Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time

I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”

Your intentions mean exactly nothing when you're being paid by Zuckerberg.

It also doesn't actually matter what you intend, because the problem isn't just what the platform can do, it's about Meta being in this space and trying to stake a claim in it. We came here to escape you. Go the fuck away.

Right? I don't care what their intentions are, if they continue to house hate groups, their "intentions" count for exactly nothing
- I fully believe that metas only intention of joining the fediverse is to find a way to undermine it. Nothing more.
Their intentions don't matter. Meta's only intention is make line go up. They will either consume or extinguish the fediverse with the rest of the corps. I'll be leaving lemmy.world the minute thread federates. I'm just gonna be a lazy ass until then.
- I thought I understood lemmy.world's position several months ago was to not federate with Threads. This was the vocal position of many instances. Has this changed?
- Agreed, my reaction will mainly be "oh no - creates account on another instance - well anyway..."
I don't get these people. They knowingly chose to work for Meta after everything that company's done. You don't get to pretend you're the good guy anymore. They're by far the most evil big tech company on the planet and that says a fucking lot when you're up against MS, Oracle, Google and Apple
- At a very desperate time in my life I worked for Comcast. Everytime something bad happens to me now I know I deserve it and that it is karma coming back to me.
- Money is a great way to induce cognitive dissonance
Maybe the engineering team has good intentions, but Zuck and his Fucks surely don't.
- I don't believe for a second that any of them have good intentions.
I'm not a fan of Meta and I don't want to join Threads. But there may be some people over there I would like to follow. At least on Mastodon, we can block any instance we choose to manually. I hate when instances make the decision for me.

Defederation should be a last resort when there are so many options here for people to tailor their own feeds.
How long before they spam us with their ads, pushing them as posts?

Defederate.

They can have a corporate silo. They can use an open standard. But they cannot do anything good for the fediverse. The best thing for the fediverse is to let them exist as a walled garden (and we can put up the wall).

There are about 10 million users on the free fediverse. That number has grown steadily and sustainably. There are 160 million threads users. They were instantaneously leveraged onto the platform by a billion dollar corporation (possibly in violation of antitrust laws).

If we federate, Threads won't become a part of the fediverse; threads will become the fediverse.

EEE

True that. I will make a spam not that shall post meta decent
I'm deleting my Lemmy account because it's just
- hey guys have you seen Candlejack he was right

Ill move to server that has defederated meta completely

You can find servers based on Threads defederation through this site. Since you don't want anything to do with Threads, I suggest filtering by 'blocked' and 'Fedipact' I'm not sure what the difference is between the two is though, so I'd appreciate if someone would explain.
- theres also https://defed.xyz/
- I don't really care about that, but given that defederation with particular instances is a good way to get a feel for what content and instance allows/disallows, it'd be nice to be able to filter instances on https://lemmyverse.net and https://lemmy.fediverse.observer and https://kbin.fediverse.observer by whether an instance is defederated or not with some list of other instances. Like, maybe you want an instance that federates with instances providing pornography (lemmynsfw.com) but not extremist political positions (hexbear.net). Right now, it's a very manual process to check the federation list on many instances.
- I'm not sure what the difference is between the two is though, so I'd appreciate if someone would explain.
  
  Looks like to be part of the fedipact you have to sign this: https://fedipact.online/
- How does one "move" to a different instance? Or do I have to make a new account and start over?
- I signed the fedipact yet mine isn't listed there, at least it says "blocked".
I was thinking about joining one that's federated with them. I'd get a look at the normal side of the internet, what's going on there without having to join I forgot what's it called.
- Nah that is a positive for them as they will harvest the data on that server, so that is a no for me.

Fuck letting the Zuckin billionaire into this party! Build your own shit communities with your own shitty user base

<sigh> I'll miss my cozy little Lemmy...

The upsides are apparent for the platform, but there's no denying that change will be inevitable for all of us, whether some instances choose to defederate or not.

What your Lemmy feed looks like is 90% up to you. Subscribe to things that you find interesting and block what you don't want to see.
- That's a great solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

I don't mind the threads integration much actually.

The idea that they will destroy it by just... Being a bigger instance? Because they can influence development? Isn't this shit developed by a tanky? A self-proclaimed stalinist? Why the hell would they capitulate to a megacorp? I'm more worried about the actual developers ruining this shit than Meta and Threads.
- Even if you aren’t against federating with threads on principle part of the challenge is going to be able to keep up with moderating their entire user base en-masse and being able to afford the cost of federating content from so many users at once.
  
  It’s a burden I doubt a lot of smaller instances can handle.
- I mostly agree. The one thing I will say in favour of defederation is hate content. Meta has incredibly lax moderation. People can literally say "this person deserves to be killed", or even "I would absolutely murder this person if I came across them" and Meta will be like "yeah we understand this may be disappointing to you, but we're gonna allow that to stay" if you report it.
- Yes, by being a bigger instance with piss poor moderation. We'd be overrun with trolls and spammers
- they could develop new features but intentionally implement them in a way that they are not compatible with other services. they could put all the other instances they federate with on rolling blackouts so that it seems like they are down when in fact it's just them cutting the connection. doing just these two things with purpose could make it look like Facebook has the most advanced and stable instance. in addition, as you mentioned, it would also have the biggest populace. there would be pressure to abandon other instances to join that instance to stay in touch.
- yes, by being a massively bigger instance their algorithm will have a huge impact on the feed algorithms on the fediverse side. If they show a post in their algorithm in threads, it will get massively more engagement due to just being shown to a larger user base
  
  The only "solution" is granular federation - the fediverse side could treat them differently, say by having their posts and comments count less when building a feed... But that's easier said than done. Do they build a "threads ranking" feature into the core, or do they they give admins the tools to build specific configurations for federation?
  
  It's definitely not present in Lemmy, and I don't believe Mastodon has it either. And on that topic...
  
  they have granular control over their own federation. They're a monolith where the fediverse isn't - if they want to sprinkle in fediverse content, it's much easier for them. If they want to publish only their most controversial content to the fediverse, they can. They can do it at any time telling no one
  
  For example, there was a post claiming they're blocking toots referencing pixel fed. I don't know if it's true or not, but they easily could. And in doing so, they effectively derank those posts in the fediverse (see point 1)
  
  they could EEE conventionally, by extending the activity pub standard to serve their needs, or by making the fediverse reliant on their content then pulling away
  
  There's a lot of ways they can leverage their size as a weapon. They're not another instance, they're a private monolith running their own code... And they have a terrible track record
yeah if threads integration means that i could interact with my friends threads posts with mastodon account i don't mind it. it's not like they are gonna use mastodon. maybe there might be a chance that people on threads might visit mastodon once they are fed up with spams on threads.
- The chance is higher that threads will add some features mastodon doesn't support and then people will leave mastodon for threads.
  
  embrace extend extinguish
Genuinely surprised to see this comment so high up, with so many more upvotes than downvotes. I personally have no problem with Threads, and some of the higher-profile celebrities, comics and artists I want to follow are already there. That I can add other fediverse accounts to my feed, or add Threads accounts into my Mastadon/Lemmy apps, it's a win.

I'm not oblivious to why folks don't like it and want no part of Zuckerberg's companies. I still prefer open platforms to closed ones, and Zuck seems to understand that too. I personally don't buy the EEE fears. This ain't Microsoft.
I was kind of hoping the hysteria would be over by now. Walled gardens are a bad thing, I'm pleased when holes are poked in them.
- "Hysteria", that's one way to belittle people.
Yeah I don't understand the issue.

People want the fediverse to grow, so FB entering it is a good thing no? Otherwise realistically the fediverse will likely stagnate and always just take up a tiny bit of space.

The more people involved the better. Sometimes I feel this group just wants to shoot themselves in the foot.
- I DON'T want the fediverse to grow if that growth is full of extremists, hate groups, porn bots, etc.
- The issue is that Meta's intention is to extinguish the fediverse, not to add to it. I can't believe people are still falling for this tactic.

With about a thousand new daily sign ups to mastodon it feels like it is going back to its rapid degrowth that it has been on before the Twitter debacle.

Fuck Zuckerberg!!

Doesn't Lemmy let users block instances? So no issue here.

The problem seems to be with Mastodon (and possibly others like Pixelfed, Bookwyrm, etc), which I think is controlled at instance level. Fortunately, the admin of the Mastodon instance I'm on has defederated Threads.