Sick of lemming shenanigans? Come to kbin.social. It's better here, like an internet Jamacia - a land of special people where champions grow. Aussie local instance at kglitch.social.
If we take you at your word, one lemmy.world admin didn’t disclose one meeting they had with Meta - and from the sounds of it, you don’t even know the nature of the meeting itself. It could very well be a long meeting where they expressed interest in federating with Threads, or it could be a very short meeting where they said “lmfao go fuck yourselves”.
That and you practically going on like “lemmy bros I don’t want you to blindly follow me but Imma make my own Fediverse instance but it’s ok you don’t need to join but just know Imma make an instance with blackjack and hookers it’s gonna be better than this just blindly trust me bro” in some of the posts here just further weakens your accusation.
In 12 years, selfhosting will be so cheap and one-push-button easy that everyone will have their own instance and federated with each other. It will be called Neo-Geocities 2.0.
Well, not really the same thing but I saw this the other day. I think it is awesome, but that is probably only nostalgia talking. It is a geocities website for the current day!
Honestly, maybe the incompatible protocols should just be severed from each other.
It’s novel that Mastodon can technically talk to Lemmy. But why? It’s such a hassle to make it happen – and the results are so messy.
If you want Mastodon to happen on Lemmy, it just ends up being easier to post a URL to a Mastodon post than it is to try and use the “official” federated methods. Just like people could post a link to a tweet or Facebook post.
I would not be surprised that after Twitter, Meta’s next target is Reddit, which is ripe for a serious commercial rival. Meta are probably working on a Reddit replacement, using activitypub and their experience with Threads. If you federate already with Threads, then it is a relatively small step to extend that to Meta’s Reddit killer. Maybe federation with Threads will automatically be extended by Meta to this new app. Give them an inch….
I was a bit confused about this as well. Once Threads implements ActivityPub, what would federation with lemmy.world actually look like in practice? I understand how federation works between Lemmy instances, but how would a microblogging platform fit in? Would Threads users just be able to post to Lemmy, or would it somehow show up in a Lemmy community when a Threads user makes a post on Threads?
I’m not really understanding how two different services like Lemmy and Threads can be intercompatible.
Lemmy communities are "groups" in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.
It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I've seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.
Groups don't even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can't stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.
In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize "This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something," than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly--in corporate terms, it's like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.
@RxBrad @corroded
As you can see here I can also comment from Mostodon, the most mastodon-like app ;-) . Likewise, threads can participate in threadiverse once they federate. That's how federation works. @pinkdrunkenelephants
@RxBrad
I can subscribe to a magazine from Mastodon. This is not too much pain.
But you are right, my mastodon account has another purpose. To true participate in threadiverse I use a kbin spoon.
But I think the threads users are more painless....
Replying from Mastodon, just for giggles. As far as I can tell, the feed for this /c is just a random stream of unthreaded comments, sorted by when they're posted, with no indication which post they're actually referring to.
I'm not even totally sure if you can even create a new post (and I don't want to spam the sub trying).
So, yeah.. it's possible. But by no means an ideal way to do Lemmy.
This is true - the bigger impact would be on Kbin instances that are both Threadiverse and Microblogverse facing.
However, if you go on Mastodon you can see Lemmy threads as posts which you can click through to the hosting instance and also boost (but not downvote). So for Lemmy if Threads.net federates, the biggest impact would be exposure of content to Threads users who then come in to Lemmy instances but not logged in or who could boost content and distort things.
For Kbin instances and also Mastodon it could mean being swamped with content from Threads.net.
Personally I do think overall the Kbin/Lemmy/Mastodon servers should probably not federate with Threads.net. The content appears to be poor and it could flood the fediverse with crap, when really it's still small and needs to grow organically. Threads.net is at 70m users already and rising rapidly, while Mastodon is at 8m (1.6m active) and the Threadiverse is more like 130k across Kbin and Lemmy. Mastodon/Kbin/Lemmy need time to establish what it means to be an independent federated social media network. They can always federate with Threads.net in the future - rather than it being Meta's choice, it should be the communities choice if and when they want to federate with a behemoth network.
Feel free to do so and run your own server. Blackmailing is childish and non productive by the way. I’m sure most instances will defederate from threads over time but they are looking to federate with mastadon instances more than lemmy/kbin.
I support defederating from threads too, I despise FB and anything they touch but blackmailing is not going to do anything in the case of OP and it is the wrong way to go about it . I’m on lemmy.world myself and when the time comes I will have the choice to make depending on what this instance does. We all have that choice, that is the benefit of federation.
The entire point of the fediverse is that there is no “we”. Or rather, you can decide which “we” you want to engage with. Look at behaw. When world started exploding with growth, the beehaw instance defederated because they wanted to preserve a smaller community.
I will never sign up for Threads or any other Meta service. However, if the fediverse allows me to interact with my friends and colleagues who have without having to give up all my data to do so, that’s a win in my book.
So feel free to go start or join an instance that defederates from Threads. Just stop expecting everyone else to do so.
You don’t give much thought to what Threads wants to do to the fediverse, and your concern is only what benefits yourself in the short term.
Just be aware of that. Many of us older folks have seen this process happen over and over. Threads will start to dictate what activitypub will be, and once it has many millions of users, it gives them power to influence the entire protocol.
And if people don’t like that, they will have to come up with a new protocol and start over again. Which is exactly the cycle we are constantly experiencing.
I think we should not let them into our instances. Keep them as a corporate funded version of the fediverse, separate from the ones run by individuals.
But since each instance owner is free to do what they want, I estimate that many will federate with threads and suffer the consequences in the future.
I’m just dumb and forget the world wide web is, well, world wide haha. I just live in my own little bubble sometimes but i’m trying to be better about not blindly assuming the folks i interact with on here and other places are from the US
Thank you for pointing out that this is so much worse than just EEE. Meta has a long history of social and political engineering, and deliberately creating a toxic environment that turned all of our parents and grandparents into deranged conspiracy theorists. They don’t just let hate thrive on their platform, they artificially inflate it in the name of engagement and profit.
I see no reason to assume they won’t do all of this again, and should they do it all again it’s going to impact the entire Fediverse. Even if you just stick to instances that block Meta, if you’re federating with instances that aren’t, the toxic environment Meta is likely to build will come back to you. If the majority of instances fail to block them, I can’t bear to stay here and watch what has become the internet’s most healthy and vibrant community rot from the inside.
I honestly don’t understand why this is even a debate. If even a fraction of the shit meta has pulled was done by a smaller Fediverse instance, we all wouldn’t hesitate to defederate from them.
And to those of you who justify Threads because Meta is somehow the lesser of two evils compared to Twitter, please remember that while Twitter is owned by a raging and incompetent manchild, Meta has eroded democracies and played a major role in a genocide. Don’t fucking support these murderers. Meta is more than happy to spread even more hatred and killing in the world if it boosts their profits.
Thank you so much for being the first to properly understand the threat I was trying to express. You said it so much better than I could at the time.
I think the reason we are debating is because there are already bots and bad actors working hard to change and forge opinion. I think this style of fediverse just died, but we are close to easily making a new better one.
I'm gonna need to see an argument on how Threads' toxicity will reach places that are at least once removed. You can't just use it as evidence when it's not even clear it would happen. It's like saying this community is already tainted because there are folks who also have Instagram accounts. If it's not via people spreading the toxicity, I'm all ears to hear your reasoning. Cause it's far from just being obvious.
What are you even arguing anyway? You're saying defederating Threads isn't even enough. There's no sign they'll even federate beyond platforms of similar concept (micro logging as opposed to link sharing/exchange).
Are you just saying by simply existing, if everyone doesn't defederate them, the fediverse dies?
Your reply is a perfect example of how threads actions are causing toxicity in lemmy.world.
edit: Id just like to point out that at no point does he respond about meta being evil and unworthy to associate with, which is the important part he should be talking about.
I’m not here for mass-produced content, if I wanted that, I’d be in other platforms. The beauty of these communities is they are not filled with posts that are all the same, algorithms and bots. It’s just a community of real people having conversations.
The problem with the fediverse is that it's not really filled with posts at all. Maybe the Tech or Random magazines, if that's what you're looking for, but if you want to talk about cars or suits or model trains or whatever, you'll be lucky if you see one post across the fediverse in a month. Niches are empty, because most people here mostly have one interest in common, which is the fediverse itself.
Conversely, the value of large-scale social media, and the theoretical ideal of the fediverse, lies in positive network effects. You're into some obscure Japanese manga only four people who speak English have ever read? odds are, three of those people are on reddit, and you might find them. Looking for a review on a bootmaker you saw at the thrift store? Go to /r/goodyearwelt, there will be twelve threads about it, none of them sponsored or anything, diving way too deep into details you never could have imagined wanting to know.
But right now, look through lemmy.world or whatever, and tell me:
What are some good anime? Some good Shonen anime? Some good non-Shonen anime? An anime that represents trans issues well?
Where is a good place to get a suit under $400? In the US? In Europe? What's the difference between Huntsman and Edward Sexton's cuts?
What's a good recipe for a cake? What about a salad? How do you deflame a red onion?
Who is the vice president of the United States? Who is the secretary of state? Who is the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office?
Trivial questions, right? Most of them haven't come up here at all. Reddit is a massive corpus of knowledge, answering questions way more obscure than these, with enough people around to answer whatever question you might have in a variety of niche communities. People want that on a service they can trust.
I don't think many people want more tools to talk to strangers about nothing. Scale gives rise to better conversations and interactions in niche areas.
I totally get your point and agree that this is still the niche inside the niche, and growth would be good, I just don’t joining Meta is a good growing strategy
This is a very good comment. I’m basically repeating what you said but the thing about Lemmy is that there aren’t as many people as there are in Reddit, and most Reddit users are lurkers who don’t have the awareness that Lemmy exists as a viable alternative. So it’s natural that Lemmy users will refer to Reddit content, and content from large social medias for that matter, when talking about the topics relevant in their communities.
the things you like about Reddit didn't exist when Reddit was the new alternative to the enshittification of Digg. KBin is brand new and Lemmy was not much more than a tankie hub until recently.
KBin and Lemmy will build the communities you're looking for over time. The question is: do you want those communities to develop under the shadow of the same algorithms, bots, and content you see on corporate social media, or do you want something new?
I’ll take that a step further: the big default subs on Reddit were essentially worthless. Did anyone really use Reddit primarily for stuff like r/technology or r/news? You would have gotten almost the exact same, if not better, coverage of those two with a couple of tech Youtubers and AP News. Repeat for r/politics, r/worldnews, r/games… etc. Anything that was on there was mirrored elsewhere. If they had gotten Thanos snapped out of existence, it would have ultimately been a mild inconvenience at worst.
The real Library of Alexandria are the small subs. Those are the niches that need to be filled to make Lemmy a viable replacement, and we can’t get there without further growth.
Agreed, the main reason I use still use Facebook is that it is home to largest communities for by hobbies. The subreddits for those hobbies were practically graveyards and on lemmy it is no better.
Of course, this doesn’t mean it can’t change, but for some things other communities are better right now.
Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media
Do you?
It certainly doesn't mean "everything from everywhere can reside on the server I pay for". Nor does it mean "we can't vote them off the island if they're negatively impacting us".
It means exactly the opposite, in fact. It means we get to say "no" at whatever level we choose, and that includes at the server level.
If you don't like the choices the admins on your server make, find a new one, or start your own. That is the promise of federation.
Totally get your point. But I think this notion of I’m paying, so I will decide what you can do is not a good mindset. If you’ve started a general instance with tens of thousand of users, you have a responsibility, no one forced you to do this. And with no easy option to migrate accounts, yes this is authoritarian.
The foundation of free speech is that you cannot force someone to say something they do not want to. This is a lot more foundational than the “you can say what you want” aspect of free speech. You can’t force someone to agree with you, you can’t force someone to publish or say something in their name, you can’t force someone to host content on their website.
Similarly, you can’t force an owner of a Lemmy instance to host or say something they don’t want to. If an owner said “you know what, I don’t want to host this” or “I don’t want to federate with X” then you can disagree with them sure, but you can’t force them to say/do something they don’t want to.
Whether this is or isn’t authoritarian, the alternative is that someone can force a Lemmy owner to host things they don’t want in their server. Imagine if some really repugnant communities showed up on your instance and you couldn’t remove them. Now that really would be authoritarianism - it’s removing your freedom to choose what you say… Just because someone can say something, doesn’t mean you as an owner/individual have to listen to it, like it, agree with it, or host it.
The big free instances are running off of good will, they don’t owe you anything, they certainly don’t owe your view a voice unconditionally. If you don’t like it, especially with Lemmy, you can set up your own instance/club and say and not say what you like.
Did anyone talk about forcing instance owners or any other person to do or say something they don’t want?!
Sorry but I think you have not even read the post. I’m talking about all these negativity towards other instances from average users in here. If and instance owner decides to defederate of course I might disagree but there’s not much I can do about it, specially if they can present reasons.
If anyone can prove that some other Instance is harmful it’s just natural that it should be defederated (in most cases)
Again. My issue is talking nonsense about oh that company is trying to destroy us whilst in reality they have hundreds of millions of users and are gaining more each second and we’re sitting here circle jerking about our nice little community.
I say we should be open to new experiments. I am not saying defederation is bad, I am not saying instance owners should be forced to do anything
The general public does not understand federation. When Threads makes content that I have created via kbin.social visible on Threads, very many people are going to think that that content was created on Threads. And Meta then takes that content, aggregated with all the other non-Threads initiated fediverse content, and monetizes it. They are using "not their content" to enhance the desirability of their portal, and certainly placing ads in its vicinity. As with any instance, they can also curate that content to promote their chosen agenda, which is surely in part "increasing engagement."
We've seen how "increasing engagement" has been done by Meta and other companies already: ragebaiting and misinformation. While there is no way to completely prevent this, I want to avoid content that I have created from being used in that way. If there was a way for me to individually defederate from Threads, so that Threads could not see my content, I would turn that switch on in an instant. So far as I know, the only way for my content to be excluded from being viewed via Threads is for the instance my account is on to defederate. I'm not in any way asking for kbin.social to defed from Threads, just noting that that is currently the only functional way to accomplish the stated goal.
I do understand that there are already instances that have done that very thing, and I am certainly able to jump over and use one of those instead. I may do that at some point, but I am pleased with the interface at kbin.social, and developer of kbin's work. For the moment, I want to watch and see how things play out, becoming more informed before I make a decision about how I interact with the fediverse.
Thanks, I get your point and have the same concern. But again, simply defederating will not solve this (in most cases). We need to make a case good enough, so people would willingly join these instances and stop using threads and such. I’m all for freedom, and yes freedom comes with a cost, there might be some bad actors here and there but thinking for rational actors and censoring is not a solution.
... simply defederating will not solve this (in most cases).
Oh it would address that concern, but it's a very heavy-handed action. At present, I don't think there's enough reason for instances to defed from Threads, even when there are good reasons for me to want myself to be. That really plays into my not jumping over to some instance which has already taken that step; I would wonder about how such an instance was being shepherded in other ways.
Once there are proven and reliable mobile apps for lemmy and kbin and whatever, the barrier to entry for the general public will be much lower. But the general public also needs to know that there are ways to get to fediverse content outside of the Meta environment. You and I and those like us here now are still pretty early adopters.
You realize that defederating prevents you from seeing their content but not the other way around right? Meta will see your content regardless. So many people are confused about this
I have no problem with people making educated decisions or ask for change based on facts. Fully agree about quality over quantity as well. My issue is FUD, having no idea what you’re talking about and still trying to convince everyone of that is harmful. When people working day and night on these protocols say there are no privacy concerns and no one can show you ads etc. and yet someone with literally zero understanding of the matter claims otherwise.
I dunno. I just stumbled on a movement to push instance owners to defederate any instance that doesn’t defederate Threads.
This seems very much in the vein of dictatorialism / authoritarianism. It’s honestly just gross. This whole “you’re either with us or against us” tribalism is what has made social media so awful these last several years.
I think it’s more like the instances are countries, admins are governments, and defederation is embargo. Information and influence are the resources. Eventually, you’ll have instances that keep to themselves and others that throw their weight around regardless of any real world political alignment.
Not exactly. state actors and political party-sponsored troll farms have nurtured that tribalism and dialed it up for the past decade while the companies running the platforms stood by and raked in the cash because anger is engagement is money.
I don’t really agree with this article. The argument seems to rest on the idea that a representative democracy is a compromise on direct democracy. In reality, even though I have the ability to meaningfully participate in every election a direct democracy would entail, I have no desire to because I have other things I would rather spend my time doing.
Similarly, even if I have the ability to run my own instance (admittedly I do not, but many of us early adopters do), I do not want to. I’m happy to let other people do it as long as those people seem like broadly agree with my morals. I don’t need an close relationship, just a trustful one. This digital forum inherently has even better benefits than real life; if I realize I dislike my current instance, I have the option to move to another instance or create my own. In real life I can only move to another district or hope to vote out my current rep.
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