Doesn’t Lemmy let users block instances? So no issue here.
The problem seems to be with Mastodon (and possibly others like Pixelfed, Bookwyrm, etc), which I think is controlled at instance level. Fortunately, the admin of the Mastodon instance I’m on has defederated Threads.
With about a thousand new daily sign ups to mastodon it feels like it is going back to its rapid degrowth that it has been on before the Twitter debacle.
The upsides are apparent for the platform, but there’s no denying that change will be inevitable for all of us, whether some instances choose to defederate or not.
Shouldn’t exist? Why? Ofcourse it exists and it’s not even a problem. People just are different and have different interests. It’s up to the individual to choose what they want to pay attention to and what not.
I have to guess you are too young to know the lengthy and detailed history of the anti-consumer and anti-privacy activities of Facebook/Meta over the past decades. (And if you aren’t, you haven’t been paying attention)
There is no corporate entity in the tech space that I can think of that has so thoroughly proven time and time again that they will bend or break every rule if it makes more dollars for them. (I say this despite the existence of Microsoft.) Their users are literally nothing but statistics and a data/income stream for them. It’s not (mostly) about who uses Threads, it’s about Meta. If the fediverse can be fucked over and enshittified (and it most certainly can), Meta will be the one to figure out how, and do it.
There is NO upside to federation with Threads. Zero. The only entity it benefits is Meta.
There’s a reason you can subscribe to commmunities you’re interested in and block the ones you’re not. It’s so that you can curate your feed to reflect your personal interests which vary between individuals.
When it comes to what you’re talking about; you’re free to block threads.net instance yourself or you can choose an instance that does it for you. They’re getting access to your your lemmy content either way.
They’re getting access to your your lemmy content either way.
That’s not an argument for cooperating with them.
That’s not at all what I’m talking about.
But it’s what matters, and it is what the person you originally replied to was talking about. (Edit- it’s not what they were talking about, I thought you’d replied to a different comment. The rest of my point stands.)
Whether I personally see Threads stuff does not relate to whether Meta can and will create an inflection point that distorts the fediverse into something different than it is today. Nothing in their history points in any direction OTHER than - we’ll all be making another exodus at some point, to get away from them and companies like them.
Edit: I say again - literally no upside to federating with Threads for anyone except Meta.
You’re free to not federate with them but due to the open nature of the fediverse there’s nothing you can do to stop them from federating with you. What ever you post they have access to.
Still. This has nothing to do with what I was talking about.
In any case, I’m doubtful we have common ground in any area here to try building on, and it feels like we have been talking past each other this entire time, so this will be my final participation in this interaction with you. Good day.
There is NO upside to federation with Threads. Zero.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I don’t think it will affect Lemmy at all, since it’s a different type of posts. But in terms of Mastodon, it means a whole lot more content for Mastodon users, and a whole lot more people to follow. And also means that people can move to Mastodon while still having the audience that Threads provides.
Of course if you think that the downsides are worse than the upsides, then that doesn’t really matter. But don’t say there are NO upsides.
Those are valid points but I very much do think the downsides are (enormously) bigger than the upsides. Time will tell. Feels a bit like advocating that we sell our soul to the Devil instead of waiting for the fediverse to grow organically.
They can have a corporate silo. They can use an open standard. But they cannot do anything good for the fediverse. The best thing for the fediverse is to let them exist as a walled garden (and we can put up the wall).
There are about 10 million users on the free fediverse. That number has grown steadily and sustainably. There are 160 million threads users. They were instantaneously leveraged onto the platform by a billion dollar corporation (possibly in violation of antitrust laws).
If we federate, Threads won’t become a part of the fediverse; threads will become the fediverse.
I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
Your intentions mean exactly nothing when you’re being paid by Zuckerberg.
It also doesn’t actually matter what you intend, because the problem isn’t just what the platform can do, it’s about Meta being in this space and trying to stake a claim in it. We came here to escape you. Go the fuck away.
I’m not a fan of Meta and I don’t want to join Threads. But there may be some people over there I would like to follow. At least on Mastodon, we can block any instance we choose to manually. I hate when instances make the decision for me.
Defederation should be a last resort when there are so many options here for people to tailor their own feeds.
Their intentions don’t matter. Meta’s only intention is make line go up. They will either consume or extinguish the fediverse with the rest of the corps. I’ll be leaving lemmy.world the minute thread federates. I’m just gonna be a lazy ass until then.
I already did. But what will happen to the fediverse will mirror what happened to email when corporations came in. So eventually you will have nowhere to run.
I thought I understood lemmy.world’s position several months ago was to not federate with Threads. This was the vocal position of many instances. Has this changed?
I… Don’t think lemmy.world said it. I think they took more of a “wait and see” approach, in contrast to most other instances. Please someone correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t get these people. They knowingly chose to work for Meta after everything that company’s done. You don’t get to pretend you’re the good guy anymore. They’re by far the most evil big tech company on the planet and that says a fucking lot when you’re up against MS, Oracle, Google and Apple
At a very desperate time in my life I worked for Comcast. Everytime something bad happens to me now I know I deserve it and that it is karma coming back to me.
People want the fediverse to grow, so FB entering it is a good thing no? Otherwise realistically the fediverse will likely stagnate and always just take up a tiny bit of space.
The more people involved the better. Sometimes I feel this group just wants to shoot themselves in the foot.
Even if this is somehow true (no clue who you federated with, man), we’re talking a community abt 80 times the size of the fediverse whose owner does not care and will not do anything other than dump its worst upon us.
Even if they aren’t planning EEE, they might just be trying to rid of the fediverse by filling it with junk.
There’s not much one can really do about that. You can block their instance or join one that does it for you but that still doesn’t stop them from joining the fediverse or seeing the content here. Being an open platform means that it’s also open for the actors you don’t like.
With hate groups and extremists I was refering to the anti-right-wing, anti-capitalist, pro-socialism/communism, pro-anarchy, anti-AI, anti-facebook/twitter/google etc. sentiment that’s alive an well all over our frontpages here.
Outside of the odd troll here and there, fascism isn’t a huge problem (at least on lemmy). Exploding heads died in like a week and you haven’t really seen any popular resurgence of far right politics here since. Can’t speak for the rest of the fediverse but lemmy seems to have carved out a semi-comfy niche for itself
I haven’t seen far rights here myself, but it’s a self selecting bias.
I’ve definitely come across more far lefts here than any other platform I’ve used which are equally as bad as far right imo.
I’m always concerned if there is only one strong group representation like that though. I’d rather have no extremists obviously, but if we have one side at least allow the other, otherwise that sort of crap starts seeping elsewhere.
But we’re talking our current problem but instead expanded into a community 80 times the size of the fediverse. That’s a little more hate than we’ve got now, no?
So what do you want exactly? Do you want the fediverse to remain small and irrelevant forever? Or do you want it to grow and become the dominant space with more bad actors but more useful actors as well?
Because you can’t have both, and you will always have more extremists and shitty views with larger groups. I for one think the fediverse is a better implementation of the social tech for pack of a better word, and would prefer its implementation over the closed wall implementation of non fediverse applications.
But honestly, the fediverse is tiny and I find it’s not a suitable replacement for anything at the moment. It does need to have more people joining for it to be a complete replacement.
As to whether Meta will extinguish it or not I don’t know, but at least in the short term it could help. I don’t think it’s reasonable to pre-emptively shoot your foot off because you might get gangrene - I’d rather wait to see it and then decide.
The fediverse just needs time to grow. It’s still a very new thing. Growth will take a long time, but the fediverse needs to be an alternative to corporate social media, not integrated with and dependent on it.
It will be more difficult and damaging to defederate later when Meta starts throwing its weight around, because people will become accustomed to a much larger community. The fact that threads has many more users will give Meta disproportionate power over the fediverse, but unlike other open source/free projects, their only goals are to profit and gain more influence over society.
It’s best to never federate with them, even if that means losing growth opportunities in the short term.
The idea that they will destroy it by just… Being a bigger instance? Because they can influence development? Isn’t this shit developed by a tanky? A self-proclaimed stalinist? Why the hell would they capitulate to a megacorp? I’m more worried about the actual developers ruining this shit than Meta and Threads.
yes, by being a massively bigger instance their algorithm will have a huge impact on the feed algorithms on the fediverse side. If they show a post in their algorithm in threads, it will get massively more engagement due to just being shown to a larger user base
The only “solution” is granular federation - the fediverse side could treat them differently, say by having their posts and comments count less when building a feed… But that’s easier said than done. Do they build a “threads ranking” feature into the core, or do they they give admins the tools to build specific configurations for federation?
It’s definitely not present in Lemmy, and I don’t believe Mastodon has it either. And on that topic…
they have granular control over their own federation. They’re a monolith where the fediverse isn’t - if they want to sprinkle in fediverse content, it’s much easier for them. If they want to publish only their most controversial content to the fediverse, they can. They can do it at any time telling no one
For example, there was a post claiming they’re blocking toots referencing pixel fed. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they easily could. And in doing so, they effectively derank those posts in the fediverse (see point 1)
they could EEE conventionally, by extending the activity pub standard to serve their needs, or by making the fediverse reliant on their content then pulling away
There’s a lot of ways they can leverage their size as a weapon. They’re not another instance, they’re a private monolith running their own code… And they have a terrible track record
I mostly agree. The one thing I will say in favour of defederation is hate content. Meta has incredibly lax moderation. People can literally say “this person deserves to be killed”, or even “I would absolutely murder this person if I came across them” and Meta will be like “yeah we understand this may be disappointing to you, but we’re gonna allow that to stay” if you report it.
I saw that here, too. Thought about reporting when I saw the sidebar didn’t even have a rule against it (forgot which community though - my app doesn’t present that in an obvious way)
There’s definitely users who will do that here. There are on any platform open to sign-ups by the general public. But my experience has been that it’s very likely to get removed if mods or admins are made aware. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a positive response on Meta.
Even if you aren’t against federating with threads on principle part of the challenge is going to be able to keep up with moderating their entire user base en-masse and being able to afford the cost of federating content from so many users at once.
It’s a burden I doubt a lot of smaller instances can handle.
You make a very good point there. That’s probably the best reasoning to be against federating with them I’ve seen. It also brings up duplication of content. If they have so many users, would it be possible that a smaller instance getting content from them could literally fill up all their storage space, assuming it’s not a gigantic data center but something self-hosted? Text may not be problematic, but images from Instagram can be massive. I suppose if your instance was that small you’d already be picking and choosing what to federate with, though.
they could develop new features but intentionally implement them in a way that they are not compatible with other services. they could put all the other instances they federate with on rolling blackouts so that it seems like they are down when in fact it's just them cutting the connection. doing just these two things with purpose could make it look like Facebook has the most advanced and stable instance. in addition, as you mentioned, it would also have the biggest populace. there would be pressure to abandon other instances to join that instance to stay in touch.
The people making the most noise about it don’t seem like they’re pressured one bit. Also, walling it off through defederation won’t stop any of what you propose may happen, anyway.
Why would that happen anyway? A lot of people already came here from bigger sites, like reddit for example. If we don’t federate, then why would people who are already here be pushed by something that isn’t there?
yeah if threads integration means that i could interact with my friends threads posts with mastodon account i don’t mind it. it’s not like they are gonna use mastodon. maybe there might be a chance that people on threads might visit mastodon once they are fed up with spams on threads.
and break compatibility so that neither of the users won’t be able to share posts properly. yes i am aware of their shenanigans. i am gonna use mastodon even if they make it a sinking ship. plus i hope people realise it doesn’t have porn/spam bots like threads do.
the very fact that they don’t allow instagram users to view threads post without making them open a threads account tells me how much they are gonna try to push threads by any means, even if it affects other platforms like mastodon.
Genuinely surprised to see this comment so high up, with so many more upvotes than downvotes. I personally have no problem with Threads, and some of the higher-profile celebrities, comics and artists I want to follow are already there. That I can add other fediverse accounts to my feed, or add Threads accounts into my Mastadon/Lemmy apps, it’s a win.
I’m not oblivious to why folks don’t like it and want no part of Zuckerberg’s companies. I still prefer open platforms to closed ones, and Zuck seems to understand that too. I personally don’t buy the EEE fears. This ain’t Microsoft.
I was thinking about joining one that’s federated with them. I’d get a look at the normal side of the internet, what’s going on there without having to join I forgot what’s it called.
They’re the options if you want to still check it out and maybe interact with it, which is what I wanted to do. Of course not having anything to do with them gives them even less.
In don’t think we should federate either but most of that data is public anyway. Everything on mastodon and lemmy can be scraped without being federated.
There is just no way that they will not get more data if you are involved directly with them.
If for nothing else we know they have had meetings with server owners across lemmy and mastodon and also meta have historically provided resources in the hopes of capturing a market. It is not that farfetched that they would have to provide funding when they federate with servers because their userbase is so huge and that could be detrimental to the freedom associated with lemmy.
You can find servers based on Threads defederation through this site. Since you don’t want anything to do with Threads, I suggest filtering by ‘blocked’ and ‘Fedipact’ I’m not sure what the difference is between the two is though, so I’d appreciate if someone would explain.
That’s a really good site too, though I suggest using fedipact.veganism.social if you’re specifically interested in which instances are defederated from Threads. Some instances have hidden blocklists and won’t show if they have defederated Threads if you search through defed.xyz.
For example: You can only see that retro.pizza and masto.ai have hidden blocklists if you look through defed.xyz. However, if you look on fedipact.veganism.social, you can see that retro.pizza has joined the Fedipact against Threads, while masto.ai is fully federated with them.
You create a new account on a new instance and then you export your subscriptions and settings from your old Lemmy server to your new ones, you lose your comment history but that doesn’t really matter on Lemmy like your post history does on Masto
When you say export, is there a tool for that for, like, mass exporting your subs? Or do I have to manually search each one and sub again?
I ask because I’ve been meaning to switch to my alt, but I made a point of subbing to as many communities as possible to make Lemmy more fun to use for me, and good lord, it’s a lot to do.
I don’t really care about that, but given that defederation with particular instances is a good way to get a feel for what content and instance allows/disallows, it’d be nice to be able to filter instances on lemmyverse.net and lemmy.fediverse.observer and kbin.fediverse.observer by whether an instance is defederated or not with some list of other instances. Like, maybe you want an instance that federates with instances providing pornography (lemmynsfw.com) but not extremist political positions (hexbear.net). Right now, it’s a very manual process to check the federation list on many instances.
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