With the upcoming #meta #Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it.
➡️ To avoid data mining …
However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scr...
It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
Defederate (wait and see)
Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It's all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I'm not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
We need to think this through from the standpoint of an instance admin who is trying to figure out how to use Threads to make their instance grow. That’s really the only motivation I can think of to federate with Threads. Otherwise it’s just all downside. As a corporate social media entity, they are entirely opposed to everything Lemmy stands for philosophically, and their scale is a massive threat to the culture and operations of the much smaller fediverse. Why would anyone ever want to federate with them? Because they see it as an opportunity. To ride the dragon, thinking it can be controlled. This is madness. Choice 4 all the way and if it becomes necessary, 5.
The beauty of the Fediverse is you do not need to make everyone else agree with you. It is important that mods know what you want; what you think other people should want is irrelevant.
No, you don’t need to go around making other people agree with you, on the fediverse or anywhere, really.
But if you are going to enter into a mutual risk/benefit relationship with another party, it does help to understand what their motivations are, so you can figure out if they’re going to line up with your own, or lead to conflict.
My post is about trying to understand those parties’ motivations. Not make everyone agree with me.
They already got millions of users. Depending how they'll implement federation, the sudden influx of millions of unmoderated users into the fediverse might wreak havoc to small instances. So personally, I prefer no. 3, defederate (wait and see).
I'm starting to dislike the concept of ActivityPub. It gives power to the admins instead of to the users. Users should be able to decide what servers they connect to and what content they see. I hope another protocol like Nostr becomes more popular.
Yeah that's something I've not seen discussed here much. I get that people want control, but getting started with an ActivityPub centric site (like kbin) is now cheaper than ever. Get your own cheap hosting on a VPS and handle some traffic.
People can even create their own instances just to federate with everyone and absorb their content if they're worried about the rules and regulations or "x server not connecting with y"
Overall I think it's a pretty good system compared to a single silo like Reddit
When the barrier to entry is technical in nature you get a selection of the competent in that space as your representation. It's not perfect, but it beats zuck, musk and Huffman.
I’m paying for the server. I’m handling all the maintenance, moderation, etc. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna allow nazis or whatever other horrible shit is out there anywhere near my instance. I’m not going to enable bigotry. Fuck that.
Everyone can see my instance’s TOS as well as who I’ve defederated and why. If they don’t like it, they can find another instance. They’re not entitled to an account on mine.
Nostr is the Bitcoiner protocol. It's simple but inflexible and not that censorship resistant (if you don't run your own relay you can lose data). ATP is more like Ethereum, way more complex but you can build actually useful apps with it.
So why is it important to not federate (or block) with Thread? Asking seriously. I read the article and while those are valid and real concerns. What is the net gain of that action? How does it help the fediverse? I cant see any way that it helps and lots of ways it hurts. At this point it seems like a lot of what ifs.
Edit:
If you need the reasons why to block Threads (meta) I think the answers below explain it better than most!
From what I understand, they're likely trying to kill the fediverse by making it irrelevant (embrace, extend, extinguish) seeing how it's finally starting to grow, since they can't just buy it up this time like they've always done to competitors.
Even aside from that though, their algorithms designed to retain user attention by any means necessary are definitely going to seep into and poison the fediverse, at least indirectly, if they're federated.
Not to mention they could easily run ads as normal posts and boost them artificially; they are an ad company after all. Wouldn't put it past them.
Not federating with them means we don't have to deal with all that, and the fediverse can just continue to grow naturally as it's been doing.
Federating on the other hand means a very real risk of permanently halting the fediverse's growth in favour of corporations', like Google did to XMPP
That's a good point. Would it not make more sense to block/de-federate when they start being bad actors rather than preemptively block? I'm not saying that preparing is bad, I think it's very much need and valid to assume they will be bad actors. I would like to be wrong and believe that being good hosts is better for their bottom lines. I do not expect them to do anything good because it's the "right" thing.
Defederating is a one-way transaction. Any instance that defederates from Threads will only stop themselves from receiving data from it, but Threads will still be able to pull data directly from any and all instances.
@ninekeysdown@jocanib i would say its because its meta trying to get a foothold on the fediverse and possibly take people away from here. people might just use threads instead of mastodon or lemmy since they can get the content on threads. my take
Wouldn't more people using federated software be a good thing? EEE is a valid concern eg XMPP (GTalk). I'm not sure (not saying it's impossible) how that would happen in this case. I see it being more like email than XMPP for instance. I could be way too idealistic & optimistic as well
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
I agree. All the Fediverse is to the Silicon Valley firms is the current buzzword. Like you said; if- and to me, it's a question of if and not when- Fediverse integration gets built into Threads, it's gonna be limited. My bet is that somehow they're gonna make it so that Threads instances can only federate with other Threads instances.
And that's if it exists at all. I feel there's a considerable chance that Meta just throws away the Fediverse integration idea. Either it's too much effort for too little profit, or some new buzzword comes along for them to chase.
4 is honestly my preference. I don’t see the need to defederate from instances that federate with Threads. But I do want to see a list of instances that federate with Threads so I can personally never comment or post there. I don’t like the idea of comments and posts I make being used to generate ad revenue for Facebook.
Make your own instance, defederate from everyone, make 20 accounts, disable account registration, post from 2 or 3 accounts, upvote from the rest and make conversations.
Only real threats of Threads federation are EEE and server overload. Not the people from there or privacy. If someone wants to see some content you don't want to see, like some opinion you don't like, they should be able to see it. I don't understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time. I have heard Threads has a pretty good moderation, so that solves this problem anyway.
I don't get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
I don’t understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time.
A major point of the Fediverse is that you can choose instances based on their moderation policies. If you want fash crawling your timeline, join an instance which allows fash to crawl your timeline.
I don't get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.
Site A hosts communities that serve vulnerable people. They see Meta as a threat to those vulnerable communities, as they are not well moderated, and have no issues with hate speech and harassment, so they defederate.
Site B federates with both Site A and Meta. They act as a pass-through for content from Site A to reach Threads.
Bad actors on Threads see content from vulnerable people on Site A and engage with it. People from Site A cannot see the bad actors on Threads doing this, but people on Site B do, and bad actors there get alerted to an opportunity to be proper shit stains. Now, vulnerable people on Site A get targeted by this induced harassment coming from Site B.
What does Site A do?
They defederate from Site B.
The question is just about whether they wait until the harm has been done or not.
Defederation is a one-way block of incoming traffic from the blocked instance. I'm on lemmy.world and can still see Beehaw content posted by Beehaw users even though they've defederated from lemmy.world, but if I comment on that content it will only be visible to lemmy.world users. Beehaw has protected its communities from lemmy.world commenters, but its content is still accessible by anyone for any purpose. Instances that federate with both sides don't change this.
I am a fediverse enthusiast and I am excited for Threads federating. I hope it incentivises Tumblr to federate also and then we actually finally have proper choice.
I hate to say it but we already need a better Twitter and Reddit alternative than what the fediverse has to offer, then. Each time a big company comes in, the communities will get thrown into disarray, eat eachother, and generally make the original 'vision' of the fediverse smaller and smaller. People will use what is easy, not what is best for their interests (at least for the vast majority). The solution is still open source, community managed and driven content, but it doesn't look like the fediverse is a long-term answer.
I tend to agree but there may be some small and especially vulnerable communities which need the privacy. I don't know but I'm happy as long as everyone gets to have an instance which suits them.
Not that 1 and 2 are best though. 2 and 3 unless you want to be drowning in swastikas and child porn.
If there's no such thing as authentication when you view posts, you have no privacy anyway. Everything you post online can be seen by anyone and archived anytime. It's not like you have privacy when you post now.
The whole point of this is that I want my instance to federate with threads. I want to be able to interact with my friends on there from the safety of the fediverse. I don't want to have Mastodon for Mastodon and Mastodon for Threads. I want Mastodon for the Fediverse.
I just want to know about new games and whatever else that interests me. Why’s that so hard.
Then only subscribe to communities related to your interests. This is what I do and I avoid pretty much all the irrelevant stuff that I don't want to see.
Meta-discussion about the Fediverse will happen in [email protected] since that's what this community is about.
If 9 regular people sit down with a nazi without protest, you have 10 nazis. Threads will absolutely not stop nazis from posting nazi stuff. We know this because Facebook is full of nazis. Why would anyone want nazis at their table? Because they’re nazis. Anyone who wants to federate with Threads is a nazi. Do you want to federate with nazis? Option 5 is really the only way to keep the nazis away from the table. This is not an exaggeration. There are literal nazis given free reign on Facebook. There will be literal nazis given free reign on Threads. If you don’t stop the nazis because you want to interact with your friends who interact with nazis, you’re enabling nazis. Don’t enable nazis. I can’t stress enough they are literally nazis.
Apparently this guy thinks Nazis are everywhere. Almost reminds me of Russian propaganda, Ukraine is full of Nazis we need to go over there and clean house etc.
It sounds like they just don't like people with differing opinions and anyone who doesn't toe the line must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser 🙄
Are you saying people who call themselves nazis and wear nazi memorabilia and fly swastikas and are antisemites and think the nazis were the good guys during WWII are not literally nazis? Because I’ve got news for you, buddy. They’re nazis. Literally.