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”.
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.
Israel have been successfully pressuring meta to remove and shadow ban accounts sympathetic to Palestinians. The level of censorship is crazy.
OK, I’ll bite. You got something more substantial than “I read it on the internet” to back that up? One reputable source on your accusation? Not sayin’ you’re lying/wrong, just asking for some verifiable proof.
Numerous actual popular accounts and news sources have been suspended. It was major news in the Arabic-speaking world in October. Meta even apologized for auto-translating Palestinian as “terrorist.”
Hate to say it but that’s a fail on producing a reliable source.
Did you want specific accounts?
Palestinian Shebab News Agency has facebook pages shut down
@Eye.on.palestine on IG suspended by Meta, then back up after a backlash.
#IStandWithPalestine and #FreePalestine getting censored by Facebook
Thanks, that’s much better.
You know, you have access to search engines too. You don’t need to be lazy and treat the rest of the Internet as your personal stenographer/research assistant.
Fucking HELL, despite how increasingly easy it is to find information, it cannot keep pace with just how utterly fucking lazy people are getting.
You don’t have to humor the troll. We all have the internet we are all free to independently verify.
At the moment this is coming from secondary sources from within meta so there are no articles about it that I’m aware of. But Palestinians and activists constantly have their content removed, account reach limited, and comments removed (which has happened to me multiple times). People also have their accounts threatened and removed.
These actions are visible constantly, meta have been doing this since the start. For example, when you go to someone’s stories at the top it might show 4 or 5 stories, but when you click through to their profile there’ll be 20+.
Some people I follow don’t even show up at the top anymore and I have to access their stories via their profile page or if I’ve messaged them recently.
After (as of this reply) eight hours, you have produced nothing more than anecdotal evidence if not outright invented. I must assume at this point you are spreading disinformation for whatever your goals may be to that end.
Thank you for wasting everybody’s time.
Go look for yourself instead of being condescending.
Welcome to Lemmy!
It’s like Reddit with the provocative takes and hyperbole, but even more extreme somehow!
This place is hilarious.
Well a good friend of my girlfriend is from Gaza. He has been posting translations from his sister’s account of what it is actually like living there right now. Then some AI artwork behind stories of “this place was bombed, my friends just were killed, etc…” and he got a big notification on Instagram that “his account has been restricted for violent hate speech” even though he didn’t incite violence even one time. He just has posts with 2nd person stories of the situation there.
And thus is the problem with charging tech oligopolies with being the arbiters of truth: sometimes they disagree with you, but whatever they believe is “the truth”, because they make it so.
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
“make another account somewhere” isn’t really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
Mastodon, Kbin, the new Lemmy 0.19 release allow on a per user basis to block entire domains, so I don’t see how this is a “you can’t do anything about it” situation. Just let users decide.
Lemmy 0.19’s instance blocking does not filter users, only communities, in addition it does not solve the problems of content polution because it does not limit interaction from blocked malicious users in any way, just hides them (it only really works under the assumption that they’re not malicious users and the blocker is just throwing a fit). For these reasons it is not and cannot be seen as an a replacement to defederation.
Also as I already said users are 100% free to decide, they decide by choosing their instances. If you don’t like it you’re free to host your own or move to a more open protocol like Nostr. The idea of federation was built around the idea of communicating with certain instances and blocking others, not about users individually choosing the servers they connect with, Some servers do operate democratically but in the end the fediverse is designed around servers so servers have every right to choose.
Also I’d like to address the “defederation will kill the fediverse” claims I’ve seen floating around. It won’t in fact it’s a dedicated feature of activitypub and has been in use since forever, instances are able to block ones that go against their values either due to the way those instances are operated or the users they allow on them. This is how it’s worked since the beginning and almost certainly how it will continue. Some users don’t like this and believe that they should be able to access stuff no matter what, failing to realize that they do not own the server their account is hosted on, accessing content on other servers via activitypub requires the content be copied over to your home server, and if the admins don’t want that they can block that server, you don’t really have a say in it because it isn’t your server. So either host your own where you do own it, or move to a more open protocol which exist for the purpose of user freedom and anti-censorship.
What do you think it’s about? Because from my perspective changing instances is kind of the entire defining feature that separates it from commercial platforms.
It’s about connecting communities and having fail saves, not bullying.
Federation is about being able to communicate with other people even if they use a different platform.
I feel like that’s exactly how it was billed to me, find somewhere that federates with who you want, and if that changes, you’re free to move
The choice of email providers is not about which one can exchange mails with GMail.
Some of the time it is though. Like Gmail has a pretty large list of IPs it won’t deliver email from. When self-hosting, it’s something you really do have to worry about.
The reason most people don’t worry about it is that most people only use a handful of free emails and organizations that provide email addresses for their users spend time worrying about it so users don’t have to.
When self-hosting, it’s something you really do have to worry about.
So erecting artificial walls is not positive then. Good we’re on the same page.
No. I definitely prefer email with good spam blocking. I’m not criticizing Google for blocking mail how they do. It’s pretty necessary. Which is also something you learn fairly quickly if you try to self host.
Please explain how federating with Threads is “supporting Meta” and not the opposite.
I’m not sure if federating will help meta so much as it will definitely (most probably) hurt the lemmy/mastodon network.
Here’s a similar case that happened before, with the XMPP protocol being coopted by google but eventually killing it in favor of their own proprietary solution:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Big tech isn’t on our side, and we have to handle outside corporate influence with heavy skepticism.
XMPP still exists and doesn’t have any fewer users than before Google adopted it.
Excuse me sir, i cant be more agree with you
me too ^_^
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
They don’t get to block instances yet.
The ability to block Instances/Threads by user would make this a non-issue.
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.
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 can’t imagine why you are getting push back. I can tell you are very passionate in your position and are on the right side of a complicated issue. The only reason I can think of is your idea hasn’t become mainstream yet and people hate it when they don’t know they should be upset.
Either way I have no skin in it and I agree that meta is garbage. Thank you for be passionate about something in this dispassionate world.
:3
I’d imagine is because Myanmars situation is way more complicated than Facebook “undoubtedly caused a genocide”.
Seems like it’s getting trivialized to shit on Facebook
Facebook deserves every ounce of shit it has coming to them.
True.
But do you believe the actual people commiting the genocide and manipulating Facebook shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions?
🙄 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.
It will always be … a name that doesn’t exist and has never existed?
(Hint: BURMA. It’s hard to sound smart when you can’t even get a single fucking name right! Especially the name that “it will always be” for you. Holy fucking shit!)
You wrote all that over an obvious typo? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
An “obvious” typo you missed when you wrote it. When you read it back after posting. In a post where you were putting on airs of being smarter than everybody.
I fucking love it when that happens and love to rub it in.
That one is actually public record, with
-
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
-
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
-
They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
-
Their direct fault? No. But they sure as fuck share a lot of the blame in pouring gasoline on the fire.
Because it was totally and we have the receipts? Imagine being that ignorant of world events.
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.”
I don’t want to join a proprietary service, but I want to be able to communicate with people who chose to join it.
Facebook accounts are free, that’s all ya need man
They are not free because they deprive you of your privacy.
Interesting. Then why would we want lemmy drowning in all that?
Because if the content is federated, then you can access it without sacrificing your privacy.
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.
How about adding a feature to “unlist” an instance, where you could interact with it normally, but its posts wouldn’t show up in All, Popular, etc.?
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.
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.
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 ?
Leave it to users. Let people decide what they want to see.
Do you think any users would populate a place that’s over-run with trash?
If there are, would they be the type of users who would populate communities you would feel comfortable in?
Do you think any users would populate a place that’s over-run with trash?
- Facebook.
- Instagram.
- Twitter (pre-Apartheid Edgelord).
- Twitter/X (post-Apartheid Edgelord).
- … and a cast of hundreds.
Seems that yes, they would.
… that’s why I included the second sentence?
You will only see the “trash” if you subscribe to users from Threads.
This. Imagine begging daddy admin to protect you from mean Meta.
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.
Imagine zucking on Marks schlong.
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.
If anybody remembers XMPP being widespread and what Facebook, Google, Apple and others (say, I personally remember VK and Yandex in Russia supporting it) did to it, that’s what will happen if you “wait and see”.
EDIT: oh, half the thread is such comments
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.
You mention kbin/mbin, but you do not understand its power!
https://lemmy.world/comment/5715981
This person who responded to me didn’t think so. Maybe you can talk to him about it.
If anything meta integrates here I’m out.
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.
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.
Exactly. It’s basically pen testing.
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.
My sweet summer child.
With a network that big, they have to be very careful, and really try, if they don’t want our servers to just go kaboom.
Or we just defederate from any of those attempts.
Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.
This is an excellent point. Thanks!
in that case considering meta is saying that it would take nearly a year to federate the platform we probably should defederate them.
What point in that linked blog swayed you? The circumstances are quite different. XMPP was dogshit when Google started working with it. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
I really don’t know enough to say one way or the other, but the fact that this is an established Microsoft practice swayed me. I can actually believe google didn’t intend to do what it did to xmpp as a log of google employees from the 2000’s speak highly of the company, but these executives are traded like nfl players, and i know enough about meta’s history to believe they may do this. Besides I’m still new to development, but i don’t see many other reasons why it would take meta nearly a year to fully launch federation.
Actually this just occurred to me, but isn’t it interesting which accounts were linked first?
Triple-E predates Microsoft. IBM was doing it before Bill Gates was a twinkle in the mailman’s eye.
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!
As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
Is it even true? I doubt XMPP was ever popular outside of google’s talk.
Not even a little bit. XMPP was rubbish.
No it’s not in the least bit, but because people keep reposting that angry blog post by someone who was personally involved and wanted someone to blame so they blamed Google (as if XMPP needed any outside help to fail to catch on, they could do it on their own perfectly fine), people believe that narrative and then get sold on Meta wanting to the same with the Fediverse. As if they could give a flying fart (just like with Google and XMPP).
If they don’t care about Fediverse they wouldn’t join it in the first place. It isn’t just meaningless but actually harmful - people can gain access to the content on their service without being subject to their extensive surveillance and ads. Add to this all the regular problems with federation.
As for Google and XMPP, back in the days it was happening Google were playing good guys - they had infamous “don’t be evil” motto, supported various open standards and open-source projects (they still do so to some extend of course). I think for them it wasn’t really an intent to ‘kill’ XMPP, it just XMPP was too dependant on google so they suffered a lot when the company decided to stop federation.
This forced many XMPP users to get into Google’s ecosystem
No it didn’t
As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started
Wrong again.
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.
@Creatortray
You’ve just written it : their negative reputation for easaly understandable reasons. We can already foresee Threads will very soon be used to spread the most toxic campaigns on the net and that will undoubtably harm the Fediverse. One of the most valuable trait of the Fediverse is its decentralization and consequently, the potential accountability of any server administrator. Why should we take those risks when it’s so easy to avoid it? #BlockThreadsOut
@mypasswordis1234@Nelfan @Creatortray @mypasswordis1234 if my server federates with #Threads and it creates a problem, I’ll stop supporting it and move to one that doesn’t.
@boiglenoight @Nelfan @Creatortray @mypasswordis1234
Great toot, Nelfaneor, but to use the word ‘risk’ with respect to the probability of #falseBook creating harm in the #fediverse network, is a mistake — it is a “certainty”.Boiglenoight if you value the free and open web we have news for you, your instance is having its HTTPS intercepted by Cloud(G)lare (change ‘G’ to ‘F’). Move to a different one, if you want us to continue dialog with you.
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?
There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/
Oh jeez how do I turn off all the moving stuff
