Yeah, the problem here as I see it is that just the same as Twitter, this social media service is still owned by a single owner corporation who is running the service for a profit and they will eventually sell user data or bastardize the service. Ive been on the internet for 30 years, social media and websites come and go and so does their popularity.
Which raises another point, how are the bills being paid for with any of these services, including lemmy? TAANSTAFL.
Generally disagree. If you want the Fediverse to become a large open standard, if not the largest, then this is going to just be a matter of course. Companies will seek to commodify all their offerings, whether they use open standards or not. Many exist that commodify on top of open-source software and open standards. The important part is to ACHEIVE the open standard to begin with, and I think it’s short-sighted to pre-emptively block something that could be a strong item down that path, and before it might show itself to be more harmful towards that goal.
It can always be blocked later, situation-depending.
But here’s the thing: do you really want the Facebook crowd in the Fediverse? You’ve probably been to any facebook comment section of any facebook publication, and it’s cancer. One thing I liked about reddit before its fuckups, is that it was not facebook (or twitter for that matter).
So, screw facebook. I’m quite okay with instances blocking that noise.
Well done. I hope more of the fediverse follows suit. Facebook has a long way to go to restore trust – if that’s possible at all. They’re nowhere near that threshold yet.
Personally I don’t think there is anything they could do gain trust short of undoing their data harvesting. Which would destroy them as a business entity/platform.
Agreed. And I just saw lemmy.world’s post explaining why they aren’t going to defederate until Threads messes up. Personally, I think that’s granting Facebook far too much benefit of doubt. I’d much rather belong to an instance that takes a wait-and-see approach before allowing Facebook to connect to its communities.
There’s no way to build, let alone restore, trust with that kind of business model. All behavior manipulation companies need to die. Their mere existence is unethical.
Oh shit you’re right. I could have sworn I saw they used their own protocol “similar to activitypub” but looking at their site it sure as shit is activitypub. Thanks
You shouldn’t be. These companies are not here to play along, but dominate. Just like reddit played along with 3rd party developers until it didn’t need them anymore, so will Meta use the openess of the protocol to ultimately undermine it.
They are, but we should figure out how to beat them at their game. They’ll probably manage to get custody of the remainder of the decent people from twitter, being able at an individual level to follow a single person over there without having to hear from all the people over there would be a better solution.
Right now we lack the proper tools to keep them at bay without massive moderation on our end so blocking them is best, but we can eventually work out a middleground.
I don’t know. I would like to subscribe to someone on Threads from Mastodon (since both are Twitter alternatives), if they don’t have Mastodon account (which let’s be honest they probably don’t). Zuck does not get any of my data (besides what’s available publicly anyway). If Threads decides to go full EEE, I’ll stop getting updates from people on Threads, same as I don’t get updates from people on IG right now. I think proliferation of ActivityPub protocol would be the greatest advantage.
Moreover, I think we should follow the email architecture - I might use i.e. Proton Mail, but it does not prevent me from sending emails to Gmail, which I think is a bad provider, who collects a lot of user data. In fact if Proton Mail forbade sending email to Gmail I would be really displeased about that.
The goal is to allow people to choose where they want to go and ActivityPub is what can help with that, unlike blocking Threads.
As I understand it, and I probably don’t, you can subscribe, you just won’t see anything from threads except what’s re-shared, or you’ve subscribed to.
You may see things from other instances your instance has federated with.
i ONLY want to conter your argument with email and activityhub: on email people choose to send stuff to a very limited amount of people except maybe newsletter and scammers. with threads, which should have already multiple times of osers compared to the fediverse, will flood the content to /all. Of course there are cool people but i think the entire fediverse culture will be blown away by threads in an instand. And with their weird moderation (especcially small) servers here will have large problems trying to moderate it
but by email there is no mass broadcasting to the public so it does not need to be moderated
Email is not only 1:(small N). Maillists do exist and and are used to facilitate discussions between a large amount of people via email. They are also often public so anonymous readers and search indexers can use them.
/all is certainly an interesting thing - default Active sorting calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time. If Threads are connected they would dominate /all. But there can certainly be adjustments, we can create a new sorting style, and make it default. For example:
Posts are deprioritized based on MAU or some similar metric. The larger the MAU, the lower the post is ranked assuming the same engagement. If the post got 100 upvotes on an instance with 1000 users, it’s probably a much more interesting post, than the post that got 100 upvotes on an instance with 100 000 000 users.
Posts are (de)prioritized based on instance source. For example setting Threads to -1000 would effectively remove it, setting Threads to -50 would allow you to see only super active posts. On the other hand if we want to see more content from less populated instance we might set it (i.e. german lemmy feddit.de) to the score of 100.
Instances can provide a limited number or percentage of /all - i.e. after we got 10 posts from Threads, stop getting posts from this instance.
I couldn’t agree more. Racing to block Threads when it’s completely unclear if Threads will even actually ever federate and what the implications of them federating will even be seems incredibly short sighted. Imagine how much innovation would have been lost on the internet if web server admins raced to block Google Chrome from accessing their content because they have some personal beef with Google.
Offensive language won’t be tolerated here? According to who? You clearly don’t understand federation if you can’t grasp that you can be part of two different instances that aren’t federated. What you’re doing is trying to impose your will on other people who want nothing to do with it. Calling that fucking stupid is the most polite way I can frame that attitude.
Yea agree, not a fan of “Meta”. But I think limiting who can use federated networks kinda goes against the federated nature of such networks. What’s next, we’ll have a centralized blacklist of lemmy instances.
This is mentioned in pretty much every thread but I haven’t seen anyone apply the theory to the fediverse. The second step is for threads to create features that lure people over from Lemmy (or activitypub). So are the people saying eee by extension saying they’ll move to threads from their current server because threads have a bigger and better development team?
they’ll move to threads because threads will be incompatible with the rest of fediverse (thread essentially defederate themself), and if most content is being posted in threads, they’ll move there (since they can’t access it from other instance)
this has happened before, such as
MSN messenger breaking compatibility with AOL IM (MSN wins since it got 95% market share)
MS Office doing obfuscation to their office file data to prevent FOSS editor like LibreOffice from rendering it correctly
I’ve been saying exactly this since the news dropped. I fully understand people being worried, but I haven’t seen a concrete pathway to damage that doesn’t involve meta-hating users moving over to a meta product.
Past performance is indicative of future behavior. Simple as that. Meta has proven that at every single turn they will do what’s profitable, not what’s best for the user.
The problem is when bad actors enter the situation. Meta has no interest in being a part of the community, they want to take it over and commercialize it.
Still no. If you feel ostracized because your bigoted viewpoint isn’t welcome, then you should take a hint and stfu instead of crying about it. I don’t feel bad about not welcoming hatred and for treating it the same way it treats others. Your dog whistles aren’t welcome either.
So text-based Instagram with 70 million regular users and some brand accounts is hatred? Serious reality distortion field you have there. Well, Lemmy.World has not blocked Threads at the moment, so I’m alright and actually not crying at all. It is people like you who want to police what other people look at.
Maybe you should lobby to block Trump’s Truth Social which is an Mastodon instance full of actual racists.
Meta’s decision to work towards federation does need to be taken with a lot of salt. Corporations using open platforms or open source to make their money has always resulted in power imbalances that, left unchecked, may become impossible to solve without concessions from said corporation, or else [X] thing just gets hung out to dry.
You have to hope the people running that company understand that these problems exist, and actively work against ruining everything for everyone else that relies on it.
The nice part about federated networks is that if you disagree, you can just move instances. Nobody is bound to the will of the admins like with traditional centralized social media
Is there yet a way to fully migrate a lemmy account like a Mastodon one? Otherwise, “just move instances” isn’t great advice, it’s still having to start over. We need that ability imo or we’re losing a major benefit of being federated.
being open to everything is not better though, and being open to meta specifically will threaten and lower the quality of the place. lemmy.world should defederate with threads
You’re in no position dictate what an instance should or should not do. If you don’t like what an instance is doing, you’re welcome to join another one or start your own, that’s the beauty of decentralization.
As users, we have every right to express an opinion and to ask the admin to consider taking an action. As you say, if you don’t like it, join another instance.
I think one can be “open” to a fault. If you cling to principles and morale for the sake of it and without exception or nuance, you set yourself up to be exploited or worse. Many things, entities, interactions in life contradict each other and it is important to set boundaries and make decisions for yourself. Because life and people are multi-faceted and aren’t nice and clean and perfect, which blind, naive idealism fails to take into account. The keyword here is nuance.
Many big tech companies run on greed and inhumane, unhealthy, invasive practices for the sake of pure, blind, unsustainable growth and profit. And I would argue that this is one of the driving factors of the fediverse even existing. If you don’t clearly separate yourself from these practices, then we all can simply use Reddit. But people create, maintain and use alternatives for a reason. Not taking a stance or action against what you want to escape from, even openly inviting it for the sake of being open and on a morally high horse makes simply no sense.
Idealists won’t like to hear this, but it’s the same with peace. Look at Ukraine to have a recent example. Most people want to live and prosper in peace. That is natural and desirable. But there are always some, who profit from war and who try to destroy things, disregarding the fate of others. Or political systems that want to expand territory and exploit / convert whole populations. When the desire for peace is only one-sided, and all attempts of talking or peaceful incentives fail, you can either protect yourself forcefully or be stolen from, raped, tortured, deported or murdered, watching your homeland be turned into ashes and those you love suffer for decades from the consequences.
In the same way, when the desire for openness, humane fairness without exploitation of users is one-sided, you have to draw a line and take a clear stance to defend that “safe space” you seeked in the first place from entities and principles that contradict it. And we have decades of clear evidence how big tech, especially Facebook / Meta operates, they are known to invade user privacy, strive for one-sided power, try everything to avoid or circumvent legal regulation. They have more than earned to be excluded from a place created to offer something better, healthier. And it’s not like we hurt feelings here, it’s a corporation, a virtual, soulless entity.
I can only speak for myself and do what I deem is good for me, so I’ll migrate to Lemmy.ml, because at least they have the balls to stay true to a concept, even if it involves difficult or ugly decisions. And even if blocking Meta won’t fully “protect” the fediverse, at least it is a clear message and limits the amount of power they can achieve and the amount of damage they can do here.
My many years of experience on the Internet has taught me that once the unwashed hordes of the public show up and start slinging shit around, that’s when your website dies if you like having intelligent discourse on it.
The article was a nice read. I’m surprised that there is either no awareness or discussion in the privacy conscious tech crowd over here on the lack of privacy from anonymous bad actors. Everyone seems to only care about Meta, who are bad, but the most they will do with our data is advertise to us. The other bad actors enabled by ActivityPub can actually doxx, redistribute, save our posts, messages.
I agree that the fediverse isn’t currently super privacy-friendly, although I think there’s also an inherent limitation to privacy on a social network since it’s all about sharing things. I view privacy as having the control over WHAT I share, with WHOM I share it with, and WHEN, and I get that moreso with the fediverse IMO. I choose what information I share, what I follow, etc. The major difference to me is that Lemmy isn’t tracking me elsewhere around the web like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc do. The big sites also save our posts and messages even when they claim not to, because things that are deleted are very rarely ever truly deleted.
I would appreciate the ability to send no-knowledge encrypted DMs here on Lemmy. But using PGP is not difficult, will guarantee only the recipient can read the message, and is a skill that everyone who uses the internet should be able to do anyways.
Meta has the right to join the fediverse, but instance admins have the right to defederate from them. If a user doesn’t like that, they can make an account with another instance. How does it go against “fediverse principles?”
Disagree. It should be up to the individual USERS to have the freedom to block whatever user or instance that they want. Honestly the whole point of the fediverse is just freedom and not being at the whim of some god figure overlord
It would be great if that was the way it worked, unfortunately right now it’s granular to the instance level, not user level. Not sure it’s even possible to get it down to user level unless every user runs their own instance which is unlikely to ever happen. The data has to live somewhere, so we need instances or instance -equivalent to host the data. Maybe if they get it down to where hosting your own instance is super easy one-click ordeal. Then each user would be truly in control.
or you know, just don’t use instances that have admins that are powerhungry, authoritarian, censorious dicks. (If you’re looking for a good mastodon instance like that, I’d recommend checking out qoto.org)
I don’t really get this. I see people were worried about Threads app/web app permissions (which I signed up and no permissions were granted immediately beyond notifications). Regardless, wouldn’t staying federated with threads.net allow everyone to interact with them all from the more reasonably permissioned app of their choice, like Jerboa?
It’s more like just in case of legal issue. Big corporations tends to declare more than what they actually use in “Data Safety/Privacy” just to say they consent in court. It doesn’t mean they collect or use all the things they declared.
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