For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
It still is. I think more folks percentage-wise are OK now than were then. Had the argument just yesterday. I’m not seeing nearly enough pitchforks, and it worries me.
Oh no, it was everywhere, and I got into some decent arguments with those lovely people who ask you to show them how it’s going to have any effect on the fediverse at all, complete with citations.
People make more complex decisions when they have multiple roles:
As admin of pixelfed.social, dansup may have decided it is best for that community not to federate with Threads, at least at first
As the lead developer of the Pixelfed software, he probably doesn’t like anyone censoring discussion of his software
As an individual with an interest in social media, he has a Threads account and is participating in conversations there; he would probably like to be able to talk about the projects he’s working on
Migrate away from instances that embrace Meta to those that do not. Choose an instance that aligns with you.
Or in the extreme case, if you’re the first who can’t find such an instance and you’re technically inclined, there’s your room for a new instance. It’s how the fediverse works and partly why Meta is so intent on destroying it.
The tooltip for fedipact says: “Agreed to block all communications (their blocklist is private)”
To me that says, they’ve agreed but it’s not confirmed that they’ve gone through with it because the blocklist is private. Blocked on the other hand says “All communications are blocked”
No, that’s not how federation works. My instance sends my content directly to everything my instance federates with. No instance takes content from other instances and sends it further - that is not a thing. I sent my content to lemmy.world and it is free to be there. Lemmy.world will not forward that to Threads.
This is a strange response for me because de-federating is an active step on behalf of its admin, usually after a vote amongst its users, at creating a virtual boundary between the two entities. How is that burying your head in the sand? And yeah, lemmy.world is big, but aside from the obvious loss of content/users, what other effect will that have on the mass of de-federated instances?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta.
For example, this discussion we’re having right now is on !technology. So it doesn’t matter whether our own instances have defederated meta - our posts and comments here will bring them value. Directly, in the form of content. And indirectly, in the form of processable data for machine learning, shadow profiles, etc.
but my understanding is that since LW will federate with them, any content they host, will end up on meta
Your understanding is wrong. Instances don’t forward stuff from other instances to other instances. Instances only send their own content directly to the instances they federate with.
@Minotaur@henfredemars@technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That's federation. We're all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they're in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
Servers can block, or "defederate from" other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.
And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.
I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a (comparatively) niche competitor like Pixelfed
I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.
That’s exactly why Threads is incompatible with the Fediverse. Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.
Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.
Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?
Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked “accidentally”, how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.
You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn’t a revenue opportunity, it’s a potential front for which they’ll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying ‘engagement is containment’?
It doesn’t work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of content that isn’t posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it’s available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn’t exist.
FWIW I think this is intentional and a feature, not a bug. By spreading content to communities, you can delegate moderation responsibility much easier.
Content not posted to any community would need something akin to a site-wide moderator or an admin to moderate, and such a moderator wouldn’t be as effective. They’d cover a wider array of very different content. Community moderators work better because they can define rules that are only confined to their comm and they know better how to moderate their own community and they also care more about their own community so are more motivated to keep it well-moderated in the fashion they want.
I didn’t fully understand what I was talking about when I replied, and for that I apologize. Now that I know a little bit more, this is basically how it works (I think):
We cannot see posts made directly on Mastodon. However, they can see posts made on Lemmy and even comment on them. We are able to see those comments as normal and without doing anything on our end, but again, that’s only as long as they’re made under Lemmy posts
Threads hasn’t had federation enabled until now, but you’ve always been able to interact with Mastodon… sort of. The Lemmy UI doesn’t really have a good way of finding Mastodon posts that don’t tag a Lemmy community or of following Mastodon users, but if they do tag a community the Mastodon post will show up as a Lemmy post in that community.
You’ve had some well-meaning but ultimately not quite accurate answers in this thread so just to clarify:
You can follow, post to and interact with Lemmy communities from Mastodon, because they’re treated the same way as a “group” on Mastodon in general.
You can NOT follow and interact with Mastodon users from Lemmy, because Mastodon accounts are individual “users” and Lemmy doesn’t have the concept of following and interacting with users, only with communities. If Lemmy ever does add a feature to let us follow other users, then in theory following Mastodon users will also become possible.
The UX can be awkward though. As an example, I had to add the community tag to this comment manually, as it won't federate to lemmy.world otherwise. That's because Mastodon doesn't push replies to every server with users participating in a thread, which I think is a design flaw.
To post to Lemmy from Mastodon, just tag a community. You can load any of the fediverse links shown in the default Lemmy web UI in a Mastodon search box and reply to them. You can also follow a community and receive every subsequent post and comment as a boost (this is a bad UX and I don't recommend it), as well as follow Lemmy users, which you can't do in Lemmy itself. You cannot vote on Lemmy posts/comments from Mastodon.
I find tagging an appropriate Lemmy community from my Mastodon posts to be a good experience. You'll see a few of those from my @zaktakespictures account in @birding, and from @zakreviews in @flashlight.
I'm pretty sure Lemmy won't make new toplevel posts out of this in those communities since it's a reply, but I'm going to check just to be sure.
I just do not get the twitter framework for social media. Like I appreciate you mastodon bros, but what the hell is actually going on over there. I had the same issue with twitter. What the hell even is this?
It’s an convenient way to post about some trending topic, without creating a whole new community for something temporary. For example the eurovision sing festival, or some natural disaster that happened.
And on the other hand, it works for expressing some personal thoughts or memes without having to adhere to a specific topic. But with random strangers instead of only your facebook friends.
I think for these kind of needs, no other social media framework would comply better.
It’s not. You have the “explore” tab which is more like “today’s viral toots” (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy’s “All/Top 24h” since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn’t really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It’s not a cafeteria, it’s your RSS feed.
Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that’s only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.
This is basically how I feel about Instagram. I just can’t understand why people use the platform, or even how they do.
Every time I try to use the app, I just end up closing it in frustration a couple of minutes later. What’s the point in following people when the algorithm is just going to show me a randomized assortment of their posts from the past week where every one is followed by a “suggested” post from somebody I don’t follow and then a “sponsored” post (ad). And then it stops after like 20 posts and refuses to load any more because “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!”, even if I haven’t opened it in 5 months.
I guess following people whose content you’re interested in has gone out of style in favor of consuming whatever the algorithm vomits up in front of you. I feel like even Tik Tok does a better job of letting you see content from people you’re following, and that thing is basically all algorithm.
And now I sound like my parents in the 2010s trying to figure out why people use Facebook…
I never really got the Twitter model either. Following a specific individual is a weird one for me; I’d rather follow an idea or a topic instead (Reddit/lemmy/forums). I honestly don’t care enough about any individual user to the point where I want to know what they have to say about… anything, really.
I really valued twitter for the ability of an individual person or groups of people to share their experiences of world events happening in real time. This is less about following individual people and more about being able to get meaningful analytics out of the mass of posts in order to spotlight “things” – a political movement, an earthquake, a lawyer who cant turn off zoom filters – whatever. But, it did always have a lot of noise. I usually ended up there when somebody linked to a post.
Obviously not, but the behavior already shows that Meta/Threads isn’t interested in being a good fediverse citizen, and in doing so lends more credibility to the idea that they’re aiming to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
I’m sorry but the fediverse is full of instances that block other instances. Blocking an instance is not bad behaviour on the fediverse.
If you don’t like Threads, don’t use it (I’m not using it), and if you want to use an instance that blocks Threads… you’re welcome to do that.
But what I don’t get is the idea that threads is somehow trying to kill the fediverse. All of the evidence is to the contrary. Meta wants to exist in a federated world. That doesn’t mean they will allow access to all content on their corner of the fediverse, nobody wants that. All instances block some other instances and threads has every right to make their own choice about who to block.
Honey blocking all mentions of Pixelfed is not at all like blocking one instance, it is blocking the entire platform. It would be the same as blocking all mentions of Lemmy or all mentions of Mastodon, which would not block ONE instance, but ALL INSTANCES.
Other people care, I certainly don’t care if you care or not doe and I didn’t ask for that spontaneous bit of information. You don’t care? Uh, ok… I guess.
You’re missing the point. I don’t want you to understand my feelings, I want someone to explain to me what the big deal is. How meta “moderates” their platform has no effect on me, a non-threads user. What is my stake in it?
I’ll copy and paste my reply to someone else here:
Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.
Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.
Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?
To summarize, how big Threads is and how they decide to moderate the content matters for anyone who doesn’t want the Fedi to end up like e-mail.
I think it is (or should be) an antitrust issue to scrub all links to a competitor (Pixelfed vs Instagram) from your platform.
I can still find out about Bing from Google or vice versa. People would legitimately be upset if this were not so. I can still use Edge to download Firefox. People would legitimately be upset if this were not so. Etc etc etc.
Happy to see that nearly all the biggest Lemmy instances are blocking it, with the glaring exception of lemmy.world, which is the largest by far. lemmy.world is to lemmy as AOL was to the early internet—the default bucket for those who don’t know any better.
Lemm.ee still shows up as “private” in the Observer, but I don’t know how I missed .ml being in France (I really doubt they somehow “ moved” the server). Checking again you’re right though, the situation got a lot better over time.
A small instance has a higher probability of the owner stopping maintaining it. Obviously this doesn’t apply if the instance is yours, but I’m not tech-savvy enough to do that.
True, that’s fair. But I’d still join a small server to give it a chance and to keep them afloat. Small servers would maybe stay around more if more people joined :)
The only thing that saved Meta/Web3 from creating a special hell where digital rent seeking pervades all social interaction is that capitalism is too advanced at this point to create a market before trying to squeeze every last drop of blood out of it.
The chicken comes prehatched inside the egg so to speak, but when the chicken hatches it is just a really tiny useless chicken that lays eggs the size of ice cream sprinkles.
I wish I could go back to a Lemmy thread showing how Mastodon and other Fediverse instances were blocking Meta ahead of it’s integration, where people went “Oh you’re just being paranoid, why would they do that?” And when given examples of companies taking open standards and either making themselves the biggest source of users or killing it (Microsoft, Google, Apple) they either went “Well that happened in 2006, it’s 2023!”
I know the bootlickers wouldn’t actually change their mind, but jesus christ. It’s frustrating for groups of advocates to be ignored and proven right each time. Cassandra syndrome is real.
I just feel like this strategy won’t work for activitypub. The whole idea is to make interoperable web platforms. If meta tries to damage that then I don’t see why activitypub developers would cooperate when it’s against the whole purpose of the project.
They will come here (edit: They HAVE come here) with a goal of exploiting and controlling the fediverse. You and I don’t have to know how they will do that in order for it to be true. Scrubbing links to a product that competes with Instagram from threads seems like a decent start though.
I mean I am completely unsurprised by their misbehavior, I’m just slightly more optimistic about our ability to resist them.
That said, the one danger I can see is Meta gaining more authority over the activitypub developers. That is probably something worth being vigilant about.
I wonder if this means we can mention any word in their filter and our content will not be scraped by them? Something like a Meta filter signature on every post or comment like follows:
I think my instance isn’t federated but I am under the understanding that the federation can still scrape data through other federated instances that mine is connected with. Something along the lines of ‘their data doesn’t come in but your data is still sent out’.
the federation can still scrape data through other federated instances that mine is connected with
That’s not true. If your instance is defederated from Threads, your content will never be sent to Threads. Other instances will not forward content for you to Threads.
A quick search leads me to fedi.tips which has a lot of information. It mostly focuses on Mastodon but it generally applies to Lemmy and any other Fediverse app as well.
You probably won’t find any source specifically saying that “content is not forwarded from remote servers to other remote servers” because that’s just not how it works. The documentation will probably focus on what it actually does rather than all of the infinite things that it doesn’t do.
It’s not just true, there’s a history of this mentioned in the replies to the original masto comment. Pixelfed is a direct competitor/alternative to instagram and meta’s has a pretty clear policy of not giving it any airtime on their platforms.
Why, well they dominate the instagram style platform space (and I’d guess it’s their biggest platform ATM and most prospective going forward). Twitter-style platforms are new for them and introduce monopoly issues … so they toy with the fediverse to allay potential issues.
I think all of the schmoozing the likes of Evan, Gargron etc are doing with meta (they have active accounts on Threads AFAIU, for instance) will reveal their true colours (techbro growth mindset just the hipster way) and leave them with egg on their face.
One of the cool things about the fediverse is that you are free to run your own instance with whatever rules you do or don’t want, and tell the rest of us to fuck right off.
Some instances will defederate from you depending on what those rules are, like those specific relatives we all avoid if we can at holidays, and ignore the rest of the year. They are also free to do so.
IOW, folks might tell your instance (or Meta’s) to fuck right off.
That’s what freedom looks like. It’s not supposed to be just your freedom, it’s supposed to be everyone’s freedom.
Edit: And by the way, I’m very surprised if a company scrubbing mentions of competitors from its platform isn’t a solid anti-trust violation.
each instance can do its own thing. so its very strange to see people shitting on meta for doing exactly that.
You mean scrubbing mentions of a competitor from their platform? That’s not OK, and it’s an indicator of their future behavior that is very consistent with their
this hate-boner everyone gets from the idea of meta on the 'verse is childish.
You are entitled to your opinion. (And so are the folks you think are being childish.)
Nobody is saying to shut down any instance, only that we, and others on the platform who think likewise, would like to not have to see those instances. Nobody is saying to shut down Truth Social or Pawoo or Baraag, for instance, despite having severe disagreements with those instances - we just decided, on our instances, not to federated with them. You aren’t obligated to agree with us - you can make your own instance with your own rules, as others have said, or switch to an instance accommodating to your beliefs. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to listen. Think of defederation like blocking - I’m sure you have some sort of block list for trolls, spammers and bots. Same thing, but for an instance.
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