Meta is allowed to use the ActivityPub standard just as much as any other standard. This does not mean anyone who decides to use it must interact with others who use it. SMTP will block your mail if you aren’t from a larger server, have the right signatures and even then. Servers block HTTP over VPNs often, and there are even rules about referencing content via other servers on HTTP (CORS). Just because a standard is open doesn’t mean everything using that standard has to communicate with each other.
The beauty of this is that those running instances can’t restrict access of other instances to the fediverse. If Meta does start using ActivityPub, every current instance can block it. Other entities could want to run an instance that federates with Meta who has the resources to do so. Currently the biggest issue is the vast difference in scale between current instances and Meta. But if other entities got into the fediverse that federated with Meta this would still be a decentralized system, just with larger nodes between them. All of this still allows those who run small instances to block these larger instances that are more mainstream and keep it the way they want it.
In all seriousness, Google needs to get on providing an easier way to specify that a search should hit the Fediverse. site:reddit.com works for Reddit, but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.
I mean, it's great that you've made this, don't get me wrong, but they really should do that as well.
but there is presently no analogous operator on Google's search for a distributed system that spans many domains.
Because that's just a basic search. A search engine searches across multiple domains by default. If you're specifically looking for only results from ActivityPub enabled services, that's pretty much an impossibility since there's no way to know (from a web crawl) if a page is served by a server that supports ActivityPub. Another problem is that a lot of fediverse instances purposefully block search engine crawlers because they don't want to appear in search results.
When the explosion of new users happened, kbin.social was the only instance and it wasn’t ready for the growth. It was completely offline or disfuncional frequently and Ernest had to both disable federation and put up a CloudFlare captcha to slow down traffic to the site. So after all that lemmy.ml had to also temporarily block kbin.social because bei g unresponsive to lemmy.ml trying to federate was slowing down lemmy.ml. so people who were looking at both went to Lemmy.
Cloudflare protection also completely messed up federation, so in those days kbin was more or less completely cut off from Lemmy. And back then there weren't really alternative kbin instances to choose from.
Kbin is still much more bleeding edge - kbin had just recently reached a level of basic usability at the time of the first wave of Reddit migrants, whereas Lemmy has been around for years with a development team of twice the size (two people).
Where kbin is lagging behind the most is probably in how easy it is to set up an instance, and administer it once it's out there. This means that niche sites are more likely to use Lemmy at the moment. Then there's also, of course, still no API/apps (could change any moment now).
That said, I am incredibly happy with kbin myself, and I also don't mind at all most of the people out there being on Lemmy. As far as I'm concerned having two strong platforms from the beginning makes the Threadiverse stronger.
Having multiple clients is a great way to ensure that the underlying protocol remains open, nobody can "get away" with extending it simply because they happen to have the only actual implementation of it.
I have no idea how easy it'd be, but maybe having a way to convert a Lemmy instance into a kbin instance would be a good idea.
(public beta requires you to sign up for https://artemis.camp and access the app via this instance, as soon as the kbin API is fully released as opposed to dev branch only, all instances will be supported!)
I was about to say "how did I miss that?"... lol
Unfortunately the thumbnails in compact mode are microscopic. Probably the worst size I've yet to see, and most apps are already pretty bad at using the available space for that.
(public beta requires you to sign up for https://artemis.camp and access the app via this instance
*if you want to use it for more than lurking at this point.
Unfortunately the thumbnails in compact mode are microscopic. Probably the worst size I've yet to see, and most apps are already pretty bad at using the available space for that.
I've made a ticket about this. Just because it's low priority doesn't mean it won't happen - it just means Hariette goes through tickets FAST and there's a bunch of higher-prio things to do~
Feel free to add a comment if you have anything additional to add, or to upvote it to show your support
*if you want to use it for more than lurking at this point.
Ah good clarification! You can view it logged out without any new account,
I can see that opinion, but as the person who is currently prioritizing tickets for Artemis, I can tell you that the issue tracker is being paid attention to haha
Kbin is about 3 months old whereas Lemmy is about 3 years old. Kbin simply wasn't ready for growth, and still has a few major feature shortfalls. Lack of API access is a big one.
Because Lemmy is older and already has a lot of established communities. Kbin saw the larger growth rates though (in the context of the recent Reddit drama). Kbin also currently lacks native mobile apps, and a lot of people browse this type of media form their phones.
And those who were stubborn enough to keep looking at all options despite what could easily feel overwhelming to a non-tech user.
I am not very tech-inclined, so trying to understand the fediverse as a whole felt like very deep water, and lemmy really didn't do any job at all at explaining what it was I was committing to by choosing an instance when I didn't even know what instances were and had trouble finding out.
Since Lemmy was and is by far the most mentioned alternative and I found it too anxiety-inducing, it's mostly stubborn desperation that brought me to kbin. Which says nothing to how much I'm genuinely enjoying it here, to be clear, I was just relieved to have a simple option at that point.
Being made anxious by a new platform isn't great and I would guess that most people who didn't like the experience they had with Lemmy didn't bother clicking other links that would take them to the same fediverse. They're likely to assume they won't enjoy that one either, and resign themselves elsewhere.
So kbin naturally got fewer users just by word of mouth, and then the necessary brief isolation didn't help either when people were still getting comfortable and testing out different accounts. I don't particularly mind it other than those rare times I'm accidentally excluded, either by a question addressed only to Lemmy or their recent version of r/place disappointingly being incompatible with kbin.
I was initially put off by the UI of Lemmy that I encountered when I first went to the Lemmy site. I was a little confused as to which instance to join. That's when I stumbled upon kbin.social and that's where I landed my new account. Overall I am most comfortable here.
Since joining, I've encountered Lemmy posts that take me to their instances proper, and the formatting looked different, more like here just with a different colored background. Overall, Lemmy instances seem okay, I just like it here better.
Maybe it's the overall familiarity with the instance, calling main topic pages "magazines," the microblogging option, etc. Lemmy's resemblance is a little closer to Reddit, so that might account for why people decided to go there instead of a kbin instance.
Regarding the articles: tech journalists all use microblogging sites like Mastodon, so for them Kbin’s microblogging integration is a major advantage. Also, IIRC Kbin made it easier to follow certain people, like industry leaders, while Lemmy is more focused on communities.
Personally, I really dislike microblogging, so for me it was a major reason not to use Kbin. I think there may be a large silent group that feels the same way, but I haven’t seen any statistics on this.
I’m not surprised. While I’ve created quite a corner of an online life for myself here, in the back of my mind there’s always the thought that I’m half a step from being misunderstood and reported, banned, or at least least dumped on.
I’ve encountered a bit too many people here who are paranoid and apparently only looking for the worst in everyone else. And since I’m probably older than average, and from the eastern half of Europe, I’m just more used to using abrasive language sometimes without needing to constantly announcing my tolerance for some particular selection of specific things that happens to be in the news this month. That’s obviously not the preferred vibe here.
I’d be interested on peoples views on a concern that I’ve had growing for a while; maybe the concern is genuine, or maybe I’m being paranoid. But I feel that some of the more extreme ‘pro-trans’ conversation online feels less ‘pro-trans’ and more ‘anti-terf’ or even ‘anti-everything’ to the extent that it has become impossible to have a discussion about concerns, confusions, genuine ignorance etc, in other words impossible to educate or come up with solutions to genuine problems.
A lot of these extreme trans, conversation destroying comments are so full of hate, so often, that I admit I have become suspicious. If you were deliberately trying to divide a community from potential allies you couldn’t do it better, and I’ve seen one too many ‘as a black woman’ comments accidentally posted from the wrong account by some white as a lily racist extremist man to trust everyone who says ‘as a trans person’ online.
I would like a space where people with genuine curiosity but also genuine concerns (as in, that they have the concern is genuine, it doesn’t mean necessarily that there is a genuine problem that needs resolving) could have an adult discussion to educate and understand each other, in order to find solutions, without having to worry about being cancelled and shut down.
If you’re on the fence and it feels like the only people who listen to you with respect and sympathy are the anti-trans people, well, you’re going to end up hearing a lot more of what they have to say than learning something actually useful.
I understand that the trans community must get frustrated with having to explain themselves all the time, and impatient for the day they don’t, and it sucks that that’s the world we live in right now. But I’m also very concerned that we should be cautious about accepting every hateful or insane sounding ‘as a trans person’ comment we read at face value. Hatred leads to the dark side after all, and that’s where some people want you to be.
That said I’m not trans, or even pretending to be trans, so I can’t speak for the community. I just believe strongly in the adage that the most effective way to win support is to meet hate with love, and I know a growing number of people who should have been trans allies being turned away by the feeling that they are not being listened to or taken seriously. Even if their concerns feel stupid to be people in the community.
Oh also, whilst I think people should be taking genuine concerns seriously, be careful of ‘whataboutism’ so hey, fun tight rope.
That’s my paranoid ramblings for anyone who cares from someone who wants to see tolerance and understanding but is scared we’re going the wrong way.
I’m non binary. I noticed this long long after puberty, a lot of trauma repression I think. Even for me entering trans spaces is daunting. I have one trans friend that I talk to but I also have questions and need to learn and the only materials on offer is like half a book or youtube videos. Neither of which are media I learn well from. (I haven’t checked fediverse spaces out much yet tho.)
If you’re on the fence and it feels like the only people who listen to you with respect and sympathy are the anti-trans people
This is what people just don’t seem to understand. The “you’re 150% with us and declaring it on every turn, or you’re against us” rule just makes completely normal people end against them.
This really goes for every kind of issue that may come up, not even just for the typical “left-right” feud bullshit.
The thing is, it’s not even required to be nice and keep explaining shit or whatever - there’s always the option on an individual level to just ignore stuff.
Like with the joke in this story - no, you don’t need to be the police to immediately report and flag everything that’s 10% over the line. You don’t need to see red all the time. Just ignore it and move the fuck on, you’re not getting any extra social credits for beings overly sensitive and protective.
The obvious counterargument is “well if you ignore everything, they win”, but that’s still just the same paranoia, the same dividing between us and everyone else, the same overprotectiveness. You don’t have to let everything pass, that doesn’t mean you have to police everything everything either.
Besides there will always be a ton of people willing to do online vigilantism, so you’re really totally fine to just ignore most things and not run to the mod about everything.
It’s like those zero-tolerance policies in some schools (American schools of course, where else) where forgetting a pink plastic water gun or a nail clipper in their backpack can get a 10yo kid arrested and expelled. It’s not helping anything, it’s not addressing the actual problem, it singles out random people as examples, and it just makes everyone hate you.
be careful of ‘whataboutism’ so hey, fun tight rope
If I see someone using the term whataboutism, I know there’s no discussion to be had with them. Another originally sensible word that has been destroyed by overuse. I’ve been accused of whataboutism by just adding some extra information about a game console history. Holy shit. You can tell that person’s entire mission in life is to just scope the internet of any sign of disagreement about anything they find holy, no matter how trivial.
The problem is that the well has been poisoned. Simple fact is that whenever someone says "I just have concerns", nine-out-of-ten times, they're just trolling you.
And I've been involved in this conversation for years, on a couple of different forums, trying to explain things that trans folks go through. And to this day I still do my best to always give people the benefit of the doubt if they seem sincere.
But I'm not at all exaggerating when I say 9/10 times it's just someone JAQing off, and within a few posts they're accusing trans people of being a danger to women or children.
This is combined with the fact that a lot of the "reasonable" compromises cisgender people come up with, just aren't at all reasonable from the perspective of the transgender people they would affect. The compromises usually involve denying life-saving medical care, or involve basically accepting being ostracised from public life.
Finally, cisgender people just massively outnumber transgender people. So while for any one cisgender person, this might be the first time they've ever asked anything about the topic, the trans person has likely been asked dozens if not hundreds of times. Many of which were in bad faith.
So a lot of trans people have checked out. For their own mental health.
I will add that many of us who work remotely using publicly accessible wifi also use VPNs, and Imgur actively blocks IPs from multiple commercial VPN providers. If you want those users to see the image you're sharing, Imgur is not the way to go.
Pixelfed works well with other Fediverse services like Kbin and Lemmy. Try hosting there!
The first one that comes to mind is that defederation DOES stop your posts from going to Meta's platform when combined with the AUTHORIZED_FETCH server setting, while a simple user-level block may not. Depending on your server's settings, your posts may or may not be available on the open web where Meta could scrape the data - but this is still very different from them appearing in the feed or search results of, say, the transphobic, racist, or antisemitic groups that call Meta home.
This has serious implications for user safety and should not be overlooked. In fact, user safety is one of the biggest issues I have seen people mention when advocating for defederation.
Second: it's not yet clear if threads will allow their users to follow people on Lemmy or Kbin servers. But if they do, their users - including, for instance, the millions of followers of some big celebrity or politician - would be able to uprank posts and influence what you end up seeing. You might have LibsOfTikTok tell their users to brigade any posts critical of them, who knows. Meta's own algorithms could end up surfacing certain posts to their users, making the post rankings here largely a reflection of what Meta wants their users to see.
In other words, there's a lot more to the story than just 'blocking their content' when it comes to why you would want full defederation.
Here are a couple of blog posts that go into more detail around some of the data & privacy issues with federation:
The whole line of thinking where we don't need to bother with defederating because your data can still end up over on Threads is not entirely correct. Yes, you can still grab data via RSS, yes you can still scrape data, but from an AP standpoint Threads users will not see or be able to interact with your content if you are on server that does not federate with Meta, and that is key. If the threads app can't see your data, and users there cannot follow or interact with your posts, then Meta cannot gather intelligence on you in relation to their users, which is completely different than scraping your data and viewing it in a vacuum. Your content is more valuable to Meta in relation to the content of their users and how they interact with you.
Yes, you can learn a bit about someone by observing them from a distance, but you learn so much more if you are interacting with them directly.
Good question! By and large, some of the following would count as a "strike":
Poor moderation
Excessive spam
Most importantly: Making non-backwards compatible changes to the ActivityPub specification that may lead to the classic "Embrace, extend, extinguish" situation
Threads as it exists now is poorly moderated in that it is 90% shameless self-promotional commercial content.
If your instance doesn't have a policy against horrible undisclosed commercial promotion, I want nothing to do with it. If it does, Threads already has hundreds of thousands of strikes.
is it even possible to federate with them without receiving thousands of posts per minute of barely moderated content that would drown everything else in the feed?
Most importantly: Making non-backwards compatible changes
That's the shift into "Extend" - they won't do this until their Embrace phase has enmeshed their users with other fediverse users so that defederation affects people's subscriptions.
I'm actually hoping Google or Microsoft or Apple etc create a compatible activity pub based service. That would create balance and make 'extend' problematic for meta.
I also think we need state actors and universities to start using Mastodon (not Twitter) - again that would make it difficult for Meta to deviate from standards.
I’d say any automated/integrated effort to direct users of federated instances to the threads site to view content should count as a strike. (Such as needing to go directly to the threads site to view an image that could be easily posted anyway.)
So should any automated/integrated effort to encourage users to make their own threads account. (Such as needing an account to visit this link or view this image.)
Any attempt to coerce non threads users to sign any sort of agreement or TOS with threads.
As well as any data collection on non threads users. Merely interacting with a federated threads account should not entitle meta to any data collection of that user.
Mine won't nor will any of my other 3 Fediverse servers.
I know of a number of Mastodon servers that have already de-federated or limited threads.net, even though it does not yet connect to the Fediverse. Some are even limiting or suspending connections to servers that refuse to de-federate from threads.net and are trying to pressure other servers to do the same.
An Admin has no right to force their personal agendas onto all the people who are on their servers. People are competent enough to make their own decisions and can individually decide to block or limit Threads. I block servers on my server to protect members from hateful people.
I will limit threads.net if their moderation is inadequate, just as I do now for a number of Mastodon servers that don't do much to keep hatred and offensive content off their servers. This won't prevent anyone from following someone or being followed by someone, on threads.net. It just means that people on my server need to approve being followed and that posts from threads.net won't show up in the public timeline.
At this point, I haven't heard of any Kbin instances planning to de-federate but there's a ton of yacking about it on Mastodon. I finally muted the "threads" hashtag to get some peace from it.
I will limit threads.net if their moderation is inadequate, just as I do now for a number of Mastodon servers that don’t do much to keep hatred and offensive content off their servers.
I disagree that the admin of an instance doesn't have the right to moderate it how they wish. By joining the server you agree to let that admin control what content you see on your instance. That's how instances work. It's still on you to agree/disagree with the admin and how they run the server. That's why other servers exist and you have the complete right to associate with who you wish, or even run your own instance and run it how you like.
I do not agree with the people wanting to control other servers by trying to force defederating from threads. Independent admins running their own server is what the Fediverse is built upon.
I do not agree with the people wanting to control other servers by trying to force defederating from threads. Independent admins running their own server is what the Fediverse is built upon.
As long as authorized fetch is implemented (and correctly), intermediaries can't "leak" messages out anyways. If Threads wanted to read the contents of a boost, they would have to ask your server for that, and your server can tell them to screw off.
Does kbin or Lemmy implement authorized fetch? If they don't they should start working on it. And consider enabling it by default. I know versions of Lemmy >= 0.18 can talk to GTS (which enforces AF) so there is partial support for it. And nobody runs 0.17 because of how inefficient it is, so that won't be too big of a backwards incompatibility issue. No idea how it works on kbin land here, but it should be implemented ASAP if only so that any future enforcement won't break backwards compatibility.
Im not going to deny the threat of Extend/Embrace/Extinguish, but everyone defederating now, and threatening to defederate all other instances that dont do so as well, comes across as an incredible hasty and mostly an emotionally driven decision.
I get that. I'm all for viewing then with suspicion. Rightly and justifiably so. I don't have Facebook or Instagram except for contained osint work. I value privacy and understand it's importance.
But I'm personally not in favour of wildly quarantining every instance that doesn't fully block them before I have had more time to understand the risks and options here. And I think a lot of people here don't do. Not really. In that regard its just classic social media with people stoking each others fears and feasting on it.
And I guess a lot of people are here, fresh from reddits corporate ego trip only to immediately feel the worry of their next digital home inevitably meeting the same fate. I think that fresh trauma is directing a lot of the current discourse here. And I think it would be wise to revisit the subject again when we've settled and understand our new surroundings more.
tl;dr: don't trust facebook, but also don't burn half the street down because they bought a mansion down the lane.
Come on, one thread is all about "if we do nothing now in two years Threads will have swallowed the Internet", and here it's like "if we do something now we're all drama queens".
Personally I think it's all very simple. Meta has an agenda, which is monetizing data through all means available.
This is not up to debate. It's a corporation, it has no morals and no other goal other than generating profit by selling users data to advertisers.
I'm saying this as a statement of facts.
The purpose of the fediverse so far is in complete contrast with that, so I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that Meta's ultimate goal will be to alter the fediverse to suit their own goal.
Therefore, telling them to go fuck themselves while we still can seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
Everyone is free and welcome to make thir own servers, and so is Meta.
However, admins are also free to defederate from the servers they deem dangerous or inappropriate for any reason, and fuck, Meta has shown thousands of times that they're not to be trusted.
Basically Meta will try to join the fediverse build up a bunch of users and get content. Once they become the biggest instance they will build up a wall to kick all the competition out. It is what google did to XMPP. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html By signing the anti fedi pact we are esentially preventing a corporation from taking over and ruining it for everyone else.
They or their users don't want their posts reaching Meta's servers. Any site federating with Meta has the ability to boost content from other sites they're federated with to all others they federate with. So, if Site A is federated with Meta, and Site B is federated with Site A but not with Meta, posts from Site B can still reach Meta via Site A.
The solution to this is Authorized Fetch. It trades a little bit of efficiency (individual AP messages being re-shareable by intermediaries) for proper authorization (every server must fetch the messages directly from the source, with the correct authorization). Mastodon implements it behind an env variable, and implementations like GoToSocial force it. No idea how kbin or Lemmy work but they should look into it.
I don't get the XMPP thing. XMPP was an obscure protocol mostly used in non-federated applications (several MMOs use XMPP for in-game chat for example, obviously not federated). When Google and Facebook adopted XMPP and federated, the user base exploded, sure. Then they defederated, and XMPP went straight back to where it was before. There was no EEE - it was EA: Embrace, Abandon. Google and Facebook didn't extend or extinguish anything. If anything, Slack and Discord killed XMPP, not Google.
What also could happen is that a lot of Fediverse post could be collected, then used to build ad profiles. It's quite easy to deanonimize people, and even if the "same user handle" tactic fails, one can just use heavy monitoring to someone to say "X on A is Y on B". I got advertisement for Galaxy S23 Ultra cases just by talking about it.
@ZILtoid1991 this can happen today, everyone is scraping fediverse. But as others said we are not that many anyway. Threads got 10 million users in 7 hours
I think many people here are immensely overestimating the value of the Fediverse user base. The entire active Fediverse, let alone individual instances, is barely a rounding error for Meta.
There is no if or when Threads become the biggest instance, Threads apparently got 10 million users in 7 hours. The whole of Mastodon has ~9 million users in total. By now, Threads alone is likely bigger than the entire Fediverse combined, which mind you is something like >99% bots and inactive users.
Even if every single instance defederates from Meta, their fork of ActivityPub would by far be the most significant one by not a small margin.
Even if every single instance defederates from Meta, their fork of ActivityPub would by far be the most significant one by not a small margin.
And? Any other big name will never agree to import the fediverse fork of Meta. The war is open, all of the big names know about the EEE trick and none of them will fall for it and embrace their fork.
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