A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
Thanks, I appreciate it! It took a stupidly long time. :V
On some level, it's probably not that important that people understand all this stuff, but I think the most dangerous thing is people believing that their data will be protected if Threads gets defederated. Any other confusion is basically harmless, but that's the one thing where people have a false sense of security, because Meta has exactly the same access to your data whether or not they get defederated.
For the most part, Threads content just wouldn't appear on Lemmy at all. It's like how you can't see Mastodon users' timelines on Lemmy. e.g. Jeri Ryan from Star Trek is on mastodon.world, but you can't read her blog from Lemmy because it just doesn't display microblog content, only stuff that's sorted into groups (communities).
The one exception is that Jeri Ryan can track down the equivalent group on her Mastodon instance and "microblog" directly into the group. Mastodon has some hacky tweaks to do things like reading the first sentence as a heading, the second line as a URL, and the third line as the post body, so if you're especially dedicated you can post to Lemmy from Mastodon. If Threads cares enough, they could add similar functionality to Threads to make it technically possible to post to Lemmy as long as you try hard enough, but just regular people's blog posts on Threads won't display on Lemmy at all.
Meta is categorically evil, but the pretty obvious gain from federation is the same as it is federating with anything else: content. Threads has people posting on it, some of those people say interesting things ... the end.
That's not to say that outweighs the downsides, like some of that content will also undoubtedly be hateful bigoted trash, and the moderation load of suddenly dealing with an order of magnitude more posts will be a huge strain on fediverse admins who choose to federate, but there's undeniably something to gain.
There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It's self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.
I think what did it for me was episode 3, "About a Girl". Up to that point I was enjoying the show, but the third episode was the first one that you're really supposed to take seriously as an audience. I think this quote from the episode's director Brannon Braga is informative:
There was an episode that was supposed to be a later episode. I’ll call “About a Girl” which was about a transgender metaphor using our Moclan characters. [...] It’s a very dramatic episode. And we decided to pull it up in the air date order to the third episode because we had to know, “Is the audience going to embrace what this show really is?” And they did.
The episode isn't perfect and MacFarlane has even said he would do it differently if given the opportunity to write the episode again, but the show was leaving nothing on the table, taking a huge swing for this early in a series. I had been really missing sci-fi with a social conscience in the last decade or so before The Orville began, and this episode specifically felt like coming home after a long time.
In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don't matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it's tough to pin down an exact start date because "When did it become the fediverse?"), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There's any number of things Meta might want, but I don't think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.
I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn't threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we're not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they're not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU's new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse--which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr--and saying "See, we're all on equal footing! We don't control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users."
This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there'd be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.
Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn't a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it's closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.
If nobody has ever subscribed to a foreign instance's community/magazine before, it won't show up on your home instance. Currently, the best way to pull it into your local instance is to copy its web address on the other site into your local search.
e.g. If you wanted to pull in kbin.social's AskKbin from lemmy.world you'd find its URL, https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin, and paste that address into your home instance's search box. As long as somebody has done this once, AskKbin will now show up in regular community lists, searches, etc.
Yes, this is what happened. It's using this article as a source, which has the following in its intro:
Throughout American history, the Dodge brand has maintained a strong bond with the United States military, from Chrysler Defense developing the first M1 Abrams tanks all the way back to when George Washington drove a Dodge Challenger to lead his troops to battle. The Father of our Country’s giant middle finger to the British with one hand, his flintlock pistol brandished through the sunroof with his other – all while mashing the gas pedal for an epic burnout and blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” – was the boost in morale and firepower the Yankees needed to prevail in the Revolutionary War.
OK, maybe my memory is a little blurred regarding some details of that last part. History was never my best subject; I can’t recall if I read that in a book or saw that in a documentary or a maybe a commercial.
So I guess the AIs are just like us, they read the opening paragraph and ignore the rest.
Hello, compatriots! I’m new here (joined a few hours ago) I’m more than glad to become a part of what is referred to as the ‘new face of Reddit’. What brought about my joining was my search into the Fediverse after Threads come out with the promise of being a part in future iterations of the application. With the take...
There's also another take that Threads becoming federated could be used by Meta as a defense against accusations of monopoly (if it becomes the new Twitter, they'll be running all three of the three largest social media platforms) and protecting it from falling afoul of the EU's new Digital Markets Act, which designates "gatekeeper" companies that control large platforms, placing additional legal requirements on them which force them to demonstrate that they are competing fairly and openly.
Meta could either hope that by federating, they can claim they're not in "control" of the platform and so not a gatekeeper at all, or failing that, that by using an open protocol that's compatible with other similar services, that they're competing fairly. At best, this is using the fediverse as a smokescreen: Threads is only a few days into existence and is already at least five times the size of the entire fediverse put together, but in this theory it's to their benefit to maintain just enough compatibility to avoid getting in trouble with the regulators.
I didn’t come to a new service just to see it get taken over by the corporate beasts who ruined the internet in general, and I am sure as hell am not going to use an instance that doesn’t care about its users....
The other problem here is that I don't think a lot of people actually know how defederation works. There's lots of takes like "I don't want Meta to get my data, so we have to defederate." But defederating stops you from receiving their content, not the other way around. Once Threads actually is federating, defederating it will stop people seeing posts from Threads users. That has its own merits, but it doesn't protect your data in any way. If you don't want corporate entities to access your online posts, either send them via some private end-to-end encrypted system where only you and the direct recipients can see them, or don't post them online at all. The Internet is on the Internet.
Now, a bit more of an explanation on what defederation is: while the decentralized nature complicates things (since different servers will have different defederation lists), defederation is closer to a Reddit shadow-ban than whatever it is people are imagining. If literally everybody defederated Meta/Threads, they would still see our content, but from their (Threads users') perspective, it would just seem like we're all giving them the silent treatment, because we never respond to their posts or comments.
Lemmy communities are "groups" in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.
It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I've seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.
Groups don't even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can't stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.
In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize "This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something," than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly--in corporate terms, it's like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.
Defederation, Threads and You
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
deleted_by_author
Threads readies handy explainer of Mastodon and the fediverse (9to5google.com)
BTS photo from S03E09 "Domino" posted by Tom Constantino
The single point that made me love the show
After the pilot episode I was willing to watch another episode, but I was still a little on the fence about it....
Meta's 'Threads' wants to colonize the Fediverse (fortune.com)
I really hope this is a complete failure, like Meta itself.
Twitter’s traffic is taking a dive, according to Cloudflare’s CEO. - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
Dutch government starts own Mastodon instance as reaction to the instability of Twitter (lemmy.world)
@beheerder
Edit: TIL it doesn't matter if you make your community on Lemmy or kbin, they're federated and will have equal exposure
Thanks everyone for the help....
To accurately answer if George Washington drove a Challenger (lemmy.world)
Introductions
Hello, compatriots! I’m new here (joined a few hours ago) I’m more than glad to become a part of what is referred to as the ‘new face of Reddit’. What brought about my joining was my search into the Fediverse after Threads come out with the promise of being a part in future iterations of the application. With the take...
Escalator to nowhere at the mall (i.imgur.com)
Can I override custom styles for magazines?
Is there a way to configure kbin to ignore custom css on magazines?
If Lemmy.world doesn't defederate from Threads, Meta and all things Zuck within 24 hours, I will shut down my subs and leave.
I didn’t come to a new service just to see it get taken over by the corporate beasts who ruined the internet in general, and I am sure as hell am not going to use an instance that doesn’t care about its users....
The Orville cast and crew on Threads
I know we hate Threads here, but if any Union defectors want to support them, I won't tell....