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 Yeah let's make this US-centric too sighs. And now with an extra dose of transphobes and nazis Threads refuses to moderate, and that would imply an automatic defederation if it was literally any other instance.
@kkeller@Gargron@potus Already did the first, and gonna try to get the second one ready by this weekend (although I already set myself several deadlines and failed them :/) still leaving the biggest and more or less "official" instance federating with the place that welcomes fascists and transphobes is a very bad thing for the entire fedi, a double standard and a sign that their admins don't really care for the safety of their users.
@cygnathreadbare@Gargron@potus perhaps it is bad for mastodon.social. It is not bad for the entire Fedi, where the whole point is to federate with servers you want to federate.
@cygnathreadbare@kkeller@Gargron@potus
If you did defederare why are you still commenting on too that talks about (@potus )? Honest question why the evangelization? If you are convinced and doing actions that reflect that why blasting around?
@Twitter_expat@kkeller@Gargron@potus@potus am I not allowed to voice my concerns to the lead developer and admin of the biggest instance, where some of my mutuals are, and who will be unsafe because of this decision?
@cygnathreadbare@kkeller@Gargron@potus@potus
The majority of the people here on the #fediverse ran away from one person making all the decisions. I don’t know if you are aware of that. Not the admin of the biggest instance, nor you nor anyone “with concerns”.
You are free to voice whatever you want as you are doing but decisions like that won’t come from you nor any single person.
@Twitter_expat@kkeller@Gargron@potus@potus I'm just asking for mastodon.social to comply with its own server rules the same way it did in other cases with the same unmoderated content. They are free to change them, of course, just admit that some transphobia and fascism is acceptable, and let the rest of the fediverse decide what to do with that.
...except he is not on the fediverse. He's on threads.net, which is a walled garden you can't interact with, and the content the president's PR flacks will post there is hardly unique. I mean, I could set up a script that reposts the whitehiuse.gov RSS feed to mastodon with a #potus tag. Would that mean the president is "on" mastodon?
@Gargron ich weiß threads ist für viele hier das personifizierte böse aber ich fands schon ziemlich cool dass ich jetzt dem account des amerikanischen präsidenten auf mastodon folgen kann
nice
@simonharper@potus@ivory Threads users have to opt-in to federation on their side, but anyone who has opted-in, yes, it's just like following any Mastodon user.
@Gargron Unless Threads server is blocked on the instance you're on. I get people not wanting to federate with Threads server-wide but users should be able to follow whoever they want on their personal timeline especially gov accounts...
@kkeller@Gargron That's easier said than done especially in a situation like Threads.
a) This can lead to more centralization if too many people have to migrate to a few instances willing to give them the ability to follow people on Threads.
b) Also, there's other advantages to use an instance close to my interest e.g Open Source and contribute to keep this smaller instances alive to avoid a)
So I don't think migrating is a great long term solution to the problem of who someone can follow.
@Gargron No, I can’t follow that account. I have to log in and create an account, says Threads. Eh… No thank you.
I am not sure I ever planned on following Biden anyway - BUT his team might need to know that you can help them. Otherwise they might just stay on Threads if it seems easier.
If the accounts that can see Bidens posts are limited to Treads, that means he could just have stayed on IG lol
@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
@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.
@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 :)
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