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.
This, the real threat is the amount of content that federates out possibly hurting others servers’ performance as their enterprise kit will scale better.
This article is so misleading. XMPP died for the same reason all technology dies. No one used it. Even if Google hadn’t ever used it, it would still be dead. I know this because Google Talk and ALL Google chat apps are dead. WhatsApp killed them all.
In other words, Threads could help spreading the ActivityPub protocol more, not the other way around
You are more correct than they are but are still wrong*. A lot of the interest in XMPP died after they started pursuing standardization and of course after Google close off their servers. It never had a ground swell before or after that either though. XMPP however, still exists to this day. And has become integrated into internet of things, protocols for communications between devices and as well as more comprehensive communication services such as SIP. They literally just had their 2023 Google summer of code complete a month or so ago?
But yeah XMPP is not dead. Unfortunately, it was a surpassed by a number of other services that offered more. Evolving faster than XMPP could while looking to become standardized. It only lost relevance to most. Not it’s life. For what it’s worth since 2000 or 2001, there’s hardly been a day that I have not been logged in to an XMPP server. I’m logged into one right now.
God why are all crying about XMPP? If you want to make it more popular just start using it yourself. If you don’t have anyone to speak with over there just speak with me (seriously DM me).
Also we have a lot of open source alternatives by now so XMPP is just one of many good options which means that the people will go whith what they feel comfortable with. Trust me, if XMPP would be the only decentralized, open source chat protocol around I’d be using it exclusively and many others would probably too.
I think xmpp is just the example of what could happen to the fediverse if Facebook follow the same play
So you’re saying Facebook will lose interest in the feddiverse and leave it largely unscathed to go on to do what it has always done? Not sure why people are so doom and gloom about this. This seems like the best outcome you all would want.
No, I think the point of the article is that they might try to siphon off all the casual fediverse uses with flashy features and big names and then break compatibility
There’s barely anyone to siphon right now.
I like your perspective. More people need to realize that they are responsible for what they put out there.
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)
This is what happened with Google and XMPP
They’d hoover up your data regardless lmao. Anything you post here is fair game. It’s not the same as Instagram measuring how much you look at a post or your location.
Yeah so many people misunderstand data on ActivityPub.
So you post on social media because you want te be publicly discovered? Yes
Then why are you whining because your public posts were publicly discovered?If that were the only argument I might consider your point, but there’s also the point of troll farms. You can easily identify a third party troll farm fedi instance, but Zuckerberg will keep them anonymous as long as they keep paying him. Are you not aware of the amount of shills and trolls we got on reddit advocating for:
- Russia
- Conservative republicans
- Conspiracy theories
- Corporations such as Monsanto
I’m not fucking kidding, if you paid ANY attention to what happened to Reddit in the years after Spez took control, you’d realize that amplifying voices funded by corporate or foreign government money is bad for fucking everyone.
Facebook has shown, time after time, that they don’t give a shit about actual free speech, democracy, human rights or even complying with the law.
Why do you keep treating them as if they were only a social network? Have you been living under a fucking rock?
If you like corporate social networks so much, go back to reddit.
I still prefer blocking it myself and having the control myself.
Exactly, this whole whiney demand to defed threads is dumb.
because only argument is about data ._.
I know exactly what you mean. People talk about how “anything can be scraped anyway” and don’t understand how instances can lock down public timelines, enable whitelist federation and require authorized fetch for federating - at least on the actor-based fedi platforms like Mastodon.
public timelines, enable whitelist federation and require authorized fetch for federating
And all of that can be circumvented by pulling the data via the RSS feeds or plain old scraping.
Authorized fetch and domain blocks may be effective to stop drive-by trolls, but do nothing to stop anyone with a minimal amount of resources and interest in scraping data from a social network.
The reality is simple: all information that you put on the web should be considered as publicly available. Those that want or need absolute privacy should not use information in the fediverse and resort only to provably secure communication protocols.
I don’t know of any major instances that have enabled any of those… And all getting around it would take is to create an account on the instance- which for instances without admin approval can be done fully programmatically anyway so it wouldn’t even require human intervention, just a few extra lines of code.
If your instance is federated it doesn’t matter how “locked down” your instance is it’s pushing data out of the walled garden lol
And that’s ignoring the fact you can just create an account on the target instance then hit the instance’s API
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.
They weighed in months ago back when it was announced and said they were taking a wait and see approach, where if it did cause problems they would defederate, but didn’t want to preemptively do so. Many other instances did defederate already though.
The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:
- Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.
- By closing down with Threads, you’ll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.
- By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say “hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden.”
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I mean, the last point is weird. They’d never say that, and do not care about the illusion of being open.
Point 1 is true.
Point 2, what makes you think federation will make millions of users want to move away, or even know folk are on another service. They’ll probably censor the word lemmy and every lemmy address to avoid folk advertising away. The fediverse will just be filled with nonsense data and they’ll pull the stuff that helps their platforms and keeps people hooked on the teet. Without that data, they may not be at critical mass to sustain Threads and it might eventually die. With that and Twitter going to pot, avoiding federation actually helps Mastodon as it provides a distinguishable separate entity that has reached critical mass and has significant good will with the user base that motivates them to keep sharing content.
yes, very misguided. I always loved the idea of browsing “All” and see all top brands with millions of engagement promoting their products
I thought users could block instances now?
AP does not allow for the pushing of ads.
that’s irrelevant. Nothing prevents the influencers to promote their products as they do in all the popular platforms. You’re thinking only in terms of ads as coming from an ad server but this is not necessarily the case.
that’s irrelevant
You’re complaining about ads that are being pushed on you by an algorithm from ad companies. I’m telling you there are no ad companies. Seems relevant.
Nothing prevents the influencers to promote their products as they do in all the popular platforms.
Nothing prevents them from doing that right now.
You’re complaining about ads that are being pushed on you by an algorithm from ad companies. I’m telling you there are no ad companies. Seems relevant.
I never typed the word “ad”. I specifically said post of top brands. How can this be achieved in ActivityPub? Easy. When you are using lets say Threads, their proprietary system treats differently ads and normal posts. However, anything their system is pushing on the federated network (ActivityPub) is disguised as a normal post. A post that is having millions of engagement will be visible in “All”.
Nothing prevents them from doing that right now.
You act like you’re new to internet. What prevents them is that their audience is not here and companies are not paying them for that. However companies will pay them to promote their products in Threads. With the current numbers, Threads has the potential to dominate the “All” page.
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They’ll try to dominate the way the protocols evolve. Try to push more and more crap into it because they’re too big to ignore. Insert becoming ad, bot, corporate friendlier stuff. Fediverse doesn’t need meta. It’s nice and cosy and rather friendly here, I’ld like it to stay that way. It’s like Google dominates some “open source” and pushes browsers towards more and more DRM friendly etc. We don’t need that.
It’s nice and cosy and rather friendly here
And absolutely irrelevant in terms of impact. We have at best a few hundred MAU on a good month. Facebook/Google/TikTok are controlling billions of people.
If we truly believe in the superiority of the Fediverse and that it is possible to have an alternative social media for everyone, we need to go and fight Big Tech. Defederating on the grounds of “I like it the way it is” is coward, selfish and completely lacking ambition.
we need to go and fight Big Tech.
Fight them by…doing exactly what they want?
Do they want us to let them federate so that their users can use Threads as a stepping stone out of the walled gardens?
Why would that happen?
People who used Google Talk didn’t use it as a stepping stone to XMPP. They stayed on Google Talk.
Google was not charging people to talk on their network, and they didn’t make it harder to reach someone once they got it. So there was no reason for people to jump out. Facebook, on the other hand…
When the internet was in its infancy, companies and small businesses first established their online presence by getting a aol.com or hotmail.com. Running your own email or website was still expensive and not something easy to do. Today, having “your own” social media and being in control of your brand is almost as easy as having your website and your domain. I am not saying that everyone will jump out of Threads, but if Threads ever gets successful enough to replace Twitter and if we don’t shut them out of the Fediverse before it happens, at least there will be an opportunity for small businesses/media orgs/influencers that want to keep reaching their audiences (like they do today on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube/etc) and also want to take control of their own presence.
That’s not dependent on federating at all. Meta is a member of W3C, they can be a part of developing and evolving ActivityPub at any point without actively running a service with it.
am get off old place without federation
when were you supposed to be responsible for others independent actions
That’s the thing: actions from other users and from the key players are not “independent”. It is a social network, actions and reactions depend on the context and the relationships of everyone involved.
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.
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.
Seems like everyone who is “for” letting threads stay can be summed up by “why would I want to intentionally separate this from a corporate entity when they’ll just get my data anyway” Like that’s a fucking valid argument.
Oppose corpos at all fronts, it doesn’t matter if they’ll get you anyway. If that’s your take, then if your country ever gets invaded, I expect you to bend over and invite the enemy inside.
Lol People are fucking idiots and these are the same people who complain about how everything is getting expensive when corporations are posting massive profits.
Not of course that that has anything to do with this topic
Like that’s a fucking valid argument.
It’s not. Which is why it’s so ridiculous that OP is making it.
I don’t understand. Facebook can get data from an open system whenever they feel like it.
Fetch authorization may be able to prevent that.
The amount of Meta bootlickers in this thread is incredible.
Noe consider how the number will increase AFTER they start federating!
Someone who disagrees with you is not a bootlicker.
Meta is a garbage company. Meta has done terrible things historically. At the moment we don’t know how Threads will affect the rest of the Fediverse. I’m ok with giving Meta a short leash. If you disagree, join an instance that has already blocked them. That’s how this works.
I fully expect, once rolled out, I’ll block Threads, but that is MY choice to make.
Meta doesnt need a short leash, it needs put down.
if you disagree go to threads
I’m not part of the fediverse to still have to maintain 20 accounts. In the end I want one account, ideally from somewhere like Mastodon, to rule them all. And your circlejerk throws a wrench into it for absolutely no reason other than aluminum foil bullshit.
i want everything in one place because convenience and only convenience
People don’t get that with money they can do whatever they want. Want to do something illegal, just do it because you have unlimited funds to pay your legal team to clean up the mess afterwards. We are absolutely powerless against something that can litigate you to death. Defederating is the only power we have. There is no way to react to anything that happens. There are no consequences for their actions. They don’t even answer to any governments.
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.
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.
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.
lemmy isnt for profit company
Same. Defederate - or rate limit - them if the load should become an issue.
Theyre free to join an instance that isn’t owned by meta
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.
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.
Probably because of the Digital Markets Act.
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
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.
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.
Not federating it seems like a weird choice. Can’t each user block Threads themselves if they want? Isn’t that the point of the fediverse? User control?
Yeah you are correct, and you dont even have to lift a finger in the next release 1 click and you block the whole “threads.net” instance.
New users will look at lemmy.world before they create an account. They will choose to join after seeing threads posts and comments on the front page. The default settings will keep them looking at threads untill they figure out they can block it. But when they do, they realise that 90% of all posts and comments came from threads, and they just disabled most of the content.
I would be ok with an opt-in mechanism, where the default settings and the anonymous settings disable threads content, but you can unblock them.
why unblock? again, you’re making the choice for them? Most people will use the Threads app and never realize that it’s part of the fediverse… but SOME will and come over. The rest of the people already on lemmy or whatever, will just block it when it annoys them or they will engage and it will be fine.
they arent forced to stay in the instance
Yes. Certain types of people like to pretend they cannot do that for themselves, how ever.
I believe that it is the same type of people that don’t want stuff like infinite ammo cheat codes, easier difficultis or other similar options in games, because they think it makes it to easy and boring. If you don’t want to activate god mode don’t do it, but don’t go acting like a completely optional thing, somehow is mandatory and required.
Users deciding for themselves? Literally fascism! /s
Hard agree. Fuck da Zuk.
