To the admins- will lemmy.world block Facebook's Threads or are you open to federating with them in the future?
To the admins- will lemmy.world block Facebook's Threads or are you open to federating with them in the future?
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Many of us do not trust Facebook and anything it is associated with or swallows up.
EDIT:
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected].””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
To me it’s simple. If Zuck has a part in this, I will find somewhere else to go.
I came here specifically to avoid meta and reddit
dude exactly
There are always instances and apps that will block them for you. That's the beauty of interoperability.
Yes. They have destroyed enough internet they shouldn't allowed to touch this.
hold your horses guys. But seriously, lets not put too much pressure on the Admins, they're doing a fine job maintaining the servers. I guess we wait how Meta will federate and let the admins take time to decide.
Please don't federate with the Zucc
It's very simple. Facebook/meta bullshit on here and I am moving to -tildes.
Fuck corporations. I hope they all burn and I hope their creators and their born and unborn offspring get cancer and die.
Why Tildes and not just another instance? Tildes is still headed by a single person
PS Tildes has a nice app now: Surfboard. I kinda hate the website, but using an app is way nicer.
I have done a little bit of reading but I'm still not sure what the issue is. Is it that Threads will take over and defacto become the entire Fediverse? Because I think that would happen whether or not Mastoson/Lemmy instances choose to defederate. Is privacy the concern, and if so, wouldn't it only affect people using Threads?
FB has proven time and again that they don't care to moderate their spaces, and they increase engagement by presenting the most toxic and angering things to you. Community groups in particular are absolutely hideous on there, full of people angry at the (insert minority group) walking down the street. I don't want that in my life again, and I don't want it infecting lemmy. If I did want to engage with that type of content, I'd make an account on Threads.
That said, I'm not out here making demands of our admin and moderators right now. They're busy just keeping this place running. The threads situation won't be going away tomorrow, so it can wait a hot minute.
One concern would be:
- Say Lemmy/kbin grows organically to 1 million users.
- Threads federates, with 100 million users
Do you want these users flooding Lemmy? I don't want to be biased at the theoretical type of user on Threads, though if the right wingers/trolls/extremists migrate to Threads because they think it's "more open" then that may be an issue. If it's full of soccer moms posting pictures of their kids, or karens complaining about everything, that may be an issue.
Multiculturalism is great, I want to hear new ideas, though some areas are breeding grounds for lower-think, it seems. This probably sounds prejudiced or elitist.
I want to talk to the vanguard people who take the risk and are openminded and come to lemmy, not necessarily the "lemmings" who join facebook because they love facebook and don't want to, or can't, delve deeper into why facebook is one of the worst forces in media at the moment.
I am not prejudiced (I hope) against "regular people" and "soccer moms", though think that if 10 million soccer moms came here, the discussions may not be as... interesting, as they are.
Also, I don't know what lemmy instances will think about downloading masses of data from threads.
I think this will be pretty manageable by finding and using communities that are well-run and have explicit rules and standards of behavior that are enforced. If a community is explicitly meant for serious conversations about, I dunno, music theory, that is enforceable, and if Suburban Subaru Sarah actually wants to join in on that, all the better, but pics of her kid's soccer game will belong in a different space, just as much as pics of some nerd's Warcraft raid do too.
I donate money to this platform because I want an open and free internet. I want that for anyone who wants to partake. I don’t want extremists, sure - but I think the “soccer moms” you are referring to are really just your average internet consumer. If we don’t agree on that, that’s fine - I’m happy to move to an instance that’s not as restrictive. I think that’s the beauty of the fediverse. I think it’s ironic when you talk about wanting open minded people to join the instance though lol.
Because this is reminiscent of what happened with XMPP. In the old days you had many closed source protocols for instant messaging. Then XMPP came along and started gaining steam. At that point, major platforms started using it, with everything federated. Someone with Google could talk to someone on Facebook and with someone on myown.sillyserver.net. Everything was going great. But obviously the majority of people went with the easy option to go with Facebook or Google, meaning you still had a federated network on the paper, but with a few actors weighing way more than most.
Obviously at that point, they slowly defederated, preventing their customers from talking to their contacts on other platforms. But most of their contacts where on the same platform, so the cost of migrating was higher. That's how the federation ended. XMPP still exists, and was actually used by WhatsApp in a non federated way, but it is the shell of itself with not a lot of people using it.
A social network strength is in its number. Accepting Meta into Fediverse creates a very real risk that they will try an embrace and extinguish strategy and in the end you will have most people on Meta and just a niche of people on Lemmy/Mastodon, similar to how it was a few months ago.
The goal of the fediverse is to find the proper balance between having multiple platforms big enough so that moderation and technical management can be done by knowledgeable people, but small enough that they cannot decide willy nilly to defederated. Having Meta in the fediverse would very probably break that balance.
XMPP died because of competition. Everyone is forgetting everyone said Google was losing the chat wars with Apple and that's why Google repeatedly released new systems. Google left XMPP and that isn't why XMPP failed. It failed because virtually everyone had either an Apple account or Android account. So they all had a chat account already. They "destroyed" XMPP the same way Blackberry hurt XMPP at the time as well. XMPP would be just as relevant if Google never federated with it.
It's a combination of EEE (Engage, Enhance, Extinguish) tactics, as well as toxicity overload. Meta are notorious for manipulating their viewers. Threads will rapidly devolve into rage bait, since this gives maximum engagement. They will use us to dilute the resultant toxicity. Once it's established, even de-federating might not be enough. It could generate a locust like influx of toxic new members. The federation doesn't have the community robustness to absorb that sort of hit right now.
Read up on EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
Will do - thank you
I also don’t understand the issue. I’m against meta / twitter / reddit (hence my account here), but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users? I feel like if anything this is a great way to get more people comfortable with the concept of the fediverse and push them one step closer to breaking away from the traditional social media companies. So far all I’ve been able to see is “Meta bad, defederate”.
I like your optimism, but Meta is a relentless cancer and FOSS is its enemy. It won’t sit idly by while ideas of ad-free alternatives grow in its users minds. Nothing good can come from Meta’s mingling with non-profit competition.
The only silver lining is how incompetent these corporations have been lately. Fingers crossed, they’ll fuck up whatever nefarious shit they have planned, and the fediverse can carry on in some state when they try to pull the rug - at the very least for those who value its ideals over user count, but hopefully also still as a viable and active alternative.
Here’s an accessible summary of a few historical examples of why people don’t want corporations adopting their open source platforms: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
"...but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users?"
Because our feed will be full of the kind of stuff that people will be posting on Threads, complete with whatever boosting algorithm Meta chooses to use on there. That's not why I'm here. If I wanted a heavily tilted feed of whatever Meta thinks I should see, I'd be there.
For me it's mostly because massive corporations love to destroy any possible competition. It has happened repeatedly in history. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I came to lemmy because I hate all those guys and I don't want one coming in and destroying it. Meta has absolutely no incentive to help the fediverse. He is here for the free code, to fuck with Elon, and destroy some competition. That's it. Don't let him.
There are multiple concerns:
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The basic principals of Federation is "killed" as Threads will try and bait people on ONLY using their platform. For example that they wont even show any posts/comments from others but in reverse they spam other posts with their posts and comments.
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There will be a huge increase of users like multiple million users. With it that type of users who want to share literally every opinion. The karen, twitter "Free Speech" type. It will bring much hate to the fediverse.
Personally the fediverses goal is to have smaller instances and not a big boy that wants everything.
And they would try and monetize and advertise in the fediverse.
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federation with meta will bring nothing but evil into our niche little corner of the net and i am not for it.
Please don't federate with Meta. You can guarantee they'll ruin all that is good about the fediverse.
It's starting to look like the capacity for a user to independently defederate their content from specific platforms is in order. Even better would be the capacity to select what specific content is federated where when publishing.
I personally want nothing to do with Meta, but I'd prefer to have the choice rather than having it made for me by the admins.
Agreed. I am already blocking communities I don't care for all the time but sometimes it would be much easier to be able to just block their entire instance (because the whole instance circles around the same type of content). I won't be able to find one single instance the federated with just the right others for my taste so let me just filter myself.
You can't have an instance that runs on your personal set of preference unless you run your own. Somebody else went to the effort of buying a domain, hosting, handling moderation on their own time, and everything else that comes with running a fediverse instance, so if you sign up to that instance, you get to deal with their rules.
Even if you found an instance which suits your desires--which ultimately amounts to being essentially unmoderated, since you don't trust an admin to be in charge of moderation--you'd find it getting defederated by other instances because bad stuff happens in unmoderated spaces. What you're asking for, an instance which can access everything at all times, is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the fediverse. I'm not being glib, but if that's what you're here for, you're in the wrong place.
Your choice is in which instance you sign up to, meaning you find somewhere you agree with the admins' choices. If your views are so unique that no such place exists, you start your own instance.
Well, yeah, that's how it works now.
I'm looking at an improvement to the current system. Admin views can change, and in this scenario they're a form of centralized power and responsibility. Delegating this particular power and responsibility to the user would remove the additional burden of moderation and allow the admins to focus on running the instance rather than policing the Fediverse.
Giving users the choice of where their content is federated seems like a happy medium for all parties concerned. The admins don't have to get political and the users can stay away from the Zuckening if they want to.
This is virtually impossible. The amount of processing power to do that would grind any server with more than a handful of people to a halt.
Best case scenario is hoping Lemmy servers has the same capabilities as other ActivityPub servers. You can make it so Threads can see the server but the server can't see Threads. In those scenarios, even if they reply to your post, you won't see it.
In any case, if you want to choose who you federate at a user level, create your own server. You can easily federate with who you want at that point. By being on another server, you give the admins some control. That's an agreement you made when you joined a server controlled by someone else. There is very little stopping you from your own server. It can cost very little up front and after that, effectively just your own efforts to keep it running. You can be the sole user and make it fairly easily.
They will do 100% like that, that they spread everywhere but the posts on threads are only from threads
It's not a larger server load, because you're actually publishing less as users defederate their content. The SQL is actually pretty simple if you have a content field for blacklisting that the user selects when publishing. On the federating front end, you simply don't publish the content to the instance the user defederated from, as marked in the content field. It's basically one more line in SQL - essentially would be something like:
where content.blacklist != domainin the select statement.
This is actually already in play to some extent over here at kbin, where @Ernest has made one helluva incredible engine - we've got domain level filtering for our feeds, and the search capacity is getting pretty cool. Having that same capacity for what we publish would make for an amazing platform.
I would really like to have 2 instances "ONLY Local" and "All
ActivityPub does support that concept. The server and UI need to implement it though.
i really hope we keep conglomerate out of the fediverse... they will commercialize it.
That not really how the fediverse works. A server can defederate them, but there's no way to keep them out of the fediverse as a whole. It's somewhat antithetical to the core purpose behind the fediverse anyway. They can't commercialize your instance.
I think most people believe that defederating means your messages stop going to Facebook when infact it's the other way around. Only way to prevent Facebook from seeing what you're posting here is if they defederate with us which probably is easy to accomplish by having content on your instance that's agains Facebook's terms of service and that you refuse to take it down even if they threaten to defederate.
What defederating (if we do it) does achieve however is that it removes all Threads content from our communities which probably isn't a bad thing either
Please defederate from Meta while it is to our advantage.
Don't federate with Meta, please
I don't want them commercializing the space. I feel as though we came here to get away from that. I fear an EEE tactic at worst, ads possibly showing in my feed at the least. But its not like we can't defederate after launch if it is terrible.
There's no way to inject ads into your feed, except possibly by the admin of your own instance. Meta, or any other actor, could hypothetically use a bunch of bots to promote regular posts that are secretly ads throughout the Fediverse, but that would lead to them getting defederated very quickly by everyone else.
If I wanted to be on meta I'd make a meta account
Honestly, I feel like u/ruud is gonna see these comments and keep Zuck out of things. He seems like he cares about what's going on up in here.
If they are going to block it, I would have thought they have decided that already, though seems like mastodon's head agreed - how much was he paid, I wonder.
Isn’t Threads federating with Mastodon, not Lemmy?
The way the fediverse works is that Mastodon Lemmy Peertube Pixelfed and others all implement the ActivityPub protocol. So if Threads does as well, they will be visible from everywhere. (Example: you can post to lemmy from mastodon and vice versa)
Mastodon and Lemmy are linked (you can see replies form mastodon users and posts), and if threads joins then we are all linked.
There is "one" fediverse. Any instance using ActivityPub can talk to any other instance using ActivityPub for the most part. Depending on details, you may get a degraded experience (like mastodon trying to view Kbin wouldn't work super well). Honestly, there probably won't be too much federation between Lemmy/Kbin instances and Threads. They're not very similar in use.
There's a tonne of comments saying about EEE but people need to be aware that EEE is famous for not being successful
Microsoft themselves who coined the term gave up on the approach after a number of unsuccessful attempts
EEE not being successful doesn't mean it doesn't do any damage on its target.
Microsoft might have given up on it, but that doesn't mean that it haven't done enough damage to cripple its targets.
Zucc-Gate-2023
Have lemmy.world admins said anything about this yet at all?
I can’t even interact on lemmy.world with my mastodon.world account. Is it really worth worrying about Thread accounts being able to interact here?
I have a feeling Thread is never going to bother with ActivityPub anyway. I suspect the threat was only ever a hedge in case Thread wasn’t as wildly successful on launch as it turned out to be.
I think it really depends how big the fediverse becomes. If it becomes popular enough that Meta are missing out on that rich, creamy data mining then you bet they'll do what ever they can to destroy other instances and the fediverse in general.
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
"“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected].”"
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
I’ve seen the quote but not sure how it applies to what I said.
Just because they add ActivityPub support doesn’t mean it will work with Lemmy. That was why I gave the example of Mastodon.world not working with Lemmy.world.
And that quote was from before the launch which is what spurred the second part of my comment.
If they have any access to data through federation they could have just quitely made a small instance and stolen all the data. So while I 100% won't be creating an account over there, and might block the instances myself, I don't see the need to proactively do it.
This doesn't make the argument you think it does. This is an argument against Threads implementing ActivityPub. Everyone is complaining that it'll be terrible content. And Google didn't just do what Meta is doing. Google worked because they had their own ecosystem and had everyone join it. This article lacks a lot of the context involved and was just "big tech company joined a federated place and then left it and that killed that place." That's hardly the case. It's more Google offering a different system. It would have happened even if they didn't join XMPP. Apple hurt XMPP just as much.
Ya I hear that, and I have no interest in twitter or anything like it and don't know how mastadon is used. So It could kill mastadon, but that could happen federated or not. If it does kill, You either die by the frustration when meta federatedly screws you, or by people just moving to threads. I don't know which is more likely as I'm not versed in matadon.
But I see no utility to lemmy/kbin from federation with threads, so sure block it. I'm not seeing the doom for lemmy/kbin though, unless they make a clone of us next. Then I'd block them, because they could do the evil.
In case Lemmy.world doesn't defederate, I need an instance recommendation. Preferably something active. Not lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, I'm not going back to those. Anyone got any ideas?
I'm aware of the beehaw drama... But what's the issue with lemmy.ml?
Yes please block them, I don't want Meta poisoning Lemmy. If I wanted to see facebook content I would have a facebook account, I don't.
I feel like this is entirely against Lemmy.world's ethos of "a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use" (emphasis mine). I for one joined this instance exactly because they didn't have a ban-happy federation policy like some of the other big ones. I understand people's concerns, but if you want a "fuck corporations" walled garden instance, I feel like there are better homes for you somewhere else...
Corporations offer the walled garden. Keeping them and their greedy growth-at-all-costs motives out of here would be better for the community. You have places to go to go enjoy those platforms already. Feel free to use them. Please don't force them on everyone here where they aren't generally welcome and where the communities here do better without them.
We don't have a lot of places to go to get away from them. And again, you can run to them and their platforms without pushing it on the rest of us.
I don't think anyone is forcing anything on anyone? It just sounds like people like you and others in this thread want a more curated instance WRT federation, which I don't think lemmy.world was designed to be (though I'm absolutely keen to be corrected if I've missed something in their policies).
That's the freedom of this platform right, being able to move around to communities that better suit the individual 🤷♂️ Not trying to flame and argument my friend, just sounds like there's a more obvious answer.
Please /u/ruud do the right thing! Block those creatures!
I have some mixed feelings about this
But (and don't hate me for this) If theads joins the fediverse it could actually bring a large user base over
And ofcourse once meta gets greedy the fediverse should do what it's designed for and prevent any large company from owning the fediverse
It could also convince a decent portion of the threads userbase to move over to lemmy or mastodon much easier then they would of been able to in the past since they will already be so close
Tl;Dr Allow meta into the fediverse but if it's shit then defederate them aka do what this system was designed for
I would normally agree with you. However, Facebook is notorious for user manipulation. I suspect they are trying to use the larger federated community to stabilise their own. They know they get maximum engagement out of rage baiting etc. Unfortunately, this also tends to turn the community toxic. If the threads community is diluted down by the fediverse, then they can maximize their milking of threads without killing the golden goose.
Unfortunately for us, things will flow both ways. That toxicity will flow into the fediverse. While the system is designed to deal with this, it can only deal with so much. If we give them their fix, then take it away later, by de-federating, there's nothing to stop them jumping ship to us. That sounds great, until they bring the mentalties from the toxic community that meta created over to us. We don't have the numbers, or history yet to cope and stabilise that sort of influx.
Meta is like gangrene, by the time you realise how serious it is, it's spread everywhere and you're already screwed. The only viable response is to amputate early to protect the rest.
That's fair meta do be pretty shit
I actually would prefer .world not block Facebook's Threads. I have some accounts on other instances that will be blocking them, so I can switch to those if it becomes an issue.
In any case, I think it's a tough decision and I do like .world simply because of how open it is.
I support either decision. I only just got here damn it lol
