I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.
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Well, right now Meta is pushing, not pulling. Meaning, Threads content can be displayed on Masto, but not the other way around.
IMHO, the bigger threat is having Threads content completely dominate other activity pub clients. Other clients / communities could get dependent on it. Then Meta is basically a drug dealer with leverage.
Data collection doesn’t bother me too much. I’m not going to install their client and all of the behavior trackers that come with it, and my activity pub content is already freely available to query on the internet. If they want it, they already have access to it. Everyone does.
Since lemmy can’t pull from mastodon/threads, it seems like a complete non issue for now.
Correct. This is an issue for Masto, not Lemmy. It may never be an issue for Lemmy for all we know. Lemmy is focused on following activity pub communities not individual people.
Interesting. It seems that Lemmy can see Mastodon users and send private messages to them. And I believe Mastodon users can create Lemmy posts, so potentially Threads users could do that too once Meta enables two-way communication.
It all depends on how the Meta teams implements ActivityPub and which parts of it.
Data collection doesn’t bother me too much. I’m not going to install their client and all of the behavior trackers that come with it, and my activity pub content is already freely available to query on the internet. If they want it, they already have access to it. Everyone does.
I will be able to follow and see friends’ posts and sports teams’ posts through Mastodon without needing a Meta account nor install their shitty apps.
All I posted via fediverse is public already, traveling into some obscure instances, so I don’t care if Meta uses or shares my public posts.
This, the real threat is the amount of content that federates out possibly hurting others servers’ performance as their enterprise kit will scale better.
I like your perspective. More people need to realize that they are responsible for what they put out there.
Threads content completely dominate other activity pub clients. Other clients / communities could get dependent on it. Then Meta is basically a drug dealer with leverage.
How? Because this doesn’t make an yota of sense to me.
Flipboard federated. Are you flooded with news from them?
even if they are only “pushing”, there will still need to be profile data exchanged with Threads in order to access it, if they have http signatures enabled (i.e. authorized fetch under mastodon)
I was surprised to see lemmy.world didn’t defederate. I hope it does. And, I hope a mod weighs in on the planned direction for the instance.
There is no real need right now. Lemmy is focused on following communities, not individuals. This is more of an issue for Mastodon than Lemmy.
It might never be an issue for Lemmy. Threads would need to start organizing people around communities, or Lemmy would need to encourage people to follow individuals (something Reddit promoted and no one cared about)
That’s actually an argument for defederating atm. Because Lemmy can’t pull Threads content, but Threads can without making that fact public.
Not sure what you mean. They can already pull any public data on lemmy, as can anyone else.
Whichever way instances decide to go there’s a few things people should remember:
- We’re lucky to have this option even if it’s divisive at times.
- It’s not always about what we know will happen, sometimes it’s concern over possibilities we couldn’t even imagine at the time.
- Growth is great but there’s infrastructure, moderators and policies that can be overwhelmed.
- Defederation can be reversed at any time if things change.
Federation can also be reverted at any times if they misbehave. Why should we block them in advance?
Track record.
Historical precedent and #2/#3 on my list above make the case for erring on the side of caution. That and we’ve got far more to lose than to gain.
I’m actually really trying to play devils advocate… But I’m struggling.
I came to get away from the main stream socials.
I came to minimise my farmed data footprint.
I came to find other like minded people.
These principals alone are shared by quite a few I guess.
If we end up hooked up to the machine we were trying to escape from then coming here was near pointless.
I came to get away from the main stream socials.
You still can. Just block threads.net instance in things like Mastodon and Lemmy.
I came to minimise my farmed data footprint.
Your data is public in fediverse. They can scrape even right as we speak.
I would need someone to confirm this, but I have heard that if you block, then it prevents their instance from scraping your data because they shouldn’t receive your content if they are blocked, but it doesn’t change the public data being available by other means anyways.
I came to find other like minded people.
Follow hashtags and communities that are your interest. Block users and/or instances you would rather not see or be part of. Also, you can find an instance that fits your values that is already blocking instances you disagree with.
I am mostly indifferent of Threads joining at this time, but those that are not in favor, there are options.
I’m not joking when I say our only sure way of escaping the machine is to get an off-grid cabin in the woods and no longer participate in the internet.
At this point I’m limiting what I access and where. I’m targeting a more 1990’s internet experience. I love learning and technical stuff and would miss it if I went off grid, no matter how tempting that is.
Unless threads implements the full activitypub spec then everyone should be defederated from meta. There is a fine line for meta to walk to not harm the fediverse. Lemmy World is one of the few instances that can handle it. But meta should not be allowed to be a guiding voice in the direction of the fediverse at all
+1, with an additional condition: when Meta inevitably tries to co-opt the activitypub spec and modify it in incompatible ways that only benefit themselves they need to be defederated immediately.
They can try to push ActivityPub development within the W3C without actually using it btw.
When it comes to Corporates it very much is like the Nazi Bar allegory: you let one Nazi stay because he’s beheaving rasonably and not being nasty, and sooner or later the place is going to be full of his friends and turned into a Nazi Bar.
It’s the same dynamic only with corporate logos, advertising, hypercommercialism and eventual enshitiffication instead of swasticas, racist messaging and violence.
Certainly in my eperience of it since the 90s, the Internet changed very much this from its early days and spirit as commercial interests from their original foothold almost entirelly subverted it to serve their interests.
My grandma who owned a diner used to say the same thing, but about cops
allowing them to hoover up our data
Hate to break it to you, but the fediverse is public. Most instances don’t even require an account for read-only access. If Facebook wants your data they don’t need to federate to get it.
And realistically, there’s nothing stopping them from setting up a bunch of nondescript shell instances to gather data anyway.
Don’t even need that. Fifteen minutes To set up your own instance. The entirety of Lemmy still fits on a decent thumb drive.
Why does it seem like everyone with this position is unaware that data here is already available publicly?
Please expand on how you believe blocking threads improves your privacy.
My objection with federating with Threads has nothing to do with privacy or data access, it has to do with keeping the ActivityPub protocol alive. Embrace, extend, extinguish is a much more legitimate threat to the fediverse than data scraping ever will be. No, the danger is that Meta will begin to contribute to the protocol. At first, contribution by a corporate actor would seem like a fantastic boon to an open standard that we wish to see grow, that’s the embrace phase. But it would not be long before Meta began adding features that are exclusive to a Threads user - they’ll extend the protocol to better accomplish their ends. In this way, they seek to bring more and more users into their platform in order to take advantage of these exclusive features while maintaining compatibility with the larger Fediverse. The end goal is to have enough users that when they decide to break that compatibility, they will make off with the majority of the users from the open community; that’s the extinguish part.
This is a well-established strategy that large tech companies have employed with open standards in the past (see XMPP). I strongly believe it is in the Fediverse’s long term interests to remain defederated from Threads, and any other large corporate player. Better to have fewer users and grow organically than to federate with Meta; we may see a short term boost to the fediverse, but the long term risks outweigh any benefit.
That being said, the nice thing about the fediverse is that I can just leave this instance for another if I disagree with the admin’s decisions.
Left this in another response to previous poster, but since you summarized the points, I wanted to link the article as well: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
How does defederating mitigate EEE?
Facebook is a data harvesting company. Yes, it can scrape the data but why hand it to them on a silver platter? Let them scrape it, if they want it so bad. The issue is facebook has destroyed democracies , bought out competition and never had a good track record so why risk it. If we federate, it’ll be like smoking cigarettes even though we know smoking causes cancer.
If they’re really just after data at all costs, they could easily spin up an instance that has no apparent link to threads and federate secretly. I agree with other arguments about not federating with them but idk, all these data privacy arguments against federating with threads are so dumb. If they want it, they’ll get it because getting it is so absurdly easy.
Privacy is the less relevant point here. Keeping the fediverse alive is the central point. Just look at reddit to see how corporate greed can fuck up a social network. Or google groups killing the usenet by “federating” with it. If you want the expanded version: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’m so tired of that article.
Neither the people advocating for dedederation nor that article ever explains how defederating is going to defeat EEE.
I take it you got tired before getting through the first paragraph even the first time reading? No one is talking about “defeat EEE” - it’s about protecting yourself against attempts to use the EEE strategy. And the article explains exactly how defederating is relevant in that regard.
I read the whole thing the first time it was presented to me.
No one is talking about “defeat EEE” - it’s about protecting yourself against attempts to use the EEE strategy.
Yeah and it spouts vague platitudes while avoiding specifics. Maybe it’s the sysadmin in me but that isn’t worth shit.
How does defederating “protect against attempts to use the EEE strategy”?
Maybe I could see a valid point if you could instantly have all instances defederate now and forever but you can’t.
Since you refuse to acknowledge that the explanation is right there in the text, I’ll have to assume you have ill intent.
That’s what I thought.
Let the people who come after, read this thread and see the lack of specifics, again.
Honestly I dont think they are data scraping the entire internet. There is no evidence to believe they are.
I dont want to manually feed my data to them on a silver platter.
They also don’t get access to all the data that I think is most invasive (federated or not). I expect my posts, comments, votes, and follows on a public forum to be public. I don’t expect which posts I open, which comments I read, and how long I view each one for (a much larger and more invasive pool of data) to be public, and that’s what I don’t want Meta to get. By not using threads, they don’t get that. By using threads (or any Meta product) they do get that, and they probably use it to shovel more ads in your face.
While I am a little cautious of the possibility of EEE, I feel like the majority of fediverse users are anti-corporation and relatively technically informed, and would anticipate any attempts to extinguish it would be poorly received and ineffective. (Edit: although I do think this argument is reasonable and haven’t really decided whether I think federating with threads is a good idea)
Either way, federating with threads won’t give them any non-public information, which is substantially better than if you used their products directly. The other information is there for anyone to grab, so it’s kind of weird to complain about them reading it. If you put up a sign in your yard, you wouldn’t complain about people who walk by reading it.
If they want mastodon or lemmy data, they already have access. Full stop.
Downvoting facts you don’t like doesn’t change reality, unfortunately.
Because they don’t know what’s going on and are just trying to fit in.
Those people aren’t great at thinking things through. They’re “idea people”.
Why can’t it be as simple as fuck Facebook! I don’t want a multi billion dollar corporation playing in my sandbox.
To be fair, ActivityPub is an open standard, so corporate adoption was a guarantee following any amount of success.
As an advocate for ActivityPub, I want to see more entities using it. The fact that Threads and Flipboard will interoperate will likely convince more corporate actors to join the fediverse, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
There will always be instances that block out the entire corporate fediverse, and those communities will still thrive alongside instances that do federate with the corporations. People will have freedom of choice without having to exist in a bubble, and I think that’s great.
The strength is in defederation, where communities can decide who they want to play with. I’m not personally worried about big companies like Meta embracing ActivityPub because their bad behavior will have consequences for them, and the community is starting off vigilant and aware. If they play nice, the community might loosen its grip, but if they act exploitive or abusive, they’ll get shut out from most of the community forever.
On one hand: great, federated tech is catching on.
On the other hand: fuck these clowns, they’re not participating in good faith. If Meta wants to join the fediverse they need to interoperate fully with other instances instead of using activitypub to poach fediverse users.
I’m 100% convinced Meta is pulling a classic embrace, extend, extinguish move here.
Last thing they need is our users. Threads is already bigger.
Honestly, I think they see the idea of the Fediverae a threat, and want to embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s no way they see it as a threat. They have millions more users. They’re just not as engaged or active perhaps as we are. But by the same token most of us are very against meta and other companies like them. There is no reasonable or logical way in which they could extend, embrace or extinguish it. Though I would be very interested to see you try to explain how. And it’s especially funny to see all the people being manipulated. Who have no idea what really went on trying to claim that Google embraced extended and extinguished XMPP. The XMPP work group just finished up their 2023 Google Summer of code for Christ’s sake. Google didn’t kill them and they’re not dead.
There’s no way they see it as a threat.
So why they are expending dev time to partially integrate with activepub? What they earn? Cause this would not make them a dime, not in short term, and even less in long term.
Easy. Because Twitter is their biggest closest thing to a competitor. And right now under the shepherding of the petty little man child is floundering. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. But they sure can be useful.
Threads launched to the audacious soft squishy thud of a freshly fallen turd. Millions of potential users who don’t give a shit about it. On the other hand. Feddiverse users though fewer are wildly, passionate and engaged. So much so that people on a largely disconnected feddiverse system are losing their ever-loving minds about meta even coming anywhere near them.
Right now, realistically we’re nothing to reddit or Twitter. I love the feddiverse. I’m a jabber/XMPP advocate since the 1990s. But let’s be honest, we’re still a pretty small group compared to social media over all. Meta however thinks it’s worth while to form a coalition to topple the twit. That it’s worth while to them to tolerate to some extent a den of lefties, Marxist, and even murderous leninists that couldn’t be more anti them. I’m with them as long as it takes to topple musk. And then we’re coming for their user base. To Free them from their algorithms and pro-corporitist censorship. Coalitions go both ways.
Is it? After the initial account register, it looked like it was running out of steam. I’d be surprised it lasted long without something new.
Mastodon was immediately dwarfed from the very first day Threads was launched. Total Fediverse MAU has been hovering a but under 2 million, Threads first day user signups totaled more then 30 million. Threads’ growth has leveled off now but it’s still orders of magnitude more massive.
Threads users didn’t sign up, it used their Instagram account. Even if they used it once, they click across, and boom, account there and they cannot delete that Threads account after. An initial day registration does not mean a MAU. It’s like saying MySpace is huge now because everyone had an account…
Edit: Usage plumetted massively- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/14/threads-app-slump-daily-active-users-twitter-competition
Threads’ daily app downloads have universally been in the range of 350k-700k for the past month. Mastodon’s MAU for the same time period has been 1.1 million.
More people downloaded the threads mobile app in the past three days then have interacted with Mastodon in any capacity for the past month.
Edit: Even your cited source pegs Threads’ lowest recorded daily active users at nearly half Mastodon’s monthly active users, and that was from before the app was made available in India and the EU
Seconded. Fuck Meta.
Meta should be fully jetisoned from the entire federation. If people want threads, join threads. edit: If people want their sports and brand posts then aggregate using RSS for corporate and non-corp social media. The whole purpose of the fediverse was to be NOT linked to tech bro empires.
Given that we’ve watched communities like Reddit become more closed, I would rather Lemmy not do the same. The best thing an instance can do is keep them on a very tight leash, and kick out at the first sign of a rule being broken.
What Lemmy needs, above anything, is engagement. Be open to the users from Threads, instead of punishing them because you hate Meta. Many people joined Lemmy because the idea of the fediverse meant freedom to choose, and while instances are free to allow/deny who they want, it shouldn’t be a detriment to users that want to experience Lemmy.
That’s not how EEE works at all. Facebook will embrace Lemmy, extend/improve Lemmy, and then extinguish/disadvantage the native Lemmy community, until the Lemmy server serves so little of a purpose it is shut down.
How? The unhinged ranting that threads will federate with mastodon, not Lemmy. And the frothy incoherent rage that Lemmy needs to defederate from something that doesn’t currently exist and will not impact them significantly in any way once they do exist. Makes me think none of you have actually thought this through in a rational manner.
Ahmm, lemmy.world is already federated with mastodon as well, fediverse is one network of federated instances, it is not one for mastodon and another for lemmy. You can interact with mastodon post already from here
Yes. And you’d struggle to find where someone did that. It’s so awkward and uncommon it’s truly a non issue.
Except that Threads is not going to engage mutually so this argument is moot. If we federate with Threads but they do not federate with us, what exactly to we have to gain from this besides Meta’s rage algorithms?
Great how everyone saw one post from Mosseri a week ago and decided to just ignore all following posts. The one-sided federation atm is TEMPORARY. They will fully federate in the upcoming months.
Then we shouldn’t even be considering our federation until they are willing to properly join the community.
Defederating Threads doesn’t make us a closed community. All that’s going to happen is we’ll basically end up on Threads without actually being on Threads. People will either migrate there or to an instance that doesn’t have Meta/Facebook everywhere.
lemmy isnt for profit company
Theyre free to join an instance that isn’t owned by meta
Same. Defederate - or rate limit - them if the load should become an issue.
If this functions to poll users broadly, then count another one for NOT federating. I came to Lemmy to not have my feed dominated by a tsunami of corporate junk curated by one of the worst influences in modern society. And if the counter argument is that I can block their content, then you can go join threads. I have no desire to be on a service where the majority of other users are constanly being fed crap from Meta and then interacting here, even if I can’t see the initial influence. I can go elsewhere, sure, and will if they federate, but I like it so far and would rather not. But consider, at least, the kind of thing .world will become if the only people here are people who think, “Hey, maybe Zuck’s new project won’t be so bad!”
There sure are a lot of accounts here NOT from .world throwing in their opinions
There should be an option to make posts instance-local for such things.
Lemmy.one had a user only meta community for this purpose.
This is !fediverse@lemmy.world not !support@lemmy.world
It’s a thread specifically about .world
Id love for an official members only lemmy.world poll
everyone’s opinion is valid, especially mine
Some instances have a vote and point discussion here.
