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?
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
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
I honestly want it. I want to follow people who have Threads accounts without needing a Threads account myself. I want more people in the fediverse and I don't care what platform they're using to access it because I'll be on kbin.
If Meta one day decides to leave ActivityPub, that's fine with me because I'll still be here on kbin with all the same people who are here now who also would never use Threads.
I'm baffled by the trend in recent years of everyone insisting that they need to be in control of every byte of data that they deliberately publish onto the open medium of the Internet.
I mean, I'm not really baffled. I understand that people see that their data might be worth pennies and they want those pennies to be their pennies, darnit. I mean I'm dismayed by it.
If Meta's going to be supporting ActivityPub, then yay, IMO. If you don't want Meta's servers to see your data then stop posting it on an open protocol whose purpose is to show it to Meta's servers.
Look, I understand your opinion and I respect it, but I simply do not trust Meta. They are a business, and they are always going to do what is best for their business. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with that - all businesses are in the business of staying in business - but I think their track record makes them an untrustworthy actor in regards to the fediverse; they're a big tech company joining a small (and I would argue obscure) ensemble of social networks.
Of course, I could be totally wrong and this could be a total boon for Activity Pub, kbin, mastodon, and the wider fediverse. I just think that the opposite is more likely.
And if Meta tries to pull some sort of destructive shenanigans, sure, then defederate from them. Not because they're Meta, but because they're pulling destructive shenanigans. There's already plenty of instances that get defederated for that sort of thing.
That's not what I'm annoyed about here, though. I'm annoyed by all the people who have come to the Fediverse claiming that it's because it's open and free and all that, and then when some company that they have a particular personal dislike for comes along and wants to participate in the protocol exactly as intended they go "but not like that!"
If some random instance like lemmy.ca (name picked randomly) was to find itself in financial difficulty keeping the lights on and was to strike some kind of deal with an advertiser to put banner ads on their site, would there be a similar enormous hue and cry about it? Maybe users on lemmy.ca who have to actually deal with the advertising might raise a ruckus, but over here on kbin.social it wouldn't affect me in the slightest.
And if Meta tries to pull some sort of destructive shenanigans, sure, then defederate from them. Not because they're Meta, but because they're pulling destructive shenanigans. There's already plenty of instances that get defederated for that sort of thing.
In principle, I agree.
My fear is that the fediverse has no big hitter that can compete with Meta’s resources. The closest thing would be Mastodon.social, and they are still tiny compared to the two-billion instagram users Meta is gonna advertise Threads to and the 390 million Twitter X users that they are trying to poach.
I think Meta will play nice in the beginning, but eventually (perhaps even quickly) will gain a much larger userbase than everyone else. From there, it is only a matter of time before their users create more communities and content than everyone else.
Eventually, anyone who is federated with Threads is going to get accustomed to seeing and enjoying Threads content (why wouldn’t they? It’s from people.) That is where I fear Meta will start to flex their muscles because at the end of the day their business model is based on selling user data to advertisers; having users being able to interact from other platforms doesn’t really fit into that as well as having everyone be on your platform.
Obviously, I don’t have a crystal ball and all of this is theoretical, but I can see something like this happening where people start to abandon smaller platforms for Threads because their preferred platform got defederated.
It's not hard to defederate. It's a simple, easy lever to pull. All I'm saying is that it's silly to pull it preemtptively. Meta might do something destructive, but if it doesn't then defederating preemptively is a huge waste of an opportunity.
"Look, just because Sauron tried to conquer and utterly dominate Middle Earth repeatedly over the course of millennia with soul-corrupting, mind-controlling rings doesn't mean we shouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt this time when he says he's totally offering free magic rings in good faith this time."
wants to participate in the protocol exactly as intended
I don't think they want to participate in the protocol as intended at all. I think they want to gradually warp Activity Pub for their own ends.
This isn't about liking or disliking, it's about inferring future behaviour based on past patterns. That company has an abominable history. It actively impeded an international genocide trial (after it spent years facilitating the genocide).
When that's the kind of level they can stoop to I think it's madness to engage with them and expect good faith. The secret meetings haven't helped.
A wild polar bear might not bite me if I pat it either.
Personally it doesn't seem preemptive to me because I think the part where Meta held secret meetings with certain Fediverse admins and made them sign NDAs was a clear indication of the way they are going to do things, i.e nontransparent and not as equals.
Perfect conditions for embrace extend extinguish, which is boiling a frog so could do a lot of damage before most people are able to spot it.
I accept that YMMV though, I just don't think it's particularly closed-minded of those of us who are too wary of their motives to want to federate with them.
Why in hell would a massive social media company give two flying shits about a decentralized, comparatively tiny not-quite-one-platform?
To eat it. To completely destroy it and thus gain greater power and control over even more.
Like, the fediverse isn't a threat at all to fb/meta, but people, chatting on internet, without total top down direct oversight on what comes up in your feed?
Well how would they make their money? Or push their propaganda?
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.
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
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