose of meta. content either, just something that irks me
I would be... Anything I put on here, I know kbin.social will be sending out to thousands of other instances, and what those instances do with my content and how it's displayed is completely out of my control. That's just the nature of ActivityPub, and by posting here I think I have to be okay with that. There are already ActivityPub services that run ads, so it's not unique to Threads either.
Because Threads presents an opportunity to grow the community on ActivityPub services, and because the Fediverse presents the opportunity to extend the community I'm involved in that's on Threads right now. My hope is that if that group respects what the Fediverse offers, they will also start sharing the podcast on PeerTube
My main concern is that this is just Facebook Meta utilizing the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy that Microsoft used against Netscape in the 90s.
I feel like our small communities here - which are just getting started - are going to be flooded by Threads users who don’t even know what federation is and then all the content, power & control will realistically be in Meta’s hands.
My gut says that is probably Meta’s goal, but what do I know? I’m just some internet person.
Decentralized networks are a threat to Meta’s entire business model which runs on advertisements. That doesn’t work very well when your users can just jump to another instance without ads.
Meta wants to nip the fediverse in the bud now before it’s too late for them to get a foothold. I think they’re gonna do it by (trying) to port their massive userbase to Threads, make other instances dependent on their content and users, and then pull the plug so they can go back to selling everyone’s information to advertisers.
Edit: https://i.imgur.com/4U0g4Bk.png
I saw this image floating around a few days ago that I think helps illustrate that even if a fraction of Meta's userbase migrates to Threads it will be enough to dominate the fediverse. Instagram has two billion users, and the entire fediverse only has around 1.5 million.
Threads, despite its name, is not a threaded discussion forum like the Threadiverse. It's more like Mastodon, a microblogging protocol. I don't think we'll be seeing Threads users flooding here because the format of these communities isn't really compatible with that.
How would power be handed to Meta just because Threads has more users? The communities are under the control of the instances where they were created, and Threads users couldn't create larger communities to replace them either since it's only a microblogging platform.
The concept is that overtime, communities and connections will organically grow. If Threads has a disproportionally large ubserbase, then overtime they will create a similarly larger number of communities. This then would give them a lot more influence over the fediverse and anyone federated with them.
For smaller instances that become accustomed to seeing those communities and content, the danger is that Meta can just “pull the plug,” defederate, and extinguish the competition, or at the very least hurt their competitor's users experiences when interacting with content from Threads. The reason they might do this is purely because it fits into their business model which is selling user data to advertisers; it is in Meta’s interest to have as much data on their users as possible, and to have those users be based on Meta’s platform.
As I said in another comment, I could be totally wrong and this could benefit the fediverse. I just think the opposite is more likely because I do not trust Meta. I think they will play nice in the beginning, but then start to flex their muscles once they feel they’ve got enough influence.
Also, there is nothing stopping them from expanding Thread’s capabilities to include the threadiverse. Kbin has already demonstrated both are possible in one app.
If they pull the plug on ActivityPub and take their users back, things would just be exactly how they are now. Since they can't create communities or magazines like we can (and it's very unlikely Meta is going to try to implement this), if they want to participate in discussion here, they'll be posting in our communities. Kbin's magazines are uniquely suited to this as well because content gets sorted into them based on hashtags, so they wouldn't even need to know that they're posting to a magazine to do it.
We're already in a situation like you describe though with lemmy.world's near monopoly on large communities, which seems concerning to me as is.
And I agree, lemmy.world does have a near-monopoly on large communities. I attribute that to lemmy being more developed and having apps ready and kbin simply not being completely ready in June (no shade thrown at ernest - he’s great and I like kbin better.) I hope overtime kbin grows some of its own large communities so it’s not so skewed towards a single instance.
Just to clarify what I mean, lemmy.world's position is bad for the threadiverse as a whole. It's where most of our users and largest communities we all post to are. If .world goes down, it'd be a major blow to our current, mostly stable, position and we'd be significantly worse off than if Meta were to come and go. Things are improving though and communities are slowly spreading to other instances! I also deeply appreciate that we have kbin as an alternative to Lemmy - thank you Ernest
I really don't see the issue. So more users is bad? I thought our issue is the lack of users currently.
I've seen people complain about ads and data harvesting here. But instances can already do that. Meta joining would change nothing about that. Actually, being a proper legal company, it might be easier to sue them over misusing your data than random instances.
"Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"? Let's stop between the last two steps then, not before the first one.
Kbin would be crippled by the amount of Threads content? I thought federation only happened if one kbin.social user is following a user on Threads? Should be as easily manageable then as Mastodon is currently. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
To me, big sites federating looks like a clear advantage. I don't really get the big problem.
My understanding of the EEE doctrine is that the large company/userbase pervades, overshadows, and quite literally takes over, so the fediverse wouldn't really get a say in the matter.
So block them, block them hard, block them now and forever
They should pay the hosting costs of any server they pull data from
not run ads against the content that comes from other instances
Any changes they want in activity pub should be in the form of an MR on activitypub itself, and they must respect the protocol maintainers of the project if their MR is rejected. If they implement AP features outside of spec, they should be summarily defederated. We do not need another Jabber/XMPP vs Google situation
Any instance is free to federate/defederate with threads
Wow, had not even thought of that.
RIP to any server that federates with them and has to pay for the bandwidth they're going to need to service Meta's users.
That's not really how ActivityPub works though, there's no pulling. They wouldn't be accessing kbin and downloading it's data, it's a push system. We would be pushing copies of our data out to Threads like we do now with all the other ActivityPub services. Threads would then distribute that data to it's users with no extra work on kbin's part. It would just be one more instance in addition to the thousands of instances already out there.
People bring up the XMPP Google situation a lot also, but I think it's a bad analogy for this. Google's adoption of XMPP brought people into the protocol and Google abandoning it took those same people away. Those who were using it before Google could still use it after Google. Anybody who left XMPP to follow Google did it because XMPP failed to adapt to the features people wanted. Thats why we have Matrix now instead.
No. Fuck Facebook, and fuck Zuck. There isn't a world in which they would federate and respect our privacy.
See how they build internal user profiles for users not on Facebook through tags and other metadata scraping techniques. If people you know talk about you on Facebook, there's a shadow profile about you out there, waiting to connect with you in real time. I have no reason to think they wouldn't do the same kind of shit here.
you cant post publicly over time and expect anonymity. no one can.
you are easily discernible by a number of features if someone really wanted to track you down, so this idea that using a public forum has an expectation of privacy is confusing me.
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
This is a great article describing exactly how Meta can control the fediverse and destroy smaller instances with anti-competitve practices.
Refusing to federate with Threads would achieve exactly that outcome. Most people on Threads wouldn’t know the Fediverse existed any more than most people on Google knew XMPP existed.
The Fediverse is struggling to get a large enough userbase to be as useful as the mega-services it replaces. Threads can gift that userbase and make people more aware that the Fediverse exists.
FWIW this is exactly why Threads didn’t join the Fediverse until they’d overcome the legal obstacles to operating in the EU. If they’d federated first they risked losing all their potential EU users to the Fediverse.
The quickest way to lose this game is not to play it and the Google/XMPP example iillustrates why.
I don’t think there should be one plan. Some people on the Fediverse want nothing to do with Threads. Others want the massive userbase because that’s the only way to get the content and discussion they’re looking for. Instances which do federate will have to deal with moderation issues, and will choose different ways to do that.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that there will be instances with policies to suit every user. Exactly as it should be.
I'm not super familiar with the right terminology, but in short I think users should be able to follow whoever they want, but restrictions on how it is interacted with is fair game. I think following and replying to threads accounts is sort of a must, even if boosting and other functions are disabled. Also on favor of preventing non-replies from being sent to threads.
The real issue issue is interop with Threads means surveillance of users. Limiting the info going from here to there is essential. However a read-only mode that lets us get some value out of it is fine
The Fediverse is an experiment and should/needs to be robust enough to cope with large commercial instances. I’m happy to see how this goes before blocking if it goes badly
They'll boil the frog slowly enough. Threads is huge compared to the fediverse, and will likely do piecemeal federation. Like sending account activity out but not sharing any fediverse voices, getting everyone here following and desensitized
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