I’ve seen that some instances have already done it preemptively.
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Admins are in agreement that we don’t want federation with Meta.
I don’t see us currently federating with them - https://lemmy.ca/instances
We’ll make sure it stays that way! I’ve added threads.net to our blocklist.
Great to have an official answer. Thank you!
I decided to sign on here because of this stance. Also I missed the company of my fellow Canucks ;)
Welcome, good to see ya!
Cheers bud! 🍻
Good-faith question for you admins to laymen like myself; what do you believe you are protecting yourselves from by blocking Threads? Isn’t the nature of the Fediverse resistant, if not immune, to corotate shenanigans? Isn’t the only thing you’re accomplishing by defederating Theads is that you’re just making yourselves invisible to a large userbase who are too lazy to care about their own personal data?
We’re all still protected, no?
Personal take - I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the meta will operate in good faith. I don’t have confidence that they will moderate their users, and I believe their only interest will be in slurping up 3rd party data to make their platform more appealing and decrease the chance a user will go elsewhere to find things. They don’t want you going anywhere else for that juicy ad revenue.
Yeah I’m assuming they’re operating is as-bad of faith as possible myself.
As far as moderating their users, I’m don’t necessarily know to what extent you mean. But I would assume that since they’re a publicly traded company who wants to foster their relationships with ad providers, that they wouldn’t let it devolve into something newsworthy; that’s bad for business.
Sorry if I’m repeating myself too much (I mentioned this in another comment below), but if the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. If we tested the waters and decided it wasn’t for us after some interaction, I imagine the non-corporate federation could grow immensely by that point. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
For moderating users, I mean all the bullshit conspiracy theories. My dad lives on Facebook and has gone completely off the deep end, we need to start actively fighting against this instead of being tolerant.
Same with mine and probably many others.
Yeah I noticed that FB is already linking out a lot of articles taken from Reddit shit etc as it is
If you spend any amount of time in the comment sections on Facebook or Instagram these days it’s pretty clear that meta doesn’t have the capacity or will to actually moderate. You can report things to them only to get a response a few weeks later that they didn’t look into it but also didn’t remove the content.
They want to avoid Meta from repeating history:
I’m aware of that concept, but I’m having a hard time understanding how that applies to the Fediverse. It seems like we have an inherent protection from that tactic, even if we disregard defederation as an option.
You know how Apple has extended SMS with iMessage? Like that.
In other words, they take something open and established like activitypub, and then build all sorts of cool features on top of it, but those features impose lock-in.
Eg. Maybe they make it so there’s some way of attaching media directly to posts, but only if the post is both posted and viewed from a Meta instance. And then, in a few years once they’ve become dominant due to everyone switching over to their platform out of fomo of those features, they break compatibility with activitypub and ruin the underlying structure of the fediverse.
Wouldn’t that just mean Facebook splits away from the fediverse into their own thing? The rest of the fediverse that don’t want anything to do with them would still keep existing just like it does now?
To be honest I really don’t mind if the users that want to use Facebook leave Lemmy and go to Threads. That just means that there’s less people here but the ones that stay have values closer to mine.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Here’s an article that explains how it can still happen with decentralized platforms
That actually doesn’t seem to give any context of HOW it could work for the Fediverse. All I see is “we are certain to lose”, but doesn’t go into what sort of mechanisms or tactics could be implemented to do a takeover.
Am I missing something?
What I would do if I were Zuck is the following: First I’d federate and leech a little bit off the pre-existing community. Then, I’d start buffing out my version. I could outpace the open source team easily if I wanted, adding things like video hosting, that are too resource-intensive for smaller Instances. I’d basically compete in features and polish, which are very important to less tech savvy consumers.
In the meantime, I’d be tinkering with my own Instance, seeing how much more data can be squeezed out of the Fediverse. I’d probably buy some of the largest Instances and assimilate them, just to keep the rest of the space feeling small compared to mine. Let brand loyalty do the rest.
Any time they come up with a new feature I like, I take it. I don’t share mine though, I don’t share anything I’m not forced to. The goal is to cap their growth, basically squashing awareness of them by making sure that when average people think Fediverse, they think Meta. The rest of it is just weird tech hobby junk for nerds.
Which is irrational. Threads already has five times more users than the fediverse. There’s literally no reason for them to waste time trying to harm ActivityPub. Personally, I won’t be surprised if they shelf and ultimately cancel their plans to implement ActivityPub because there’s literally no reason for them to waste their time, especially when everyone in the community is throwing shade at them.
Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.
Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.
I don’t know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.
Yeah, I’m already a little offput by how lemmy.world seems so dominant.
Yes, I’ve started looking for instances that I think represent the “natural home” for communities I’m interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.
Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.
The only thing I don’t like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.
I guess browser extension would be well suited to add account-switching/aggregating. Likewise mobile apps.
The mobile client I’m using, Liftoff, does an excellent job of both account and instance switching.
this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
It’s also about the content threads will bring
Think about all the dimwits, grifters, and douchebags on Instagram. Think about how shitty front page reddit posts were. Do you want that here?
EXACTLY. Quality over Quantity. I mean even Reddit pre-exodus, like there was great intelligent conversations and threads… but sooooo much garbage in between. The signal to noise ratio sucked. I’m loving the small but high quality posts and conversations im seeing on Lemmy in comparison.
For this reason I tend to lean towards defederating because I genuine don’t think your average Facebook user brings much value here - quite the opposite.
I just feel like people don’t quite understand what defederating actually does and I don’t claim to undestand either. However the little that I think I do undestand leads me to believe defederating isn’t going to “cut them out” the way we’re hoping. They can still see all the content here.
From what I understand, if we defederate from them, they can’t see our posts either. See what happened when Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works .
They could still be see the content by creating another instance, or by getting it from lemmy.ca directly. I doubt they’ll do that though, especially with Lemmy. Lemmy communities look weird when seen from mastodon, and I doubt they’d look much better from threads.net.
Also I hate how they called it Threads. That’s already a word used for other things in this space. Theres a thing called the threadiverse, and it doesn’t include Facebook/meta/instagram threads?
Yeah but Beehaw defederated them, not the other way around. If threads.net defederates with us then they can’t see any of our new content but if we defederate with them then the flow of content only stops from Threads to us, right?
Beehaw defederated lemmy.world.
If you go to any community on Beehaw viewed from lemmy.world, you can see that new content isn’t available. Only posts & comments from lemmy.world users show up.
If you go to any community on lemmy.world viewed from Beehaw, you can see the same thing.
As soon as one defederates the other, all communication between them stops, afaik. The content isn’t federated in either direction.
Edit: I might be somewhat wrong, since there are a few posts by users from other instances, but it’s only a few, almost all posts and comments aren’t available. I dont know what’s going on here, disregard what I said.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected], [email protected]
Yeah I don’t claim to understand this fully either but I’ve learned that the best way to get right answer for something on the internet is to say something that’s wrong and so far people don’t seem to be rushing to tell me I’m wrong at this so I think I have it somewhat right. I don’t know which instances defederate with mine so I can’t really explore it further
It’s also about the content threads will bring
Think about all the dimwits, grifters, and douchebags on Instagram. Think about how shitty front page reddit posts were. Do you want that here?
The difference in comment quality on the big subs versus niche ones was immense. I’d have week long discussions about free will on a tiny sub and get a lot of good-faith arguments for and against my view but trying to have a reasonable conversations on places like askreddit was a complete fools errand.
Thank you!!
This is great news—thank you!
I know lemmy.world isn’t blocking any instances but they aren’t federating meta’s Threads.net yet.
It would be nice to see a post detailing why you are defederating this instance from threads.net
It would be great if you could explain why threads.net is being blocked.
Because f*ck Meta? Isn’t that enough?
Whatever reason they have is enough. But it would be nice if it was stated.
I vote to block them as well. Don’t let Meta get its claws on lemmy.ca content or user info.
How is defederating going to help here? I’m genuinely asking. Doesn’t that just stop their content from showing on our feeds? It shouldn’t affect the amount of user data they can collect which isn’t much anyways because we’re not using their proprietary software.
My understanding is that people on exploding heads for example can still read these comments too. They just can’t reply. Or they can but we don’t see their replies. Only the people that federate with them do.
Am I getting something wrong here?
I also dont underetand the tactic.
Couldnt anyone just start a single user instance and gain access that way?
I think only users of that instance see the replies and not even other federated instances with them, since the replication needs to sync with the source (of which none of them can do).
You’re absolutely right!
Meta is a threat to the privacy of fediverse users, if there are fediverse instances that remain federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
I don’t know if we are but I think we should. No interest in interacting with facebook in any capacity.
I’m new to federation as a concept, but isn’t the only thing you accomplish from defederating Threads is that this community will miss the opportunity to grow its userbase? Isn’t the whole point of the fediverse that anyone can be anywhere and access anything from anywhere else?
If so, the only people who come out behind are the people signing up on Threads specifically, who are granting every piece of personal data to Meta. But people signed up on other instances are protected.
As far as I understand, the existing fediverse is not at risk of anything, correct?
I guess people are worried about Meta pulling some moves out of Embrace, Expand, Extinguish playbook.
But isn’t the core design of the fediverse resistant, if not immune, to those sorts of tactics? Should Threads be allowed in the federation, the only thing they can do is defederate, right? That means we may get used to the increased userbase and become disappointed when a large chunk of their traffic goes dark, but the remaining fediverse will have grown and benefited until then.
I think the idea is that Threads can pull in a bunch of users to the federated ecosystem using other instance’s content, implement features exclusive to Threads to entice people to move from whatever instance they’re on now to Threads, and then defederate Threads from everything else afterwards and remove ActivityPub compatibility to trap people on Threads and then enshittify the platform for more money.
But… if we defederate now, won’t we just be trying to create a walled garden of a tiny userbase?
If the goal is to grow the non-corporate Fediverse and encourage privacy and self-hosting, I would imagine that the best way to do that is to connect with the corporate Fediverse and proselytize the benefits of moving off of Threads. In the end, the non-corporate federation will grow immensely, I imagine. Whereas if we cut ourselves off now, I fear we will actually drive people to Threads, and make it nearly impossible to convince people to get off of Threads.
The problem is that corporations can scale their own propaganda campaigns way better than we can. It’s best to cut the problem off at the source than it is to try and compete with them at their own game.
Hmm, perhaps. Although if we never federate in the first place, I guess we’ll never know. It seems like if we tested the waters, what we could gain could far outweigh what we could lose, and we could always cut the line if we see it clearly isn’t working out.
It feels counter productive, but the reality is that the less huge corporations are involved in a federation, the safer it is.
The problem with federation with Meta is that it encourages Meta to develop and contribute to the infrastructure. Which sounds great, but the record is poor on that front.
Once a company with huge money starts working on your infrastructure, they’re going to make changes, changes that maybe the community doesn’t agree with, but since all the money is being funneled through one of two companies, they make the decision.
Then the company decides that they don’t want to keep supporting something that doesn’t make them any money. Since Meta would theoretically bring millions of users from their platforms, they could decide to suddenly cut out all non-Meta instances. Now we’re the odd ones out, your friends are wondering why they can’t reach you anymore, you’re suddenly offline.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. It happened with XAMPP, it happened with Java, CSS, most browsers are Chrome based, ‘exchange’ email servers, etc.
The best thing to maintain software freedom is to never open the door to huge companies.
It is at risk. Meta/Facebook have done this before. They embrace, extend and then extinguish. Eventually they say the only way to be safe as to use their products, force people to switch over as all the content is generated on threads and there goes the fediverse. It’s better to get ahead of them and just not allow them to link up. Facebook is a hostile actor in this space and needs to be treated as such.
I’m of a similar mind.
My time online is limited, and if Threads ends up having the most interesting stuff then that’s where I’ll spend my limited time. If I can follow users from Threads over at mstdn.ca then I would very likely stick with the Fediverse to get the best of both worlds. I’m mostly a content consumer so I go where the content is.
Also, I don’t really think Threads and Lemmy are a good match, if Threads is more a Twitter substitute then I think Mastadon is a better match (and all micro-blog class Fediverse platforms). So I suspect not many people will use Lemmy to follow anyone/thing from Threads, defederating them won’t have much practical effect.
A lot of us just left a site because it was ruined by corporate greed. I don’t think corporations belong in the fediverse. If there’s a vote, I vote for defedding with Threads.
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I think we definitely should.
I, for one, vote in support of defederation from Threads. No reason to allow Meta to use our content to boost engagement on their for-profit platform. And pull users away from places like Lemmy at that.
+1 for defederating
The ideals that led to the Fediverse are antithetical to companies like Meta
The ideals of the Fediverse is an open network.
The problem is that it only works if the ideal scenario occurs being that we all work together to make things better. Corporate interaction in open source has shown that embrace, extend, extinguish is a very successful strategy.
Would we be harming the idea of a completely open network? No doubt. The question is whether or not allowing corporations would be better or worse for us in the long run.
I believe there are many instances were corporate involvement has added to open source. A lot of the Linux kernel is maintained by corporations.
Sure, but the Linux kernel is an extremely time consuming thing to maintain and is not worth privatizing for most companies as it rarely is a source of profit instead of infrastructure. There is little competitive edge to doing so. Meta however has a very good reason to bring in a bunch of new users to their platform and theirs only. Considering their history, it is reasonable to be distrustful.
Open and unmolested by big corporations
I’m confused. Is threads even federated to lemmy? I thought it was more of a mastadon/microblogging thing?
Federation is independent from content type so technically yeah, but seeing as you wouldn’t really want to see microblog type content in a link aggregator style display… It doesn’t really matter. Not to mention that afaik threads ain’t even federated yet…
Yeah I figured there’s a bit of an apples and oranges thing between the two, even if they use the same underlying protocol. On the one hand, it may mean there’s less risk of threads poaching lemmy users/content (as compared to mastadon or even twitter), but on the other hand, there may not be much value in federating with them in the first place.
Mastodon, kbin, lemmy and all the other fediverse apps all use the same api, activitypub. This means we can all interact with each other even with very different ui and content goals. Mastodon doesn’t interact with lemmy much right now because the uis don’t really mesh very well, but it’s possible. If you see a post that has @<community name> in it that’s a good sign it probably came from mastodon or similar.
That’s interesting. I have a mastadon account but I’ve never used it to try and get on lemmy. I have gone from lemmy to kbin though, even though I have a kbin account also.
Any service which makes use of ActivityPub should be able to federate with other services using the same. Hence why you can see posts from people using kbin. You can usually tell when a mastodon user comments because their reply will start with an @replyingto @originalposter
Federation with Meta would significantly increase network traffic and storage costs?
Then Meta would help everyone cope with the extra workload … then help some more with a few changes … then offer some new features … then help with increased usage … then offer more features … then push out the smaller instances and take over everything … then wall off ActivityPub … then start charging people and advertisers … then make billions … then watch users rebel and start a new system and repeat it all again in 10 or 20 years.
ActivityPub is maintained by W3C not mastodon, or lemmy, or other fediverse system. Meta doesn’t need federation to push W3C to do what they want
The cirrrcle of lifeeeee…
Pretty sure it’d only increase traffic if folks on a fediverse server followed someone on Threads. So unless there’s a sudden gigantic flux of fediverse users following Threads users, it shouldn’t have a huge near term impact.
What are the objectives of defederating?
To protect our data? They can create stealth instances and get the same data. I think we have to accept and be mindful that the things we share on the fediverse can be exploited by people we don’t like.
To exclude their users? I understand they have partnered with Namecheap to offer users customized instances with their own domain. Is it even a technical possibility to exclude all their users’ instances?
To make a statement? Okay, but then we need to do more than just defederate.
This article has been circulating around the fediverse and I think it greatly illustrates why it’s so important to defederate from large corporations before they can get a foothold. It’s about so much more than just them getting our data.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway.
Isn’t this what actually killed XMPP? XMPP still works, is still viable. But everyone stopped using it. That’s got more to do with Facebook than Google, imho.
Yes. What they specifically did though was extend the protocol so that anyone who wasn’t using their version of XMPP via Google Talk would be incompatible or seem “broken” when it really wasn’t. It’s just that they were using non-standard features, both incentivizing people to just switch to Google Talk and for development on the core protocol to slow down.
I bet money Threads is going to do the same thing. They’ll introduce Threads only features that don’t work with all the standard Activitypub implementations, causing frustration with Thread users and putting pressure on people to just jump ship to Threads from standard Activitypub implementations.
Okay, but again… so? That’s just defederation. If that’s the worst they can do to us… So? That’s also your proposed solution, so what!
It’s more about protecting ActivityPub protocol than anything.
Before we know it, thread will impose its proprietary protocol and the fediverse will simply die with it.
Honestly, I’m not sure if it will happen. Social media is already pretty much corporate world so we will see what will happen.
Okay but how does this protect the protocol? What is the difference between us defederating them, and what you describe which is essentially them defederating us? Why would they bother in the first place, then? I don’t really think any of this is about us, but rather about Twitter and Google.
Like, does it endanger the HTTP protocol that we exchange HTTP data with them?
I think it’s about keeping the userbase on ActivityPub as much as possible. When meta will start doing ActivityPub and probably change it, everyone will need to follow because Meta will own all the userbase and “subreddit”.
At some point, they will decide to drop ActivityPub because it’s not good enough for what they want to do. Just like what Google did to XMPP. And maybe Google was right about XMPP, I don’t know.
Another reason is what you are saying, a personnal battle against Meta and big corp.
At the end of the day, will anything the fediverse Admin do will matter ? Only time will tell I guess.
One key difference with HTTP is just like TCP. Everyone uses it so it’s much harder to just change it and fuck everyone else. ActivityPub is an easier target for this strategy.
I don’t see a point in defederating. As long as the only data they get is the content of my posts and votes and replies I don’t care. More people in the fediverse strengthens it and splitting up into kingdoms is basically what we have now. Defederation should be done only if being federated is harmful to the users here.
I honestly don’t give a shit.
Of course you don’t. I’m sure 95% of people don’t. Most people don’t bother taking a stand on things unless it affects something more substantial like their wallets.
I don’t see anyone here arguing that this instance should remain federated with Threads. So far it’s unanimous that we should defederate from them. I agree. We should keep this separate.
Please do.
