Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
Personally, it’s the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.
I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.
The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.
Facebook has for 20 years proven time and time again that it cannot be trusted and it is not beneficial for Internet users.
Yet still dumbarse cry over how mean we are to not want them here.
Get this through your fucking head people, Facebook does not have your best intentions at heart. You exist in this space purely for them to exploit. And they will find a way to do so here because that is their whole existence as a company.
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!
I’m also in favor of remaining defeated, but I certainly understand it’s a big risk. EEE is a real threat. On the other hand, something like Threads is the fast track to mainstreaming the Fediverse and really advancing us away from dependence on big tech
Big risk, big reward. The deciding factor for me is when on the fence I’d rather be inclusive. Creating a big fight against something I’m a bit skeptical of just isn’t worth it.
With you 100%. For me, there are a handful of people who have fled to Threads from twitler and post exclusively there now. If I am able to follow those specific accounts from my Mastodon account without having to signup with Threads/Meta, I will.
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
It’s not about us embracing them, it’s about them embracing the protocol, which they can do whether we stay federated or not.
The argument against defederation is that it tells newcomers that the defederated instance is an island and they’re better off joining the place where they can talk to their friends. Meta can more easily extend if we’re not around to explain why extending is a bad thing, and if we’re not around to advocate for people to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one
Here is what it actually means
<span style="color:#323232;">Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
</span>
I think it’s naive to imagine that anything we say or do will influence Meta’s behavior or strategy in any way. But I do see your point that when an instance defederates from Threads, it makes an island of itself, not of Threads.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
We are all here because we don’t want to be a part of a corporate controlled social platform. Threads theoretically making it more difficult to communicate with their users - something we can’t do at all today - is not going to suddenly change our minds.
If your friends are on Threads now and you’re on Activity Pub then that problem already exists. If they start seeing all sorts of cool content - without any ads - coming from “that Lemmy thing” then yes absolutely a good number will switch. Not all, because some people are lazy, or don’t care, or fearful of different technology, but that’s not going to change just because Threads is federated.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
The difference is the stage at which they “advocate” for it.
People here are advocating for it now before Facebook has a chance to “embrace” us.
Facebook would only “advocate” for it after they’ve “embraced” us and started to “extend” ActivityPub with proprietary features that potentially caused issues with Lemmy users.
With the former, Lemmy continues on its own, growing naturally. With the latter, Lemmy users lose contact with communities they’ve become a part of and may be forced to move to Threads to continue interacting with their communities. That harms Lemmy’s active userbase. Additionally, because of how big Threads is, it’d naturally have the largest communities, so other Lemmy users would start using them instead of communities on other instances. That means those communities would shrink and may even die off entirely. When Facebook cuts off ActivityPub support, that’ll leave us with several small or abandoned communities. So we’d end up with a smaller userbase and fewer active communities.
They are different because most users weren't aware of XMPP. They weren't making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.
When google started removing XMPP support, users weren't aware and didn't care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don't use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just “it’s busted, fix it”. I’d love to contribute actual code, because I’d like to think I’m a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.
The super cool thing is that you're more than welcome to start your own instance where they don't block it. Or move to an existing one. Because you know, the entire point is that instance admins are allowed to run their instance how they see fit.
Correct, but that doesn't change who has final say over it. You're more than free to change instances if you no longer agree with how your current instance is being run.
Yes but being able to technically do something despite it negatively affecting the wider community doesn’t magically mean people shouldn’t express their opinions, and of you’re not saying people shouldn’t then your post is entirely pointless
I can easily imagine the future where “good” instances will then stop federating with the ones that don’t have threads blocked, all thanks to these lists.
I’m pretty sure this has already happened in the past, I swear there was a “Bad instances” list that someone was passing around, which someone else then disputed that the list was bad due to there not being valid reasons for why an instance was marked “bad” - but people had taken the list as 100% fact and blocked said instances.
That is the double-edged sword of the Fediverse, the freedom to choose who you allow and don’t allow in regards to federation. There’s always going to be the “cliques” so to speak where if you upset (for lack of a better word) the wrong people, the size of that instance can claim that you’re bad, and if other instances take their word at face value without verifying this then all of a sudden you can’t communicate with other instances/people (ie, if you get defederated by lemmy.world or mastodon.social - then good luck). Obviously, the good part about how the Fediverse works is the power for each instance admin to make their own determinations of who they want to federate with, but this is the “bad” side of it which is further amplified by the fact that there are always going to be instances that hold a very larger position of power. In a way, fracturing of the Fediverse is a bit inevitable because of this. I suspect what you say will happen (as I’ve already seen this mentioned).
It is what it is, I’m not saying whether that double-edged nature is good or bad, because at the end of the day that determination comes down to every person who chooses to participate, and is a decision they have to make on their own volition.
It's not a choice between those two, and allowing Mark Zuckerberg in the door doesn't gain us relevance. We've already been slowly growing on our own accord and we've finally started to cross the threshold to where there's enough people here posting enough stuff that it's not a ghost town anymore. Sure I do still run out of content on any given day when I'm looking at my phone on the bus and on my work breaks but it's usable enough that I don't need the corporations. The only thing that threads has to offer us is a large pre-existing user base and there's nothing else. Once we get enough people even that doesn't matter
I’m mean, I’m loving it too. My interest are well catered here, but most of my friends see it as a ghost town when they try it, because they are open source tech enthusiasts with a penchant for left wing politics. Like this is my niche and I love it, but also I have to get on other platforms if I want to actually talk to anyone outside the choir.
the total content per day's fine but some of the more niche interests outside of what us fucking nerds like aren't here yet. we can change that but we'd have
If you just want a hassle-free way to view as much content as possible, there are instances that are federated with pretty much everyone - just have to do a little research. If you want to guarantee keeping post history AND have absolute control over what you can see, you’re gonna have to put in the work to make your own instance.
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
I’ve done it and it’s not a whole lot harder than that. The additional steps are:
Install dependencies - exact commands are provided in the instructions for Debian-based systems
Create a more complex web server configuration file - for which a template is provided
Set up systemd services to start it at boot - templates are provided
It is harder than managed hosting where you might only need to create a database user in a web control panel and upload files for PHPBB, but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.
Doesn’t it require a whole mess of Docker instances and some kind of orchestrator to host? Or is it easier to stand up on a single server now? I haven’t looked into it in a year or so.
but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.
FWIW, I recall when elestio announced that they were offering managed hosting for kbin, and that they already did managed hosting of lemmy instances, and and I’m sure that there is managed hosting for at least lemmy available elsewhere.
Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.
The usual MO of buying the competitors isn’t posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish
Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we’ll be right back at the corporate social media we’re trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it’s profitable
is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse
How?
I’ve seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don’t agree with its analysis. It wasn’t easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.
There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I’m sure Meta would like us to join their service, I’m not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.
Exactly. Any analysis of “embrace extend extinguish” WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?
You aren’t wrong. I’m not here to defend Google or Meta. But those remembering that Google killed XMPP are only remembering what they were told. Relevance "killed” XMPP. Google certainly wasn’t it’s white knight. But more than anything, the XMPP working groups gamble of pursuing standardization didn’t result in mass adoption. When development slowed as it had to, to achieve standardization. Other services like Skype, discord, etc. All flourished and bloomed. Leaving XMPP largely irrelevant. It’s still exists to this day however. And I’m logged into it this very moment. I’ve been logged in to an XMPP server of one sort or another nearly 24/7 365 for the last 20 years.
the same can be argued about the fediverse. the approximate number is 1.5 million of monthly active users, which is just an ant compared to Meta’s.
So yeah, one could argue that it’s pretty much the same situation in terms of numbers if not worse (I don’t know the numbers but I’d bet that Meta has more users than Google talk ever had)
Basically every single invocation of “embrace, extend and extinguish” is a borderline fallacy that depends on an oversimplified world view.
XMPP/Jabber is even “funnier” because instant messaging as a whole is basically dead in favor of SMS and phone apps. The closest we get on that front is imessage and even that is mostly a US obsession.
Basically every “Oh mah gawdz, EEE is coming for us” article comes from a place of mass ignorance, at best.
As for Threads? I suspect that will eat Mastodon’s lunch. Because it already is. People love giving Facebook even more information and already have their favorite usernames from instagram. Whereas they will never stop bitching about how hard it is to sign up for Mastodon.
And… that is fine. Mastodon is not twitter. It is better. A lot better.
That said? I wouldn’t mind having access to Threads content. And I think there is a lot of room to use Matsodon/federation as a way for advertisers to take their power back, as it were, by controlling their own instances and being able to immediately cut off The Emerald Apartheid when he starts talking about The Jews again. But, if I ever do see a significant benefit to this, I can migrate to an instance that federates or even start my own. Rather than insisting that the ones I have accounts on do what I want.
I’d argue the phone apps are instant messaging and I’m a little surprised none of the previously-dominant PC-based IM apps made the transition successfully. Most of the ones currently popular do have web or native PC options though.
I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction. Ideally, we’ll be able to offer a more compelling pitch than just “not corporate”.
I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction.
I keep seeing people say things like this, but it’s just naive. Meta isn’t spending billions of dollars just to give their captive audience an offramp.
I’m not sure what Meta’s goal is with adding federation to Threads. Some options include:
Preempting government scrutiny for monopolistic practices
Gaining a competitive advantage against Xitter/Bluesky/etc…
Giving Threads users access to more people/content
As for why I think the flow of users is likely to be away from Threads:
People who already actively use Mastodon and the like tend to be fairly technically sophisticated and anti-corporate. Not many of those will switch to a Meta product when they can reach the same audience without it.
Most people who joined Threads got there via Instagram. Those sorts of mainstream users mostly haven’t been exposed to decentralized, non-corporate social media. The added exposure of seeing it from Threads is more marketing than these open source projects could ever hope to buy.
Regardless of how you classify them, nobody was ever going to figure out how to sideload a jabber client onto their flip phones or iphone 1 or blackberries.
And that is kind of the thing. Maybe Google got a larger market share of the IM market (I assume AIM was still dominant in the US and ICQ in the rest of the world) by using XMPP but better. But the market got wiped out by SMS and imessage and now is mostly shared between (depending on your country) whatsapp, line, and the imessage. … And I still use Hangouts.
Even if XMPP had been dominant on PC (which is not at all what EEE is about but…), it would not have survived as people shifted away from sitting at a computer and typing and moved toward stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and using their thumbs on a phone screen.
You must have been pretty young back then or ignorant. It was trivial to find a public XMPP server in 2004 and there were dozens of bridges that connected ICQ/IRC/AIM/MSN/Yahoo without the need of multi-clients which were popular at the time. Sounds pretty thriving to me, but please tell me again how Meta and Google are gonna give you a pony this time
I was nearly 20 years younger than I am now and was definitely ignorant of free, public XMPP service providers, which is kind of the point. If someone tech-savvy enough to be running Linux on a laptop in 2004 and liked the idea of XMPP tried and failed to get started with it, what hope was there of attracting a mainstream audience? You could argue I didn’t try hard enough, and you’d be right in a tautological sense. I did later use third-party XMPP clients for Google Chat.
I don’t expect a Pony from Meta. Meta is a face-eating leopard and I expect it to try to eat my face. If blocking their users from seeing the pictures of birds I share on Mastodon prevents that, please tell me how it does. This isn’t a rhetorical question; I self-host and can block, or not block whatever I want.
I’ve yet to see a convincing argument in favor of preemptive defederation or an explanation of what “Embrace Extend Extinguish” means in this particular scenario. There seems to be a lot of thinking that defederating “punishes” or handicaps Meta in some small way, which from my understanding is just not how it works at all.
I guess the preemptive block helps make the block easier for admins rather than ‘trying to do it’ once the service is embedded. Fact is Lemmy is doing ok without it so removing it isn’t going to make Lemmy worse than it was yesterday.
I don’t use threads so I don’t really see any personal benefit to blocking it, so I am a bit biased
I’m almost 50 myself. I’m logged in to XMPP right now. I’ve used it consistently since the early 2000. 20ish years minimum. There was never a thriving ecosystem of XMPP servers. There was a lot of choice, but nothing with a big name that would appeal to the average consumer. No jabber.social or jabber.world. And no critical mass of users. The transports were ultimately a frustrating gimmick. That Microsoft and AOL constantly broke. Leaving them unreliable and undesirable to recommend others to use.
When Google rolled out Google chat based on jabber/XMPP there was a lot of hopium going around that they’d be that big name to bring critical mass. Surprise! Hindsight says no. They “defederated” their servers. The jabber/XMPP development group themselves decided to persue standardization. Which largely meant an end to the active development of the service. Standards move much slower. Imperceptibly so. With Google out, the XMPP group pursuing standardization, no “official” servers, and the advent of services like Skype discord etc. The buzz and momentum behind XMPP imploded on it’s own. Stymied by no one. Suffocated by it all.
No one killed XMPP. It simply stopped being relevant to most people.
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
My friend… your instance has defederated from several other large instances already. If you were on a lemm.ee account then I could take your argument seriously. It’s like the US admonishing Venezuela for going oil hunting, China suggesting religious persecution is unacceptable, or Russia shouting about gay rights.
But you decided to weigh in on the situation… I suppose I’ve already told you which instance you’re best suited for. Basically the only criterion anyone looks at for a home instance is who they federate with. Past that, your experience is largely identical. Just federation and admins. Click “instances” to see federation.
Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like. Forcing this on the instance level is just nonsense, and exactly the sort of behavior most of us wanted to escape from. If I wanted my instance owner to just decide all of this random nonsense for me, I’d just go back to reddit. I’m glad my instance is leaving it up to me.
if you were to focus this on just Lemmy itself as opposed to the wider fedi (“Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like” implies that’s the case) you already have nothing to worry about as you encountering a threads user here will be even slimmer than encountering a mastodon user.
threads is primarily targeting the microblog/personal side of fedi. the incentives and privacy expectations are quite different compared to this side of fedi
You can block the instance, but the individual users can still be seen from that instance. You would still have to block each individual user, and that’s ridiculous.
edit: fyi, i’m discussing lemmy and how defederation here works. not sure how it works on mastodon.
If that’s true, that’s definitely something that needs to be addressed. I am all in favor of users having the choice to block instances and their users, and will likely even block Threads myself. This whole shaming campaign against instances though is childish, ineffective, and against the underlying principles of federation. What’s even the point if people are just going to start name and shaming every instance owner making a decision they don’t like?
And for fuck’s sake, I understand the core idea of embrace, extend, extinguish, don’t link me the article (not you, gregorum, just random readers of this comment). I’m just not going to use that as a kneejerk way to shut down any action taken by a company I don’t like.
So it blocks all posts from that instance but not all users? What is the difference as I still see none of their users posts, which is the point isn’t it? I’m genuinely not understanding.
You can still see their comments, unlike when your instance defederates from their instance. For some people, the ability to completely block all interaction with an instance is important.
If you want threads, join threads or a threads friendly instance, but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
That seems like an odd position to take, given the information available. The only number here – the instance count involved – has a majority not blocking Threads.
I think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an “instance” with a long history of poor or apathetic moderation vs. creating an off-boarding system for Meta users to escape the corporatocracy.
Personally I vote for the latter, and I’m glad most of the larger instances are in the same boat.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch with friends, family and news and Meta goes down in flames but maybe that’s the optimist in me.
If you think Meta will allow the Threads algorithm to show anything from the fediverse you are unbelievably naive. And that’s if content from the fediverse even makes a blip on a platform with 100x the size.
Meta doesn’t federate with the goal of giving Threads users an out. They federate because it’s the most efficient way to scrape fediverse instances and build profiles on fediverse users.
Meta has reached saturation with their existing services so they are now branching into any possible extra source of data they can. They’ll take anything, from fediverse federation to Whatsapp emails. All your data is welcome to them.
They don’t need to show you anything in the algorithm.
As for data, that’s complete non-sense. What data do you think they’re getting access to that they can’t already get? If the goal was to trove data they would have done it quietly and not announced it so that everyone could block them before they even had a chance.
They’re federating because of the Digital Markets Act.
Users should have the power to defederate in addition to admins.
They do.
Not everyone wants the same thing or has the same idea of what constitutes ‘harmful’ instances.
That’s why I didn’t say “everyone”. I said “people who join those instances”. If you don’t want that, you can choose our migrate to a different one. Or even create your own.
Yes, this is why it’s important to take individual control away from the user; to push an agenda.
You’re correct, of course, but “agendas” are not inherently negative.
Honestly I could see this being a way of trapping people by giving them less incentive to leave. If people like us leave and you have to leave the corporate hellscapes to see our posts that gives people a reason to leave too but if they can enjoy it from the "comfort" of Mark Zuckerberg's domain they have no reason to leave. That also makes them captive to met us since they can pull the plug in Federation anytime they like or mess with it in a thousand different ways. Convincing people to sign up for another account may be non-trivial but it's ultimately the best way forward
Fully agree. I feel like helping facebook keep their users stuck on their platform or worse Twitter feels counterproductive in making the world more free.
Moderators will basically be doing free work for meta. If a Lemmy.ml post blows up on threads then the ml mods will have to deal with the influx from threads users and basically moderate threads for free.
There’s another reason to defederate. Most mods are volunteers. Lemmy currently really doesn’t have the manpower to handle something with a userbase as large as Threads, and Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with moderation, so it’s unlikely they’d do anything about any issues in a timely manner.
Edit: kids -> mods, busy -> really; autocorrect was being stupid again.
I experience this a lot on Reddit where /r/Infiniti gets cross posted to a massive sub and now two mods are dealing with 500,000+ users. I can’t imagine how much more annoying it would be if I was also paying to host the community.
When this was happening I was a huge proponent of Google, and Google Talk, recommending everyone I knew to switch to it, because Jabber with the help of Google will remove monopoly from AIM, MSN, YIM etc.
Google fucking killed the network and I contributed to it (maybe not in a significant way, but I still feel very bitter about it)
GTalk was easy to install, no need to create an account (most already had Gmail), had incompatible features (like making a voice call), later was integrated into the Gmail web interface, so you could use it anywhere. So many Jabber users did switch to it.
Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving. Since most Jabber users had Gmail account many switches to continue talking to their peers. Stubborn people, like me, were left with rooster full of people online that none responded to you.
At that time Google was seemed like a white knight, fixing things and making them better.
Facebook today is known for being extremely shitty and destroying any competition, and there are still so many naive people.
Gmail went public on February 7, 2007, the last release of GTalk was May 14, 2013. Anyway by the time GMail went public, everyone and their dog had a Gmail invite.
I’d attribute it to malice, but looking at how badly Google has repeatedly mismanaged its chat offerings I’m going with Hanlon’s razor here. They did claim spam was an issue as well.
I guess I was lucky enough to avoid spam, but I believe you.
As for them doing it unintentionally, I dunno… They did very similar thing to Usenet as well (although in that case spam had a major part.
I think Google’s way of operating is to try new things and see what sticks. Once it gets popular figure out if it can generate revenue and if it doesn’t, quickly shut it down.
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy. They made a browser because everything they make is web-based and wanted to control that. They add non-standard features to the browser because they want to do stuff that isn’t doable as part of the standard, because the web is a document engine that has been perverted into a general-purpose application platform.
This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy.
I am confident that Google does have a high-level strategy regarding areas that they move into. That doesn’t mean that everything that they do that creates compatibility issues is an embrace, extend, and extinguish attempt, though.
Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
See, this is the more reasonable concern. Moderating a fediverse instance is hard, and the flood of posts coming from Threads might be a bad problem. That’s a case where I understand the need to defederate. But on the other hand, that doesn’t feel like a solution that needs to be done proactively - defederating from Threads if/when Threads users become a problem seems perfectly reasonable.
The federated timeline is ready FULL of shit I don’t care about, have no idea what it is, or can’t read it because it’s another language due to people not being able to set their language correctly.
The only time I’m going to see threads content is if it is boosted by someone I follow (which I want), contains a hashtag I follow (which I want), or in the federated timeline I already don’t use.
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
I get that you, like me, don’t like capitalist companies but what you’re saying is based on nothing.
They can’t steal content from here that’s literally not possible, this comment here I’m writing now can not be stolen by anyone ever - and not just in the piracy isn’t stealing way but in the it’s public domain so you already all own it too.
I use stuff from meta all the time and I didn’t steal it, all the vital open source code they’ve created and which is a fundermental part of stable diffusion and other open source tools is benefiting the community - are they only doing this to kill something?
I understand the logic that successful capitalist company must be evil because that’s how capitalism works but it’s also a lot more complex, open source isn’t just a wishywashy dream for cheapskate nerds like meit’s a powerful and positive force that can benefit everyone even companies like meta without them needing to kill anyone or anything. Participation isn’t just it’s own moral reward it’s actually got a lot of other benefits too.
Meta might just want to federate because open source is good.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
Brilliant, all the propaganda about “join us, the fediverse is like email” gone to shit. More like “it’s like email, but if you email ends with @hotmail.com we will block your messages”.
I agree with the sentiment, not with these actions, instead of giving meta users a way to break free, we built a wall between us and them, who have way more content, because we’re afraid of Zuck stealing our data, which is public and he already done.
It’s really interesting to see the two sides of the coin. People are extremely passionate on both sides. I didn’t think people on the side of “in favor of federating with Threads” were just as passionate.
But we are making the decision together. Look at all the conversations we’re having. Your confusing “not having a choice” with “learning to except majority opinion”
Trust me, the people in charge of the instances aren’t defederating because of their personal opinion. They are listening to us and making choices on what the majority feels.
I didn’t say “not have a choice” though. I said people are likely tired of others making the choice for them, whether it be minority or majority. Especially when individual choice is possible.
Been enjoying Lemmy, so I wanted to see how Threads is. “It’s just going to seem like another instance, right?”
It’s Facebook with another skin. The posts are pretty much all the same sort of posts memes take the piss out of. Literally feels just like Facebook… Going to stick to Lemmy, myself.
Meta wants to kill the Fediverse from inside while it’s not a big rival. That’s the only reason Meta want’s to “become friend” to the Fediverse. The same that GAFAM has been doing for decades (if you can’t buy it, destroy it).
It’s certainly possible that Meta has a plan to destroy the fediverse with Threads, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that they’re just doing this because they can. If their plan was to take over the fediverse from within, and that plan hinged on instances not defederating out of caution, then it’s off to a poor start. I might just be totally naive but this feels more like them testing the water by opening their doors to the fediverse - I don’t know if they know what happens next.
It’s probably to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, which I believe requires services that act as gatekeepers to have some form of interoperability, more than anything really.
Threads is an US-American, text-focused social media platform from the Meta Group (Facebook).
Threads supports the ActivityPub protocol and thus can be integrated into the Fediverse, allowing data portability, follower portability, and interoperability with all social media platforms that also support it, including Mastodon.
Many Mastodon instances aren’t happy with a company like Meta entering the Fediverse and thus block Threads servers.
It uses a slightly different configuration than Mastodon but otherwise it behaves exactly the same. You can read and reply to Lemmy posts from Mastodon.
In the same way, you can block requests from certain servers (this is called defederating) so their users can’t reply, follow or spam you.
You’re on lemmy.world and I’m on programming.dev, but we can still see each others posts and interact with each other because lemmy.world and programming.dev are federated.
So, I’m connected to a fancy computer called a server, and so are you, but we’re connected to different servers. The reason we can still talk is that despite being on different servers run by different people, those people have made it so that the servers can share what I say with you, and what you say with me.
Federation is simply a fancy term for an agreement to share something. In this case, it’s our text posts.
There are other kinds of federation, but that’s not important to Lemmy. Since you asked specifically about Lemmy, I’ll leave it at that.
You are on Lemmy.world. I am on Lemmy.ca. These are distinct websites but they use the same underlying service. Federating means that the two websites share their info - this let’s us talk despite being on different websites.
Maybe use some critical thinking before acting smug, smart guy. 41% of instances is not 41% of users. Lemmy.world could have 90% of users, and if this 1 instance out of 1000 haven’t blocked threads, the 41% of instances blocking might only host 4% of users.
I agree, but I’ve changed my stance to a wait and see approach. This is what we think will happen, will probably happen, and what I’m interested most of all in, is how Lemmy.world responds once things come to pass. I’ve got agency here to switch to another perfectly good instance that doesn’t federate with Threads, so if Lemmy.world allows social toxicity to prosper…I’ll just leave. The Fediverse rocks.
These “wait and see” dingdongs have somehow not learned from decades/centuries of history about how “hearing people out” in situations like this only leads to negative outcomes.
We’ll let in a little Aunt Fash, Liberty Mom, candidate for Alaklabraska school board, as a treat
No offense but lemmy has its own brain rot and echo chambers. Not being exposed to the majority of the public reinforces a lot of this. You’re just exchanging one kind of circlejerk for another.
I wanted to recommend infosec.pub where I’m at, they have only defederated from extremist & cp crap. Overall not even 10, however lemmygrad is included (which I consider a blessing), that would probably be the only controversial one.
you are literally in such instance, we have only blocked cp or extremists so far. But you can easily switch to any other instance ;D its the magic of lemmy. If you wait until 0.19 then you can even export all your settings, blocks and subscriptions
Add comment