Tangled Threads: How #Mastodon admins should respond to #Meta and #Threads in a way that protects our users best. Tip: It's not through proactive defederation.
“I deactivated my threads account already but it turns out you can’t delete your threads account without also deleting your Instagram account so maybe just don’t sign up!”
If you need more reasons not to trust #Threads or anything that comes out of Meta, Facebook app's browser now(?) injects keylogging Javascript onto the websites you are visiting.
#Threads is attempting to communicate the inclusion of quote posts in their AP messages.
Unfortunately, there’s not a true agreed upon standard for quote posts. Some #FediApp developers have made an agreement amongst themselves as to how that should work. Threads is not following those rules and has decided to use a _misskey_quote attribute in the AP messages. This isn’t coming across in the quote post format in most apps I use.
Folks, the reason #Facebook/ #Instagram/ #Meta/ Zuckerberg hasn’t launched #Threads in the #EU isn’t because the EU is determined to protect your privacy, it’s because the EU is determined to protect The Single Market (peace be upon it) from anticompetitive behaviour. It’s because they’re using Instagram to launch Threads and sharing data between them (and not with EU startups that might want to use that data too). It’s #antitrust, not #privacy. It’s markets, not people.
Sometimes we should step back and appreciate just how well Mastodon actually works. Watching this whole #Meta#Threads thing play out, makes it really clear how vital algorithm free #hashtag search is for truly democratized engagement.
Pour les médias, #Threads est l’avenir et Mastodon un obscur nouveau truc alternatif.
Pour rappel, les instances officielles européennes disposent, depuis plus d’un an de leur propre instance Mastodon avec, entre autres, le compte officiel de la commission européenne : @EU_Commission
La fondation Wikimedia vient également d’ouvrir son instance. Bienvenue @wikimediafoundation
Donc non, amis mastonautes, vous n’êtes pas à côté de la plaque. Ce sont les grands médias qui le sont.
and yet, by and large, the fediverse is the only major social media platform that actually manages to do this (the decent sections of it, at least)
why? well, here's the big secret: BECAUSE WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT PROFIT
big companies allow nazis to fester on their services because it makes them money, and here we're not beholden to such a corrupting influence. that's kinda the entire point
The discourse in the last few days regarding #Meta and #Threads gives the impression that the entire Fediverse is already blocking Threads. I wanted to take a look at the numbers and they speak a different language. The data source for my calculation is https://fedipact.veganism.social/?v=2.
Measured by user count, 76 % of all users are federated with Threads. Remaining instances with 24 % of users either block Threads or are limited (e.g. infosec.exchange).
When I was active at the wikipedia there were a group of other writers who would follow me around and mark my articles on women and black people for deletion. They marked my edits CN even when there was a citation. They reworded everything I wrote to minimize the contributions of minorities to history, and hint at theories of racial inferiority. I'd just go to the library and bury them in more citations. It was kind of violent TBH. #threads#wikipedia#moderation
In response to @potus enabling federation via #Threads the other day, a number of people asked: why can't the White House self-host their own Mastodon server?
Our writer @deadsuperhero dives in with some thoughts on the current hurdles
I did the requisite responsible reading about Threads federating, and I decided to domain block them after thinking about it.
Anybody who wants to view my public posts can still view them.
This is mostly an infosec account, and there's AFAIK zero infosec community presence on Threads.
I'm not really interested in helping Threads grow an infosec community presence.
I don't think there's any Mastodon admin ready for the network effects of several million users suddenly joining the network. There is shockingly little discussion about problems like coordinated inauthentic activity, which are going to come at that scale. I'm REALLY not interested in seeing or interacting in any way with chinese state disinformation campaigns lol
Mastodon servers and clients are held together by duct tape and prayers by people in their spare time. Threads is held together by people paid full time salaries at a large multinational corporation. Threads can make a better fediverse app and a better fediverse server than anything that currently exists. I think any future where people start downloading the Threads app as their default client to interact with the fediverse, and where people start using threads.net as their default server, is one that is very dangerous for the existence of the fediverse as a set of interoperable clients and servers built on open standards. I'm doing my part to make this as unappealing and as high friction as possible 🫡
fuck libs of tiktok, and fuck threads which is currently platforming them. The impact of accounts like Libs of TikTok on rolling back LGBTQ rights in the real world is a very good example of why network effects, discoverability, and social media amplification are dangerous.
Thanks to @jerry for letting people on this instance make this choice themselves. Having this kind of choice is a welcome change from other social networks.
I know there's a lot of people on the fediverse that feel very differently, but I'm excited about #Threads finally testing #fediverse integration with a public beta. The amount of people I've seen on Threads asking what the fediverse is since this was announced is staggering. If nothing else, I think this will help bring the wider fediverse more into the mainstream.
Earlier this year, #SocialCoop landed on a "limiting" policy for #Threads after a democratic vote: you can follow accounts, but their posts won't make it into other people's feeds who don't follow them.
That works for me so I can follow e.g. NGOs that only maintain a presence on Threads (and sooner or later bug them to get their own instance ;-). I understand why other servers may prefer to suspend, or even why some may prefer to do nothing.
(I need to update it to use the most recent version of the #BigBone library, but I don't want to try to rush that and mess something up, especially not right now, and the version that's there should still work fine. If you run into any problems with it please do let me know 🙏)
With the Zuckerberg takeover impending, there's a lot of confusion circulating about the use of user-level and instance-level blocks, and how our online expressions can be secured against Meta. Everyone who objects to their accounts being mined by the Zuckerberg entity for data collection, AI ingestion, monetization, and possible ghost-profile building needs to understand this problem. Here's information to clarify.
Neither a user-level block, or an instance-level block, will protect our posts from Meta data-mining by default on a Mastodon instance. Posts won't be delivered directly, but can be ingested by other means; if, for example, users on Meta-federated instances boost them.
However, both user and instance blocks will totally prevent post delivery in all cases IF your host instance has enabled the functionality called Authorized Fetch.
By default, Authorized Fetch is off on Mastodon instances and most haven't turned it on. If this concern is important to you, you might want to respectfully reach out to your admins and let them know. Remember that they are working hard to provide and sustain online community at no charge. It's likely they won't be very familiar with it and will need time to look into it.
I had a Twitter list "standard stuff" where I listed the core accounts I definitely wanted to hear about. This fav list grew over the years and had 120 users in total. These were active users that in the golden era posted every day. These were the ones I wanted to read whenever possible.
I wanted to see what's the status today so I went through every account and here's the result. By "inactive" I mean users who haven't posted anything in two months or more.
20% have completely deleted their account (the list now has 95 users)
36% still post frequently
64% are inactive or quit using Twitter
30% are inactive without any reason given
23% of those who still post on X also have active Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads accounts