mrbitterness

MentalEdge, 10 months ago

Yes you can. You have to trigger the federation by entering the url to it into search (the url from the instance its on, not the kbin.social one it would have) or its exact name in the @name@instan.ce format. That’s how off-instance content gets federated. Someone needs to tell your server, it exists, and that they want it.

smallpatatas, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

A few things here.

The first one that comes to mind is that defederation DOES stop your posts from going to Meta's platform when combined with the AUTHORIZED_FETCH server setting, while a simple user-level block may not. Depending on your server's settings, your posts may or may not be available on the open web where Meta could scrape the data - but this is still very different from them appearing in the feed or search results of, say, the transphobic, racist, or antisemitic groups that call Meta home.

This has serious implications for user safety and should not be overlooked. In fact, user safety is one of the biggest issues I have seen people mention when advocating for defederation.

Second: it's not yet clear if threads will allow their users to follow people on Lemmy or Kbin servers. But if they do, their users - including, for instance, the millions of followers of some big celebrity or politician - would be able to uprank posts and influence what you end up seeing. You might have LibsOfTikTok tell their users to brigade any posts critical of them, who knows. Meta's own algorithms could end up surfacing certain posts to their users, making the post rankings here largely a reflection of what Meta wants their users to see.

In other words, there's a lot more to the story than just 'blocking their content' when it comes to why you would want full defederation.

Here are a couple of blog posts that go into more detail around some of the data & privacy issues with federation:

https://privacy.thenexus.today/just-blocking-threads-isnt-enough/ discusses why defederation is much better than user-level blocking when it comes to protecting yourself from Meta

https://www.cacherules.com/blog/2023/6/resistance-is-futile-you-will-be-assimilated-by-meta/ discusses the things that Meta can learn about you via federation that they can't otherwise.

ernest, 11 months ago

Top sorting is already available on the testnet. It will be further improved over time.
https://lab2.kbin.pub/

dudeami0, 11 months ago

Meta is allowed to use the ActivityPub standard just as much as any other standard. This does not mean anyone who decides to use it must interact with others who use it. SMTP will block your mail if you aren’t from a larger server, have the right signatures and even then. Servers block HTTP over VPNs often, and there are even rules about referencing content via other servers on HTTP (CORS). Just because a standard is open doesn’t mean everything using that standard has to communicate with each other.

The beauty of this is that those running instances can’t restrict access of other instances to the fediverse. If Meta does start using ActivityPub, every current instance can block it. Other entities could want to run an instance that federates with Meta who has the resources to do so. Currently the biggest issue is the vast difference in scale between current instances and Meta. But if other entities got into the fediverse that federated with Meta this would still be a decentralized system, just with larger nodes between them. All of this still allows those who run small instances to block these larger instances that are more mainstream and keep it the way they want it.

Perry, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I really wanted something similar so I threw a quick and dirty tampermonkey script together to fetch the subscriptions from the settings page. I think it worked out pretty alright.

Edit: Someone else can probably do something a lot better, but here is the code: https://pastebin.com/P0mR9QL6

Paste it into a new script and call the addSubscriptionsSidePanel() function to run it.

Edit2: I've uploaded it to Greasy Fork so that you can install it directly: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469139-kbin-subscriptions-panel

Perry, 11 months ago

I'm not entirely sure how to properly ping users, but I've updated the comment with a pastebin with the code. https://pastebin.com/P0mR9QL6

@mrbitterness @LennethAegis @RodPhoto