The fact that you can follow the president of the United States (@potus) from your Mastodon account instead of being forced to have an X or Threads account for it is a huge W in my book. Of course our team is fully available to help if they'd want to set up Mastodon on whitehouse.gov. I believe governments should not rely on 3rd party platforms to connect with their constituents.
@Gargron@potus If your instance is federated to #Threads, every time you make a post, you're essentially toiling Zuck's estate like a medieval serf. Zuck doesn't pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of #Meta.
Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis
(replaced X/Elon with Meta/Zuk)
@Gargron@potus i think every mastodon should block Meta related every instance for privacy concerns. Or at least give an option to block such domains easily
@Gargron That you can report transphobic, homophobic & other bigotry from threads on the fedi & threads will do nothing about it far outweighs the win the ability to follow POTUS gives us
@Gargron I‘ll wait for a social.gov instance that is native instead of promoting a one-way street that leads to Meta/Facebook. And I am happy that your software allows me to block threads.net. Please don’t change that :)
@Gargron It's a huge step. Congrats to you and the whole team for building a platform worthy of such an impact. The Fediverse continues to march forward.
@mjgardner I'm quite aware that I can switch servers, but this one has been good, I’ve supported them, and hope they'll reconsider this particular position.
@mjgardner I don't really understand why…maybe you can't "block" just the stream and allow users to follow individuals (which is all I would want to do).
@dnanian@eatyourglory The federated timeline on your #Mastodon server is the aggregate of all public messages sent or received by users on that server. It may be different on other Mastodon servers because those servers have different users who follow different accounts.
@mjgardner@eatyourglory So it's really "local +”, basically. It's not really "federated", because it's not a stream of the toots from the servers you federate with...only those followed by users.
@dnanian No, this is exactly what “federated” means. Multiple services exchange messages, but any single service only knows about the messages it sends and receives.
Server admins can also subscribe to relays that push content from other servers.
@mjgardner@eatyourglory I get that it's what Federated has been defined to mean. I'm saying it's not what a normal person would think it was doing...that's all.
@mjgardner When you need a long post explaining why things don't appear when searching (etc), you must recognize a "normal person" doesn't have to be someone who has used anything else at all. It's unexpected behavior.
When we all use a term like the “fediverse”, it implies an aggregation of separate servers coöperating and acting like a “universe” of content...and that search would find things in that universe.
Saying “that's not how it works" doesn't mean that's not how it should work.
@dnanian The lovely thing is that “right now” isn’t forever, even for Mastodon. (Though it can seem like it; even after eight years of https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34, only pinned posts are backfilled when a server first learns of an account.)
@dnanian As I understand it, those advocating a complete #Threads domain block take issue with the possibility that parent company #Meta may misuse incoming#fediverse content and metadata, not their outgoing traffic.
This is ironic because, apart from anonymized "likes,” Threads users who have opted in can’t receive federated messages yet.
I'm saying Threads could set up a server and then "misuse" the incoming content and metadata, train against it, whatever, and no one would necessarily ever know.
Preëmptively blocking before ill intent is shown seems more than a bit reactionary. Although then people would say that Meta has shown ill intent on other platforms, so… 🤷♂️
@dnanian As for the possibility of #Threads or anyone else setting up a separate #fediverse server to hoover up messages and metadata, it only works if there are messages addressed to inboxes on that server. I.e., they'd have to follow everyone. That's how #ActivityPub works.
@dnanian We’re looking into how we can protect users who don’t want to federate while allowing those who do. The solution will likely be to limit Threads, while enabling authorised fetch on the server so that user-level blocks will be more rigid. I hope to post more on this soon. @Gargron
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