Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
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Wtf does EEE mean, why must people assume everyone knows every acronym
This was being discussed actively months ago. People would say the full embrace, extend… then, but now there’s a somewhat fair assumption that most who are actually on Lemmy might have the reference by now.
All you have to do is say, "what does EEE mean? " without the second half of your statement - no need to get angry.
The point of the second half is to try to dissuade others from simply relying on initialisms. It causes introspection. Maybe accusing others of being angry is uncalled for? It’s possible to want to prompt introspection in others without being angry.
The problem is you come across as a demanding jackass and will likely receive a “fuck you” in response rather than the modified behaviour you think you’re engendering.
Using initialisms prompt self learning for those that will, and wilful ignorance for those that will not. No one is responsible for anyone elses individual lack of capacity. Funny how your situation only encourages introspection in one half of the conversation.
What is the point of ever asking a question on the Internet if it should always just be met with “do your own research”? For the record, I did Google around and I couldn’t find that Wikipedia article, and when I did see it in another comment, I didn’t still understand the concept. This comes across as incredibly gatekeeper-y. Don’t understand why I’m not “allowed” into the conversation because I’m being barred from context because I don’t understand an initialism and my research failed.
You are allowed, just ask what it means. Don’t be a whiney little bitch that people aren’t hand feeding you every scrap of information, nobody is cognizant of your ignorance so don’t blame yours on them.
They’re a really good open source contributor with a great track record, I know people don’t like saying good stuff about zuck related things but they’ve helped progress machine learning quite a bit. Pytourch is a great example iirc used in stable diffusion
Textbook FUD.
DECADES long? Facebook didn’t even exist 2 decades ago bud. We know they’re shit but you don’t need to go around exaggerating everything and being so dramatic.
how DARE you miss 6 months? This just proves how righteous and noble facebook is if you have to lie about it!
/s
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lemm.ee already made the decision, based off of the voice of the community to defederate from Threads
Lemmy.Ca admins blocked Threads about 5 months ago: https://lemmy.ca/comment/901551
You can confirm that Threads dot net is still blocked by Lemmy.Ca by going to https://lemmy.ca/instances and clicking on the “Blocked Instances” tab.
Thanks, I actually forgot that one can check!
lemmy.dbzer0.com also blocked Threads
please take a look at the replies under zuck’s own post in threads.net and determine if that’s the type of content you want.
for those who don’t want to visit, majority of the commentators are bots. some advertising crypto, and others asking for money.
even if you think you can individually block those accounts, keep in mind the size of threads compared to fediverse.
for Lemmy: monthly active users are barely150K40K, while for threads it’s 100 million. there’s no chance you can control that inflow of bots.and if it still doesn’t convince you, you can read threads’ privacy policy, which states that they’ll gather all that pii if you interact with their content.
most of the internet is already bigtech, I don’t want Lemmy to become another arm of it. though I have faith in my instance maintainer and dessalines, the dev.
Let users decide because we’re fucking adults.
Great thing about the fediverse
People get to decide what they want from their platform
Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.
People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.
In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.
Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.
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think jerboa lets you block instances
Then go join threads.net? Nobody’s stopping you from doing that. That would put you on a server friendly to your beliefs.
Server admins also have opinions, and are not required to take a democratic vote and each individual user’s choice into account. They can decide for themselves, and they will, for good or ill. If you don’t like where it ends up, your user decision should be to fuck off to threads.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying.
They’re saying that some users and admins might choose to wait and see
“Yes, Jeffrey has, in the past, killed and eaten gay men. But we should wait and see. It’s impolite not to invite him to the party!”
I don’t want to use their platform, but I get why some people might choose to stay federated so that there is incentive to pull people to mastodon and educate people about the issues
There’s enough nuance there that I’m not dead set on either side, and I think we still have the chance to defederate later if there’s an increase in spam and harmful content / disinformation.
“Jeffrey doesn’t always eat people. Just sometimes. We should totally go clubbing with him and spurn him later if he eats one of us.”
This is a bigger issue to leave it to users imo. Like lemm.ee admin said a few months ago, threads is too fucking big.
Anything they push on the fediverse will be what users see in All. Plus, popular stuff on threads is determined through Facebook’s algorithm, and it will also determine the fediverse recommendations by consequence.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
However, lemmy 0.19 block feature doesn’t work on users of an instance, only posts hosted in an instance. Add to this that Facebook is a cancerous company making all its money from ads. Expect their bots to comment and make posts pushing ads on all instances.
All of this will also mean high workload on mods to regulate the content. Threads doesn’t bring anything good here, and defederation is probably the only way to protect us.
The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
Yes. One minute of a user’s time and all that’s gone.
Compare that with having to move instances due to admins blocking at the instance level.
oh no is lose convenience
You have the full right to decide, you can switch servers to one that chooses to, or open multiple accounts. That’s your choice. This isn’t Nostr, in the Fediverse instance blocking is normal and it happens without your input, but you know what does happen with your input? Registering your account on a server that fits your needs best, or as close as possible.
Generally, yes. Perhaps unpopularly, I don’t need to decide about suddenly having meta content in Lemmy. I expect that’s not ever gonna happen.
Having Elongated Musk or Fart Suckerberg in my stream cannot be the default, but at best, opt in.
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Imagine thinking Myanmar is facebooks fault. Wow.
That one is actually public record, with
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Facebook using their influence to set up in the country in a way that made it the dominant form of internet access for the country, enough that a large number of people considered Facebook=internet
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Facebook getting multiple reputable warnings about what was happening on the platform, what their advertising policies and algorithms were encouraging, and they chose to not act on them and instead continued to profit from it
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They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
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Read up rookie
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/
I don’t know what version of reality you live in but i hope these articles are illuminating
🙄 I guess the years of violence well before hand we their fault too. Imagine trying to tie years off violence and genocide to Facebook.
It’ll always be Burna to me.
Their direct fault? No. But they sure as fuck share a lot of the blame in pouring gasoline on the fire.
This is why I don’t understand all the hysteria about this.
If I don’t want to see Threads or I don’t want Threads to see me, I can go to a Threads account and click “block threads.net”.
But obviously that’s too complicated and it’s easier to just whinge to your instance admin about how Threads federation will be the death of us all. 🙄
If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?
What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?
What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?
Well, that’s spam. So obviously it would make sense to block that.
Sure, but where is the line between spam and threads content? If the content a community produces is heavily manipulated, isn’t that undesirable for all the same reasons as spam ?
This. Imagine begging daddy admin to protect you from mean Meta.
Imagine zucking on Marks schlong.
You understand that no matter how much you kneel down to service Meta, Zuck the Fuck won’t be trickling anything down on you that isn’t a bodily fluid, right?
And hey, I’m not going to kink-shame. Just pointing out that if that isn’t your specific kink, you might want to wake up to there being zero dollars trickling down to you.
What a meaningless, worthless comment. Letting Threads federate with the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t give Zuckerberg power over us (unless you’d care to explain how it does) - rather, it just gives its users and our users the ability to interacted. Why are you so interested in building walls?
I swear, I’m seeing the western equivalent of wumaos servicing Meta here. Only at least the wumaos got paid; it made sense. These idiots are doing the labour for free!
It seems like you didn’t read my comment, since yours has very little to do with it.
Say “I don’t know what a wumao is” without using those words.
Again, you are not replying to the content of my comment. You want socialism to be taken seriously as an ideology? Not making everything a shitpost could be a good place to start.
Comment stolen from user “copygirl” from blahaj.zone:
Looks like they’ll be harvesting your data if you follow anyone from Threads, maybe even injecting ads. Unsure what happens to the data of people that get followed by a Threads user. A large part of the fediverse is here precisely because they want to escape corporate meddling, data-hoarding, advertising and other anti-user malpractices. There’s a number of people talking about this, here’s a recent post that highlights some of the things from their TOS.
Is there any sort of legal precedent that covers a situation where:
- I am a user on a network server.
- Meta connects their server to my server so their users and I can interact.
- Am I now bound by a terms of service on Meta’s server that I have not agreed to and may have never seen or been presented with?
When I joint my instance, am I implicitly agreeing to any terms of service that exist on any instance that my instance decides to federate with?#
Someone actually asked an almost identical question on StackEx a while ago. (things may have changed since) From what I got from skimming the answer, is there is precedence, and it should be covered within the TOS of the hosting website/network (i.e. lemmy.world)
Lemmy and mastodon profiles are public so I don’t know if privacy concerns are a problem unique to federation with meta considering they could just scrape your profile if they wanted the data that bad. I’d be much more concerned about small instance admins losing funding as users migrate to instances that federate with meta until threads and the big instances are the only ones left on the fediverse
In favor of defederation. If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances. I don’t want Meta pushing their divisive, hateful, misinformation all up in my feeds. Meta will kill fedi. We don’t need them.
Yeah. I’ll switch to an instance that is defederated from Threads, if mine doesn’t.
I left Meta’s other properties to avoid state sponsored hate speech. I won’t use a platform that gives hate speech a platform.
I don’t need to wait to know if Meta will do that. I already know.
Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances.
You can just block the domain on a per-user basis for yourself instead of trying to control content what others see just because you don’t like it.
Has that facility been added to Lemmy yet, even?
Yes, the new release came out yesterday.
If anything meta integrates here I’m out.
Currently, I think there are two main branches of ActivityPub implementations: Microblogs(Mastodon and its forks, the microblog portion of kbin), which are user centric, and group based aggregators(Lemmy, Kbin, peertube, future Pixelfed), both of which are valid implementations, however, they don’t really work well with each other.
So, I believe that the threat of Threads to Lemmy instances is really overblown for the simple reason that there is no way for a Lemmy user to browse microblog contents through federation to begin with, whether it be Mastodon or Threads.
Kbin actually does let you look at and browse microblogs as well as threads.
Let’s not defederate from every corporate player. Some of them can probably respect reasonable rules of civility.
But fuck Meta. We already know how this plays out.
We know there’s a huge wave of hatred and misinformation incoming. We’ve seen it on their other platforms.
When Tumblr came out about the idea of opening up and using activity pub people were in favor of that idea. It’s not just hating companies, Facebook really has a bad track record when it comes to abusive practices and also extremely poor content moderation (you can find right wing hate speech on Facebook despite them having policies against it, people report it and nothing happens).
There was an interesting paired poll done, asking about federation with Threads and federation with Tumblr.
66% of people were wary of or actively opposed federating with Threads. Fewer than 20% were wary of or actively opposed federating with Tumblr.
It’s not “defederate from every corporate player”. It’s passing this message on to Meta:
Okay. I’ve seen stuff like this on both mastodon, and here, but i haven’t heard about them doing anything that would actually harm the fediverse. I guess i don’t know what the problem is. I know they’ve got a negative reputation, and for good reason, but isn’t that the awesome part of threads being federated? We can follow and connect to people there without being part of their system, and therefor not susceptible to their bs? If I’m missing something please fill me in.
It is inevitable that Meta will try to kill the fediverse while chasing profits, there is no other possibility in their endgame.
If that is pushing ads into other instances or killing those instances entirely we don’t know yet but it will happen.
It has to because the shareholders must always have more.
I just don’t think it’s possible for something to kill the fediverse. And if it is possible, then it is a flaw in the design of the fediverse and needs to be fixed.
Are you planning to pay for the extra bandwith to deal with all the additional traffic?
Meta will.
And then when they own the servers amd all the traffic, lemmy will be quietly murdered.
Quietly, because they’ll control the traffic, and therefore the narrative
All activity pub needed to do was create a user rights guidelines that prevents profiting off the data. Meta wouldn’t have touched the Fediverse with the 10-foot pole, if that were the case.
Lololol and what legal mechanism are you going to use to enforce that?
ActivityPub is a protocol, not a fucking organization. It literally has no agency.
You can licence a protocol
ActivityPub can’t license anything. When you identify actual human beings in this conversation, perhaps you might have a point. So far you don’t.
First off, calm the hell down. You’re being needlessly antagonistic.
Secondly, it seems like the W3C is the publisher of the activity pub standard seems like they ducats what is an isnt compliant.
Seems like of was specifically authored by a team including Evan Prodromou according to the wiki.
If they wanted too, but like literally and open source software, it could have been given licencing requirements
Specifically, my research has turned up that implementations of these protocols can be licensed. Threads’ version of ActivityPub likely has its own licence. I think it would be safe to say that the creators of Lemmy and Mastodon specifically could have privacy rights dictated within their license implementation. That would nullify threads legal capabilities.
People have been writing about this ad nauseum. It’s the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Join fediverse, extend the spec with so that not all clients are compatible with all features, repeat as necessary until everyone is using your client, finally drop compatibility with other clients.
Just think:
Meta has literal billions of users.
The entire fediverse has about 1.5 million.
Less than a fraction of a percent.
Why in THE FUCK would meta notice, or care, at fucking all? The entire fediverse of traffic ported over to meta wouldn’t budge their advertising bottom line.
But, it’s a comparatively small group of smart people, having conversations, and profiles they don’t have tabs and near total control over.
There’s news about cop city and gaza I have seen here that I’ve seen NOWHERE else.
Don’t let them control the narrative here
Well, then, let’s make our point I’ll just email the holders of the instances I’m on and let them know I support defederating threads
Why in THE FUCK would meta notice, or care, at fucking all?
Why do people ask rhetorical questions without following through?!
This is a question that should be asked. If, indeed, the fediverse is so unimportant WHY THE FLYING FUCK IS META INTERESTED IN FEDERATING WITH IT!?!? THAT is the question people should be asking, given that Meta does nothing that isn’t designed to add more money to Zuck the Fuck’s portfolio.
And yet … most people (for clarity, I don’t mean you here!) don’t ask that question. They don’t take that question you ask and wonder beyond that first kneejerk level. Use that question instead as a “LOL Meta doesn’t care about the fediverse” piece of evidence.
And this is why we can’t have nice things.
The fediverse is an emerging threat. It’s not ready yet, but it’s on the right trajectory. Every time there’s angst on some other platform, the fediverse get’s a bump. Fediverse is not a real competitor yet, perhaps it never will be, but for meta it’s sensible to establish a presence here in the short term, because it may be much more difficult later.
Threads doesnt have that much users I think. Fb, insta and whatsapp do have a lot of users but I dont expect a lot of users comming from there
But that’s good. Meta doesn’t care about Lemmy or Mastodon because they’re tiny. Threads is a threat to Twitter. They want to integrate with Mastodon just because Twitter doesn’t. That’s it.
They’re not going for “total control” of your conversation about Gaza. You are not important to them. You are not the main character in some David and Goliath story. There are only Goliaths.
Do you know why Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram? Instagram wasn’t worth that much. It wasn’t generating a billion dollars in revenue. It probably still doesn’t.
Facebook bought Instagram because Instagram was a growing app that was popular with a demographic Facebook wanted to control. They spent a billion dollars to eliminate a growing threat.
Mastodon and, to a lesser extent, Lemmy, represent a growing threat. Not a very big one right now, but it could become a bigger one. It could become another billion dollar problem for the goliaths on the Internet, in a few years. They need to have total control, if a social media app starts to fragment it just collapses instead as users decide to go wherever the other users are.
Facebook’s 1000:1 user ratio would make Lemmy irrelevant and stave off that billion dollar problem for Facebook down the road. An incredibly cheap way to kill a tiny but growing competitor.
They don’t want to federate because Twitter does not.
But neither to “extinguish” Mastodon or so. They need it as a defense like Google uses Mozilla, showcasing that not only do they enjoy competition, they in fact actively support it, by making their content available over there, too.
Because like you say, the entirely metaverse is so tiny compared to meta, thy could not give a flying fuck whatever the reason if it’s about anything competitive. But they can utilize the tiny underdog as a shield from criticism. And that’s valuable to them.
People are concerned because there were examples of such things going horribly wrong, most notably with Google and XMPP.
Way back in the day, Google announced that its Talk messenger will support XMPP, which made decentralization fans very happy - finally, they can communicate with everyone from the comfort of their decentralized instance!..oh.
Google started implementing features in Talk that are incompatible with XMPP, and then dropped XMPP support altogether, ending up deprecating Talk in favor of Google-only Hangouts. This forced many XMPP users to get into Google’s ecosystem, since the people they contacted through XMPP were mostly just using Google Talk, and they couldn’t be contacted through XMPP any more. As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
now most of their contacts were in defederated Google to which they now didn’t have access.
this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.
We should tread lightly!
Meta will be okay making money off lemmy indirectly for a while. Then, if they grow, they’ll want more than a toehold.
When it’s Facebook, trust that greed and power are the goals.
It’ll be successful and the current devs will lose the ability to unilaterally control the project.
So competition, that’s what they are afraid of.
We should avoid making blanket demands like this to the fediverse as a whole. I happen to support your position, but we should take into account the diverse nature of the social web.
Instead of making demands, explain your reasoning and leave each community to make up their own mind. This is the beautiful nature of the social web; we have broken decision making down into many smaller units instead of one mega instance/corporation.
Find a community that resonates with your own thinking on this issue, and over time a thousand different servers will gather experiences and a picture will start to form; was federation with Meta a good or a bad thing?
0.19 allows users themselves to block instances…
Meta is a threat to the platform though.
They are a threat to humanity as a whole
So do preemptively defederate when any corporation makes a new instance?
I’ve seen strong support for Tumblr federation adoption, so no. Context is important.
If you don’t subscribe to threads you’ll never see it.
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Because threads doesn’t have communities. All threads people can do it comment.
They can post to communities by mentioning their handle, mastodon users do it all the time. They’re certainly not going to be as much of a problem for us since it’s a deliberate process, but it’s also not that far fetched that users will sign up there to abuse it, especially if threads has poor moderation (it’s not looking good as it is).
will i see (negative) culture change
Undoubtedly.
Great and such, but the large majority that might come to the Fediverse will never look nor use that function. If we don’t defederate with our instances now, we never will.
The thing you don’t get is that more common people will find the lemmy servers for the first time. Additionally it is more of a Twitter clone and doesn’t threaten much.
What do you mean by “find Lemmy servers?” I mean, can you describe how that will look like from the perspective of someone that is using threads? And how that will motivate more common people to change the platform or browsing behavior?
Lemmy.world is a server running lemmy software. It’s federated so you can subscribe to lw communities of Mastodon and comment as well. Threads and Mastodon don’t support communities though so all they can do is subscribe and comment. There is no negative to lemmy servers of Threads being federated. Threads users will subscribe to lemmy communities, but stay on Threads. If you’re on a lemmy server it doesn’t change anything. You’ll just see posts and comments with accounts ending with @threads
From my understanding of your earlier comment you said casual Threads users will find out about Lemmy servers for the first time and I asked about how that will work out from the perspective of a threads user. I hoped for an answer of that.
Exact same experience as a Mastodon user.
*everyone doesn’t
I can kinda see the point, but also without providing actual reasons, this post just seems like a LARP.