The only drawback is that it will only start working after the first piece of content from threads.net has been shared on your instance - for now it returns a 404 not found.
Edit: Mileage may vary, depending on how Threads solves its fediverse integration.
I think there is a misunderstanding in the kbin community.
/d/ blocks a domain, A domain is not an instance.
But i'm not shure what /d/ blocks or not. As far as I know it's what's between the bracket's after a post ()
You're right that it's a bit trickier than I thought. It blocks the shared content: images and other content hosted at lemmy.world can be blocked from https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.world/ , but it will not include links to external sites, nor will it work for text posts. Blocking lemmynsfw.com worked fine for me, but that's of course because it's an image-heavy service.
Whether or not it will work for threads.net off the bat I guess then depends on how Threads interacts with the fediverse; whether it merely shares a link content stored locally, or whether it distributes the content in its entirety.
Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you’ll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.
Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.
Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.
When Thread finally enable federation, just unleash the Lemmy meme community there. We’ll see how fast they roll back the federation feature on their own after their feeds are getting flooded with beans.
Here is an example of a corpo dealing a blow to an open source project. The article covers an example of Microsoft and Google killing a competing open source project(s).
If they become so ubiquitous that all you see are Threads messages, all they have to do is start adding their own extensions to ActivityPub and degrade the experience of everyone who is not using their app.
What kinds of extensions should the typical activitypub user be worried about? I don't care if Meta adds payments or virtual avatars or whatever--if the core functionality of the Threads app is simple microblogging, it should be perfectly interoperable with that side of the fediverse.
The more likely effect IMO (if Meta holds to their word on enabling federation on their side) is that other large social media companies (e.g. reddit, twitter) will feel pressured to federate and that will make the fediverse better, not worse.
My account is on kbin.social but I'm working on getting kbin self hosted. When I do, I'll absolutely be federating with Threads whether or not kbin.social does.
A cool post pops up in your feed. You click it. You are met with an overlay that says “Sorry, this post isn’t compatible with your browser. Please log in to Threads.”
Embrace, they join the fediverse seemingly in good faith. Bringing their larger userbase to massively increase the size of the fediverse.
Extend, they add some features that are convenient when interacting with their base across the fediverse. But these conveniences require proprietary software integration.
Extinguish, once enough users and platforms are tied into the conveniences of extend, they use that to force compliance. Stricter and stricter rules on their proprietary software. Comply or die.
The fediverse won't be gone afterwards, but if it EEE works then we will end up very stifled.
Instances can defederate from meta at any point they choose, should it become necessary in the future. Until then, it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the “normies” are, as well as giving more visibility to non-meta instances and giving said normies a road to the less data-hungry parts of the network.
Plus, the more entwined threads is with the rest of the fediverse, the harder it’ll be for them to break off. Users will be following Mastodon accounts and posting in Lemmy communities and if Meta does something to break that, they’re the ones that’ll get the backlash, not the fediverse. We’ll just continue along as normal.
meta is not here to promote open networks. They will do more harm than good. If you want to learn more about how google achieved it with the XMPP you can read the story here https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html written by one of the core developers.
This is an interesting article, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame Google for the death of XMPP. Google were the largest consumers of XMPP at one point, sure, but Google was in no way (and never has been) the market leader in communications applications. Google talk came and went, Hangouts came and went and so on. The argument of “When google pulled the plug, XMPP users had to use something else to keep in touch with friends” is equally true of Google messenger users as well. I don’t know anyone that ever exclusively used a Google messenger app, now or then.
Google isn’t entirely innocent here, they definitely didn’t treat the protocol with the respect it deserved, but the development of XMPP was/is fraught with its own problems. I remember setting up an XMPP network for use in a small office as an internal chat tool, it was a nightmare of an experience. Different XMPP Clients had different levels of compatibility with different XMPP servers, many of the clients were just poor overall and the user-experience left a lot to be desired. All we wanted was a simple instant messenger for work, in the days before Slack and Teams. We ended up using OpenFire because it was developed in tandem with Spark, it was basic but worked well for our needs but any time I tried to adopt a different messenger, half the features didn’t work.
While I think I agree we shouldn 't just defederate them. This is for a user to block them. And if you tell users how they can block them, it will maybe take a bit of pressure away from admins to do it.
During the first wave of Twitter refugees , there was a lot of explaining about ignoring and blocking users. Which can never hurt IMHO. Certainly because it can decrease the load on the volunteers that run an instance
I’m all for federating with them. But give the user the ability to defederate their posts/comments based off their settings. I would rather my information not be supplied to any company owned by Facebook, that’s just me.
That’s completely fine, but just because a knob can be lockpick doesn’t mean you leave it unlocked.
Granted I have very little experience with activity pub, but I would expect that it should be very possible to have something similar to how defederating Works where if you don’t allow it to be sent to a specific Community it just won’t communicate.
edit: Looking back at it though, it wouldn’t stop them from just opening a secondary instance nobody knows about, having it set to private and then just running it as an info collector I don’t think.
The idea is that at first threads.net will seem "normal", like all the other fediverses
Then they start adding features that either break against other servers, or straight up aren't supported, making threads.net seem more enticing just because all the neat features aren't on the other sites.
Think how Internet Explorer killed Netscape with all the Page Load errors caused by ActiveX, yet everyone wanted ActiveX sites.
Once they've walked through the path of least resistance and grabbed the bulk of the traffic, they just defederate from everyone.
Yep - best option is to defederate them well before they gain traction & start creating problem by not contributing back to the protocol in a way that benefits everyone.
I think after the community got burned by Microsoft & then google we’re finally learning.
Exactly. Those who think it's a great idea are being incredibly gullible. They will turn the Fediverse into a mass of bigots, ads and misinformation. Like they did with Facebook.
Couldn’t any instance or app do this already? Like #peertube does videos in a way that isn’t necessarily fully federated with #mastodon. We get partial functionality everywhere and some places will have some extra things. If it is popular enough, then add it to the standard and let everyone who wants it add the functionality.
You’re acting like there’s only two situations: The entire Fediverse defederates with them, or the entire Fediverse federates with them. That’s not the case.
I, personally, do not want to interact with anyone using Threads, because Meta has a proven history of poor moderation and of manipulating the narrative for political gain on Facebook and I see no reason to think they won’t do the same here. I am not the only one who holds this opinion. Those of us who feel this way can use instances that defederate with them, and have our way.
If you want to interact with them, you can maintain an account on an instance that does federate with them. You do not need to have a Threads account, nor does anyone else.
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
It isn’t the people. It’s just if I already decided not to use Facebook or twitter. Why would I get back into bed with the devil on an experimental product?
Yeah, not a fan of the ominous shadow threads™️ casts. I don’t trust them not to flood the fediverse with assorted toxic garbage to push people back towards their walled garden platforms.
The fediverse offers something radical - a new shot at genuine self determination and a socialised, self-governing internet. That shit spells B-A-D N-E-W-S for incumbent platforms (imo) and they’re bad actors in general; they wouldn’t think twice about smothering anything that threatens their short/long term profits. Who’se going to stop them?
Might be a little bit overly risk concious but goddamn. If I were them, I’d be trying to kill alternative ecosystems before they grew - especially if mine (metas) is both trash to use, and be used by.
If Meta is running a fediverse instance, they're doing it for money. Sure, I might be able to block Meta-sourced content from reaching me, but that doesn't prevent me-sourced content from reaching Meta - where they can monetize it.
Show me how to do that, and I'm on it like white on rice.
@Nougat It doesn’t prevent them now, as they can just easily crawl all of your posts on here because you are posting on a public instance. Defederating from them does nothing to make your public content private.
@ninboy No, it doesn't make my public content private, but it would display my content alongside everything else that a threads user would see, which would make Meta's product more attractive to threads users. Increased threads userbase means increased ad revenue. Speaking of which, I'm now thinking about how content I created, not on a Meta-operated site, would be (as federation by default intends) displayed next to Meta advertising on their instance. My ability to prevent me-sourced content from reaching Meta's instance prevents me-sourced content from displaying next to advertisement I don't want it to be displayed next to.
@Nougat that makes sense, thanks for elaborating on your points. I guess as soon as we put any content out there we can’t prevent screenshots going viral on any context.
@ninboy Sure, you're not going to close that "analog hole," but in a case like that, the audience is aware that the content isn't from the site they're on. Me- (and you- and everyone-)sourced content appearing on a Meta site as though it was Meta content would carry some things to have real concerns about.
Of course, this is all really new(ish), so it's possible that a future internet audience will have a better awareness of how federation works, and bring that understanding with them while they browse. On the other hand, have you seen people?
Tangent: You tagged me in your original reply, which made me wonder why, and if I should do the same thing. Checking your username, I see you're on from mastodon.social, and here I am via kbin.social. I think this is my first real interplatform conversation like that, and I think it's really cool.
This is exactly my concern, I don't want my online activity to become another revenue stream for meta. If they can put ads next to our posts then we're back to working for free for the billionaires.
If I understand correctly, the concern is not for the users on Meta’s “Threads”. It’s the fact that the content you create on Mastodon or whatever fediverse part with which Meta federated would eventually reach users on Threads, and thus “you” (on the fediverse corner outside of Meta) are indirectly monetized.
So I’m on Threads (occupational hazard, I have Instagram for work) and it’s a surreal experience. It’s like if everyone you know on Facebook and Twitter joined you on a muted Tumblr overlay. Someone’s already @'d Zuck to ask for a “home feed that’s just your follows.” So… like Mastodon.
Use Threads to preach the benefits of Mastadon, Lemmy, and the Fediverse in general. Spread the good word that if you don’t want to be bombarded by ads, manipulated by unscrupulous algorithms, and have your data jealously horded to be sold to who knows then get off Threads and enter the cool kids zone!
It’s not widely shared because the actual facts of that story don’t help the “Facebook will kill activity pub” narrative.
Before Google Talk and Facebook Messenger adopted XMPP it was an extremely niche messaging protocol only used by nerds. After Google Talk and Facebook Messenger dropped XMPP it went back to being a niche messaging protocol used only by nerds.
The standing of XMPP was, if anything, better off after it was abandoned by Google Talk and Facebook Messenger than before those platforms adopted it.
So then for somebody trying to scare monger about Meta, this story doesn’t help. It hurts that narrative, and that’s why people panicing about Threads aren’t talking about XMPP.
I feel like avoiding a corporate trap for instant growth for the sake of protecting more sustainable long term growth is still in essence a focus on growth.
I agree with the decision to try and dodge this poison pill, but I disagree on the ideology that we shouldn’t try and get as many people on board the fediverse as possible. I want federated social media to have revolutionary power, and you can’t have power without leverage.
I’m very new here but already feel invested in it’s goals and success. We don’t need a ton of users or to beat Reddit, etc, we need to be independent and free. Having a slice of the internet not controlled by capitalism is worth fighting for.
I believe things like Threads.net and the Fediverse are fundamentally at odds with each other because the Fediverse is meant to be an alternative not a replacement. No one should be hoping Reddit and others fail because if they do and only the Fediverse was left i believe it would be doomed to become like them.
It’s actually entirely possible that the vast majority of the team there is pro-fediverse and Meta “wants” it to succeed. But the thing about corporations is they’re fluid entities and could turn anti-fediverse overnight for no reason other than it’s the best financial move now.
The only thing we have to ask ourselves is, at any point in the future will the best possible financial move for Meta be to begin sabotaging the fediverse? It almost seems like a certainty, doesn’t it?
Meta is also a threat to the privacy of fediverse users
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
If they do both-ways federation (I’ve heard rumors of it being one-way only) it should theoretically be both Lemmy and Mastodon, but it will work better with Mastodon because they’re both for the same purpose (i.e. Twitter-like apps).
I don’t get 2 and 3. How am I creating a text document with a name and saving it as a different name? Am I saving that document in a folder? Am I changing its name to the one in 3? Could anyone please explain?
Edit: is threads.net supposed to be a line in that document? If so, then never mind my question. Thanks
If you create it by opening your text editor, the file won’t have a name until you save it (eg. New document.txt). Threads.net goes inside the new text file as the contents, and is not the filename. Then you save your new text document as the .csv filename, changing the extension from .txt to .csv.
i’ll join the voices saying this is bad for the fediverse, and bad for users in general. there are LOTS of normie users who are joining threads who will be shut off from learning about all the cool other servers if everyone blocks them. this will mean users who want to interact with them need to sign up on Threads, which is what we don’t want.
what we want is that users on Threads see other servers, learn that they’re better, and migrate over.
don’t block Threads, show them how much better we are.
No offense, but I have plenty of ways of interacting with my ‘normie’ friends that don’t involve whoring out my personal data. If someone insists they want to hang out with you but only when they’re hosting a Pampered Chef party, they can fuck right off.
The entire fucking point of fediverse is that corporations can be disconnected when they try to come knocking. You’re literally arguing against the reason the platform exists to begin with.
this is not the point of the fedeverse, this is you’re own angry brain trying to force the general public to agree with you without wanting to explain to them the whole situation.
They are debate shit when you throw them out in average conversation. Do you say this shit to your nan or a random person in the street? Fuck no you don’t because you’d get lamped and called an absolute freak for it. Like I said - Be more normal.
ActivityPub was built for the express purpose of decentralising the net after the corporations had successfully enclosed and monopolised on what was originally a commons. It is literally called a commons-based protocol. Guess what’s anti-commons? Corporate monopoly seekers.
It would be real fucking nice if people that have been here for a handful of days didn’t suddenly try to wing-it as authorities on a topic they’re barely familiar with. I welcome you, I really do, I welcome you to a space in which we are actively harming corporations. I do not welcome this reddit behaviour and I do not welcome this attitude where you think you need to pretend an ill-informed opinion gained in just days is everything. It’s ok to say “I do not know enough about this to have an informed opinion”. It’s tiring.
Anyway, gonna block you for 24 hours now so we disengage from this shit and entirely unproductive back and forth. Later maybe.
do you just not know what logical fallacies are? do you not understand that just because something is decentralized doesn’t mean it was designed to defeat centralized social media sites?
Is it worth arguing with someone. Claiming to have been here for 3 years on a week-old account? He cries about “Reddit-brained” while possibly account hopping like a redditor.
Honestly, after literally over 30 years on the internet, I can safely say that this idea of bringing everyone together into one space, that will make both the space and the people better, does not work. Even back in the 90s it affected the signal to noise ratio badly. Now there are significant sets of bad actors, shitposting/meta and general noisy ignorance and hate that can easily, easily drown out any decent signal. It’s like a permanent Eternal September.
Think of this like the subject of tolerance - typically criticised that as a philosophy, in that it would thus tolerate the very things that would undermine and destroy it. Rather, it is not a philosophy, but a social contract - if you don’t use tolerance yourself, others are not bound to be tolerant of you. Of course, I’m not talking about being tolerant/intolerant here, but using the quality of engagement and participation in a community, as a barometer for whether that user should be engaged in that community.
Some barriers to entry are self-selection for appropriate users, and therefore a good thing - whether through obscurity, level of engagement, education or whatever. Without these, everything gets overrun and crushed. We haven’t yet found a good self-moderating system for online communities that provides everyone with a positive and fulfilling experience.
Threads can be Threads. The fediverse can be the fediverse. No-one is forced to choose just one, and trying to force them together is going to crush the fediverse. Lemmy has about 20,000 active users. Threads got 30 million signups in 24 hours.
Do you honestly think only the positive, friendly people would hop over? The entire fediverse will be overrun by crazy political conspiracy theories and hostile homophobic/transphobic/anti abortion stuff in no time.
Meta deliberately provokes that kind of stuff since rage baiting is good for engagement. They’ve cultivated and minmaxed that kind of behaviour for years. I’m sure it exists in small pockets here already, but nowhere near the same level.
999/1000 users won’t do any research on how ‘this new fb thing’ actually works beyond ‘where can I sign up’. All they want is a stream of content which the greater fediverse provides free of charge. It is going to be the whole Reddit situation with one more step. Portray yourself as the shining beacon of love and liberty, slowly start creeping in more monetisation and then build a wall once you get big enough. Meta and the overwhelming majority of the user base don’t care who is morally ‘better’. That’s not how capitalism works.
Do you write screeds about the woke mob and women with blue hair too?
It’s not normal, you’re completely right about that. It doesn’t matter. Everything does not have to look like the corporate internet and frankly advocating that everything on the internet wear a suit and tie to be “taken serious” (your words) is something you should re-examine. Spaces with different cultures are good and having a kneejerk reactionary intolerance to them is bad.
Do you also think that workers shouldn’t have tattoos?
Real question. Because up until a few years ago that was part of being “professional”.
The definition of professional is just a social construction. One created by and perpetuated by the bourgeoisie through their corporations. You can make the decision to discard it, and by doing so you can embrace a vast multicultural way of presenting things. Is some of that going to be strange and foreign to people outside of each culture? Yes it is. Is there anything wrong with that? Nah.
If I was on trial for murder, or something equally as serious, I’d want my attorney to look like an attorney.
I don’t care how good of an attorney they are, if they don’t look like one, I don’t think I’d hire them because it’s not what I think that matters, it’s what the jury or the judge thinks.
It’s the same for a pledge online. If you have little hearts flowing over your text and shitty design, it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what everyone else thinks.
Great, but this isn’t that. This is the fediverse where the existence of unique subcultures are promoted and celebrated.
The only thing happening here is that redditors who are coming over to fedi for the first time are having a culture shock when they’re exposed to anything outside of “thanks for the gold gentlesir”, “rip my inbox” and nasally snorting about some logical fallacy in a basic conversation. Which is funny because the rest of the internet has always viewed reddit culture as a freakish attempt to act like being Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang is a good thing. Bazinga!
Not everything being specifically like this. But I’ll unironically say yes to everything being different and interesting. The problem here however is that you’re just railing against this because it’s something you dislike, while failing to acknowledge just how cringe parts of the culture that you do like are. I’m trying to highlight that not because there’s anything wrong with liking it (you do you!) but because you don’t exist in a space without weird culture yourself, you just don’t see it because you’ve completely normalised it, just like these subculture bubbles also have for the stuff that you immediately think is weird.
Sadly you’re now doing the thing where you don’t actually listen to what I’m saying and instead talk past me instead of to me. I haven’t called you a sanitised corpo drone.
I know this is going to sound condescending and rude, and I apologize in advance, but this is sort of like having a conversation with a much younger version of myself. When I was younger, I couldn’t get past the fact that people judged a book by it’s cover, or that you couldn’t see past my blue hair and NIN shirt… but the truth is perception is your reality. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to ‘dress’ the part. It might be ‘cringe’ to you, and it was to me when I was younger. I’m not saying this site needs to be whitewashed in corporate branding but it could be cleaned up in a way to make it merely passable. Floating hearts that cascade down the page? Why? Whats the message that has anything to do with pledging to defederate against facebook? The branding seems all over the place.
There is a reason that Change.org doesn’t look like this site. There is a reason that if you were hungry and saw two food trucks parked right next to each other, one with a professional appearance and the other that was a rusty van with the words ‘Tacos’ spray painted on the side, you’d probably ere on the side of caution and approach the one that wouldn’t look like it was going to give you food poisoning. Perhaps you would miss out on the best tacos in the world, sure… there is that chance… but there is also a chance that you dodged a bullet and played it safe and lived another day.
I stand by the fact that I believe this linked website is horrible if your goal is to get people to sign up to defederate against facebook.
I’m probably older than you if you’re remotely close to reddit’s average. You’re resorting to condescension because it’s an easy fallback. I won’t age myself but middle-aged is very much a descriptor I have to reckon with.
Floating hearts that cascade down the page? Why? Whats the message that has anything to do with pledging to defederate against facebook? The branding seems all over the place.
The point is that it is for the fediverse, and when you have actually spent some time on it outside of the couple weeks you’ve spent on lemmy, you’ll realise that it’s completely filled with weird subculture stuff like it. If you were familiar with fediverse more your response would be “yeah that makes sense”. The early adopters and communities on it before the reddit drama are pretty much the same people that put chiptunes in the last keygen you used.
Fair enough. The lemmy-verse is weird and magical, the subculture is unique. Nothing like it’s ever existed before.
Good luck on pushing that narrative on all the normies who are going to show in up in droves once reddit finally implodes. I don’t think everyone will get on board, but i’ve been wrong before… but again, judging from the fact that the largest lemmy instance isn’t on that pledge list, doesn’t bode well for your vision.
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