- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
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Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to
What I hate to see, even in this thread, is people turning on each other in this “us vs. them”, “you’re either a part of the pact or you’re against us” nonsense
Let’s all remember why WE ALL CHOSE to get on the fediverse and build it. The strength of the fediverse comes from the freedom for each instance to choose how to run things. My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
I hate Meta. I also know that Meta doesn’t need to do anything to take down the fediverse if we do it ourselves.
Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.
Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.
Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.
Yes, yes and yes (I contribute money).
Ditto. I also try to file good, clean bug reports with detailed repro steps where I hit them. Not just “it’s busted, fix it”. I’d love to contribute actual code, because I’d like to think I’m a really good programmer (been coding professionally for decades), but actually fully getting a hosted Masto instance up to the point where you can edit the code and see it live is a freaking nightmare.
“The flood of crap” isn’t what people should be worried about. They should be worried about Meta embracing, extending, and extinguishing the Fediverse. There’s a good article about this here. People are worried about the wrong things and don’t realize what’s at stake.
The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here.
It’s not about pulling the plug. It’s about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it’s going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they’ve never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
Well that and the story while not “wrong”, is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn’t. So which is it? I’m not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn’t that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn’t cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren’t the key to success.
I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!
I’m also in favor of remaining defeated, but I certainly understand it’s a big risk. EEE is a real threat. On the other hand, something like Threads is the fast track to mainstreaming the Fediverse and really advancing us away from dependence on big tech
Big risk, big reward. The deciding factor for me is when on the fence I’d rather be inclusive. Creating a big fight against something I’m a bit skeptical of just isn’t worth it.
Embrace, extend, destroy is a thing though.
It is
I’m not sure if defederating is the correct counter to it
Defederating from known-bad-actor corporations during the “embrace” phase seems like a perfectly wise choice to me. Keeps them from getting to stage 2.
It’s not about us embracing them, it’s about them embracing the protocol, which they can do whether we stay federated or not.
The argument against defederation is that it tells newcomers that the defederated instance is an island and they’re better off joining the place where they can talk to their friends. Meta can more easily extend if we’re not around to explain why extending is a bad thing, and if we’re not around to advocate for people to ditch Meta’s platform and join an open one
Here is what it actually means
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.I think it’s naive to imagine that anything we say or do will influence Meta’s behavior or strategy in any way. But I do see your point that when an instance defederates from Threads, it makes an island of itself, not of Threads.
My understanding is that no one in an instance is harmed if some other instance chooses to federate or defederate from Threads.
It does kinda hurt the Fediverse as a whole when it becomes so segregated.
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What?
Meta has no interest in being part of the fediverse, it only wants to eliminate any posible competition.
The usual MO of buying the competitors isn’t posible on the fediverse, so the way to do it is embrace, extend and extinguish
Defederating is important because is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse, and then we’ll be right back at the corporate social media we’re trying to break away from, with the surveillance, ads and nazis being welcome as long as it’s profitable
is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse
How?
I’ve seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don’t agree with its analysis. It wasn’t easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.
There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I’m sure Meta would like us to join their service, I’m not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.
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I was nearly 20 years younger than I am now and was definitely ignorant of free, public XMPP service providers, which is kind of the point. If someone tech-savvy enough to be running Linux on a laptop in 2004 and liked the idea of XMPP tried and failed to get started with it, what hope was there of attracting a mainstream audience? You could argue I didn’t try hard enough, and you’d be right in a tautological sense. I did later use third-party XMPP clients for Google Chat.
I don’t expect a Pony from Meta. Meta is a face-eating leopard and I expect it to try to eat my face. If blocking their users from seeing the pictures of birds I share on Mastodon prevents that, please tell me how it does. This isn’t a rhetorical question; I self-host and can block, or not block whatever I want.
I’ve yet to see a convincing argument in favor of preemptive defederation or an explanation of what “Embrace Extend Extinguish” means in this particular scenario. There seems to be a lot of thinking that defederating “punishes” or handicaps Meta in some small way, which from my understanding is just not how it works at all.
I guess the preemptive block helps make the block easier for admins rather than ‘trying to do it’ once the service is embedded. Fact is Lemmy is doing ok without it so removing it isn’t going to make Lemmy worse than it was yesterday.
I don’t use threads so I don’t really see any personal benefit to blocking it, so I am a bit biased
Hating on Threads for no reason is the circlejerk of Lemmy.
One of many
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I’m almost 50 myself. I’m logged in to XMPP right now. I’ve used it consistently since the early 2000. 20ish years minimum. There was never a thriving ecosystem of XMPP servers. There was a lot of choice, but nothing with a big name that would appeal to the average consumer. No jabber.social or jabber.world. And no critical mass of users. The transports were ultimately a frustrating gimmick. That Microsoft and AOL constantly broke. Leaving them unreliable and undesirable to recommend others to use.
When Google rolled out Google chat based on jabber/XMPP there was a lot of hopium going around that they’d be that big name to bring critical mass. Surprise! Hindsight says no. They “defederated” their servers. The jabber/XMPP development group themselves decided to persue standardization. Which largely meant an end to the active development of the service. Standards move much slower. Imperceptibly so. With Google out, the XMPP group pursuing standardization, no “official” servers, and the advent of services like Skype discord etc. The buzz and momentum behind XMPP imploded on it’s own. Stymied by no one. Suffocated by it all.
No one killed XMPP. It simply stopped being relevant to most people.
Exactly. Any analysis of “embrace extend extinguish” WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?
the same can be argued about the fediverse. the approximate number is 1.5 million of monthly active users, which is just an ant compared to Meta’s.
So yeah, one could argue that it’s pretty much the same situation in terms of numbers if not worse (I don’t know the numbers but I’d bet that Meta has more users than Google talk ever had)
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That would be quite easy given that Gmail launched in 2004 as invite-only and access has been somewhat limited well into 2007.
Geez, Fedipact people talking about XMPP prove time and time again that they’re too young to remember that.
You aren’t wrong. I’m not here to defend Google or Meta. But those remembering that Google killed XMPP are only remembering what they were told. Relevance "killed” XMPP. Google certainly wasn’t it’s white knight. But more than anything, the XMPP working groups gamble of pursuing standardization didn’t result in mass adoption. When development slowed as it had to, to achieve standardization. Other services like Skype, discord, etc. All flourished and bloomed. Leaving XMPP largely irrelevant. It’s still exists to this day however. And I’m logged into it this very moment. I’ve been logged in to an XMPP server of one sort or another nearly 24/7 365 for the last 20 years.
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Basically every single invocation of “embrace, extend and extinguish” is a borderline fallacy that depends on an oversimplified world view.
XMPP/Jabber is even “funnier” because instant messaging as a whole is basically dead in favor of SMS and phone apps. The closest we get on that front is imessage and even that is mostly a US obsession.
Basically every “Oh mah gawdz, EEE is coming for us” article comes from a place of mass ignorance, at best.
As for Threads? I suspect that will eat Mastodon’s lunch. Because it already is. People love giving Facebook even more information and already have their favorite usernames from instagram. Whereas they will never stop bitching about how hard it is to sign up for Mastodon.
And… that is fine. Mastodon is not twitter. It is better. A lot better.
That said? I wouldn’t mind having access to Threads content. And I think there is a lot of room to use Matsodon/federation as a way for advertisers to take their power back, as it were, by controlling their own instances and being able to immediately cut off The Emerald Apartheid when he starts talking about The Jews again. But, if I ever do see a significant benefit to this, I can migrate to an instance that federates or even start my own. Rather than insisting that the ones I have accounts on do what I want.
I’d argue the phone apps are instant messaging and I’m a little surprised none of the previously-dominant PC-based IM apps made the transition successfully. Most of the ones currently popular do have web or native PC options though.
I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction. Ideally, we’ll be able to offer a more compelling pitch than just “not corporate”.
Regardless of how you classify them, nobody was ever going to figure out how to sideload a jabber client onto their flip phones or iphone 1 or blackberries.
And that is kind of the thing. Maybe Google got a larger market share of the IM market (I assume AIM was still dominant in the US and ICQ in the rest of the world) by using XMPP but better. But the market got wiped out by SMS and imessage and now is mostly shared between (depending on your country) whatsapp, line, and the imessage. … And I still use Hangouts.
Even if XMPP had been dominant on PC (which is not at all what EEE is about but…), it would not have survived as people shifted away from sitting at a computer and typing and moved toward stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and using their thumbs on a phone screen.
That’s a really good point imho. Maybe Google just made a better product… or at least a more accessible product.
I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction.
I keep seeing people say things like this, but it’s just naive. Meta isn’t spending billions of dollars just to give their captive audience an offramp.
I’m not sure what Meta’s goal is with adding federation to Threads. Some options include:
- Preempting government scrutiny for monopolistic practices
- Gaining a competitive advantage against Xitter/Bluesky/etc…
- Giving Threads users access to more people/content
As for why I think the flow of users is likely to be away from Threads:
- People who already actively use Mastodon and the like tend to be fairly technically sophisticated and anti-corporate. Not many of those will switch to a Meta product when they can reach the same audience without it.
- Most people who joined Threads got there via Instagram. Those sorts of mainstream users mostly haven’t been exposed to decentralized, non-corporate social media. The added exposure of seeing it from Threads is more marketing than these open source projects could ever hope to buy.
Forgive me for repeating this, but I think it’s a great analogy and explains all of our thoughts about it:
I’ve used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don’t have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren’t going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn’t really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It’s an easy forecast.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
Thank you, someone finally looking big picture. I see a lot of folks talking about things like “it won’t harm Threads” or “the federation is all about inclusiveness and joining together” and those people, while correct on paper, are missing the point.
Put simply, many instances would prefer not to deal with that unnatural influx, and that is their choice. In fact, the best part of the fediverse is not only that they CAN make that choice it’s that they can UNDO it later if need be. I can’t fault some of these smaller instances for being proactive in protecting themselves when few here really know what goes into running and moderating.
Threads wants to join the fediverse to either steal the content and/or kill it, there would be no other reasons.
Yes. My personal guess is that they want to start Threads as just another Federation instance where people build communities and relationships across instances as they do already, and act like a good Fediverse instance, all friendly and open and free . . . and then once there’s enough popularity and/or cross-traffic they will wall off the Threads portion and monetize access, so you’re forced to either pay up to continue in the parts you like and are invested in, or walk away leaving everything you put into it to Meta and paying users.
Oh, and they’ll suck up as much Fediverse data as they can too, while they’re at it: anything they have access to will be hoovered up for their commercial use, just as it is now. Federating means that all federated traffic will be propagated to Meta servers in due course, and we all know Meta has zero intention of being bound by any agreements in regard to the data of others, regardless of what platitudes they mouth.
On a personal level, I don’t give a shit whether lemmy.world federates with Threads, but only because I have already made the decision personally not to participate in ANYTHING Meta, and that includes here on the Fediverse.
I’m already here because Reddit pulled that same shit, and I walked away then too. I learned my lesson. No way will I knowingly cross that line into personally investing time and attention into what Meta could wall off at any time and monetize without recourse for anyone who does make that mistake.
And I’d rather they not have my data, but it’s not like I’m in any position to stop or prevent it. Best I can do is stay away from all Meta products, apps, trackers, and cookies.
TL;DR: People can do what they want with Threads, federate or don’t, participate or don’t, just know that Meta can and will wall it off at any time and expect participants to pay in some way to continue.
Sure does seem that way.
I get that you, like me, don’t like capitalist companies but what you’re saying is based on nothing.
They can’t steal content from here that’s literally not possible, this comment here I’m writing now can not be stolen by anyone ever - and not just in the piracy isn’t stealing way but in the it’s public domain so you already all own it too.
I use stuff from meta all the time and I didn’t steal it, all the vital open source code they’ve created and which is a fundermental part of stable diffusion and other open source tools is benefiting the community - are they only doing this to kill something?
I understand the logic that successful capitalist company must be evil because that’s how capitalism works but it’s also a lot more complex, open source isn’t just a wishywashy dream for cheapskate nerds like meit’s a powerful and positive force that can benefit everyone even companies like meta without them needing to kill anyone or anything. Participation isn’t just it’s own moral reward it’s actually got a lot of other benefits too.
Meta might just want to federate because open source is good.
See, this is the more reasonable concern. Moderating a fediverse instance is hard, and the flood of posts coming from Threads might be a bad problem. That’s a case where I understand the need to defederate. But on the other hand, that doesn’t feel like a solution that needs to be done proactively - defederating from Threads if/when Threads users become a problem seems perfectly reasonable.
Here’s the important bit, just because they’ve never been in the cruise line business, doesn’t mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
What does that even mean in this context though?
The federated timeline is ready FULL of shit I don’t care about, have no idea what it is, or can’t read it because it’s another language due to people not being able to set their language correctly.
The only time I’m going to see threads content is if it is boosted by someone I follow (which I want), contains a hashtag I follow (which I want), or in the federated timeline I already don’t use.
I don’t see the issue.
It is not dumb. Thinking that this time it will be different is dumb:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
When this was happening I was a huge proponent of Google, and Google Talk, recommending everyone I knew to switch to it, because Jabber with the help of Google will remove monopoly from AIM, MSN, YIM etc.
Google fucking killed the network and I contributed to it (maybe not in a significant way, but I still feel very bitter about it)
How many users did Jabber/XMPP have in 2004?
recommending everyone I knew to switch to it
I think we’ve isolated the problem. Everyone is aware of the risk this time. nobody is going to abandon their Fediverse accounts for Threads.
GTalk was easy to install, no need to create an account (most already had Gmail), had incompatible features (like making a voice call), later was integrated into the Gmail web interface, so you could use it anywhere. So many Jabber users did switch to it.
Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving. Since most Jabber users had Gmail account many switches to continue talking to their peers. Stubborn people, like me, were left with rooster full of people online that none responded to you.
At that time Google was seemed like a white knight, fixing things and making them better.
Facebook today is known for being extremely shitty and destroying any competition, and there are still so many naive people.
Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving.
Google intentionally turned off XMPP federation in its chat product.
I’d attribute it to malice, but looking at how badly Google has repeatedly mismanaged its chat offerings I’m going with Hanlon’s razor here. They did claim spam was an issue as well.
I guess I was lucky enough to avoid spam, but I believe you.
As for them doing it unintentionally, I dunno… They did very similar thing to Usenet as well (although in that case spam had a major part.
I think Google’s way of operating is to try new things and see what sticks. Once it gets popular figure out if it can generate revenue and if it doesn’t, quickly shut it down.
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I said it was added to Gmail later.
Gmail went public on February 7, 2007, the last release of GTalk was May 14, 2013. Anyway by the time GMail went public, everyone and their dog had a Gmail invite.
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Pxtl’s response is a straw man argument. Nevermind the dumb comment, the “wait and see” argument is disingenuous and insulting.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana
It’s not a strawman. It’s an actual man that existed and did the thing. It’s history.
What?
If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:
- Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
- Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
- Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)
It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.
Personally, it’s the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.
I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.
The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.
I think the fear is that this turns into an “embrace, extend, extinguish”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don’t know if the fear is well rooted, but I can definitely understand how Facebook is perceived as not having established a history of trust.
They are a private company, which have placed profits above the best interests of its users.
Edit: I think you can draw a parallel with another scenario: an open and free market requires regulation. There should be rules and boundaries, such that a true free and open market exists. Similarly, there’s an argument to be made than we should restrict the fediverse for it to keep existing in the way we want it to.
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Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.
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Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.
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It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.
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This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy. They made a browser because everything they make is web-based and wanted to control that. They add non-standard features to the browser because they want to do stuff that isn’t doable as part of the standard, because the web is a document engine that has been perverted into a general-purpose application platform.
This implies Google is organized-enough to have any coherent concept of strategy.
I am confident that Google does have a high-level strategy regarding areas that they move into. That doesn’t mean that everything that they do that creates compatibility issues is an embrace, extend, and extinguish attempt, though.
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I, for one, support the right of every instance to federate with whoever they choose to federate with.
So do I.
I just think their decisions might be dumb.
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If you just want a hassle-free way to view as much content as possible, there are instances that are federated with pretty much everyone - just have to do a little research. If you want to guarantee keeping post history AND have absolute control over what you can see, you’re gonna have to put in the work to make your own instance.
Also -
them: it’s ridiculous they aren’t listening to the user
the instance: held a vote and the majority voted to defederate
Have you looked into the process of actually spinning up your own Mastodon instance? It’s not exactly the good old days of throwing together a LAMP box and installing PHPBB on it.
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I’ve done it and it’s not a whole lot harder than that. The additional steps are:
- Install dependencies - exact commands are provided in the instructions for Debian-based systems
- Create a more complex web server configuration file - for which a template is provided
- Set up systemd services to start it at boot - templates are provided
It is harder than managed hosting where you might only need to create a database user in a web control panel and upload files for PHPBB, but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.
but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.
FWIW, I recall when elestio announced that they were offering managed hosting for kbin, and that they already did managed hosting of lemmy instances, and and I’m sure that there is managed hosting for at least lemmy available elsewhere.
Doesn’t it require a whole mess of Docker instances and some kind of orchestrator to host? Or is it easier to stand up on a single server now? I haven’t looked into it in a year or so.
It does not. I set mine up more than a year ago and followed these instructions.
People already familiar with Ruby on Rails will not find any surprises there; Mastodon’s hosting requirements are typical of a Rails app.
I think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an “instance” with a long history of poor or apathetic moderation vs. creating an off-boarding system for Meta users to escape the corporatocracy.
Personally I vote for the latter, and I’m glad most of the larger instances are in the same boat.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch with friends, family and news and Meta goes down in flames but maybe that’s the optimist in me.
Fully agree. I feel like helping facebook keep their users stuck on their platform or worse Twitter feels counterproductive in making the world more free.
If you think Meta will allow the Threads algorithm to show anything from the fediverse you are unbelievably naive. And that’s if content from the fediverse even makes a blip on a platform with 100x the size.
Meta doesn’t federate with the goal of giving Threads users an out. They federate because it’s the most efficient way to scrape fediverse instances and build profiles on fediverse users.
Meta has reached saturation with their existing services so they are now branching into any possible extra source of data they can. They’ll take anything, from fediverse federation to Whatsapp emails. All your data is welcome to them.
They federate because it’s the most efficient way to scrape fediverse instances and build profiles on fediverse users.
That’s not true. Quiet scraping is much easier to implement than integrating AP into your platform.
They don’t need to show you anything in the algorithm.
As for data, that’s complete non-sense. What data do you think they’re getting access to that they can’t already get? If the goal was to trove data they would have done it quietly and not announced it so that everyone could block them before they even had a chance.
They’re federating because of the Digital Markets Act.
In an ideal world people realize they can escape the ads and data collection without losing touch
Meta will not allow this to happen, and if/when it does, they will take action. This shit is a zero sum game to these people.
They may not have a choice
No, I don’t think the conversation should be about the impact of federating with an instance.
If we want to see it, great. If we don’t, also great. But we should have the power to decide for ourselves instead of some biased admins.
The only people who disagree with this are those who want to control what other people get to see.
we should have the power to decide for ourselves instead of some biased admins.
So admins shouldn’t defederate from any instances at all? Even right wing Nazi instances with Nazi flags in every profile?
The only people who disagree with this are those who want to control what other people get to see.
Yes, they want to protect their users from harmful instances. This is something the people who join those instances want.
They also want to “deplatform” those types from society as a whole.
So admins shouldn’t defederate from any instances at all? Even right wing Nazi instances with Nazi flags in every profile?
Users should have the power to defederate in addition to admins.
This is something the people who join those instances want.
Not everyone wants the same thing or has the same idea of what constitutes ‘harmful’ instances.
They also want to “deplatform” those types from society as a whole.
Yes, this is why it’s important to take individual control away from the user; to push an agenda.
Users should have the power to defederate in addition to admins.
They do.
Not everyone wants the same thing or has the same idea of what constitutes ‘harmful’ instances.
That’s why I didn’t say “everyone”. I said “people who join those instances”. If you don’t want that, you can choose our migrate to a different one. Or even create your own.
Yes, this is why it’s important to take individual control away from the user; to push an agenda.
You’re correct, of course, but “agendas” are not inherently negative.
They do.
How can I defederate from an instance? Last time this discussion was brought up, I didn’t think it was possible and everyone else agreed.
Depends on which service you’re talking about.
On Mastodon you can go to a profile or post from the domain, click the 3 dots and “block domain”.
I think Lemmy just implemented this but I don’t know how to do it.
Feel free to removed when we block Flipboard or Automattic. We’re only blocking Meta, because Meta’s interests are not the Fediverse’s best interest.
Feel free to removed? Is that client side or server side?
Good question
Then change instances to one that doesn’t block threads. It’s that easy.
Moderators will basically be doing free work for meta. If a Lemmy.ml post blows up on threads then the ml mods will have to deal with the influx from threads users and basically moderate threads for free.
There’s another reason to defederate. Most mods are volunteers. Lemmy currently really doesn’t have the manpower to handle something with a userbase as large as Threads, and Facebook doesn’t have a great track record with moderation, so it’s unlikely they’d do anything about any issues in a timely manner.
Edit: kids -> mods, busy -> really; autocorrect was being stupid again.
I experience this a lot on Reddit where /r/Infiniti gets cross posted to a massive sub and now two mods are dealing with 500,000+ users. I can’t imagine how much more annoying it would be if I was also paying to host the community.
0.19 allows for instance blocking, so the good tools will be available.
If this wasnt needed we wouldnt even think about doing it.
By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.
Say it louder for the children in the back.
This is the solution.
My friend… your instance has defederated from several other large instances already. If you were on a lemm.ee account then I could take your argument seriously. It’s like the US admonishing Venezuela for going oil hunting, China suggesting religious persecution is unacceptable, or Russia shouting about gay rights.
My friend, I’m still getting used to the fediverse as well.
Try not to assume the average user knows their way around this place, lol.
Do I just automatically know which instances block which instances? Lol. Of course not.
But you decided to weigh in on the situation… I suppose I’ve already told you which instance you’re best suited for. Basically the only criterion anyone looks at for a home instance is who they federate with. Past that, your experience is largely identical. Just federation and admins. Click “instances” to see federation.
Haha. Just can’t admit when you’re wrong, can you? I’ve met people like you before.
Anyways, peace man. Gotta do my own part and choose which users I interact with, lol.
I know you’re messing with me, but anyone else reading my comment should know that it’s decent advice for picking an instance.
If you want threads, join threads or a threads friendly instance, but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
but if you don’t like the majority of the fediverse blocking threads then get fucked because this is what the people want.
That seems like an odd position to take, given the information available. The only number here – the instance count involved – has a majority not blocking Threads.
SO FAR
Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like. Forcing this on the instance level is just nonsense, and exactly the sort of behavior most of us wanted to escape from. If I wanted my instance owner to just decide all of this random nonsense for me, I’d just go back to reddit. I’m glad my instance is leaving it up to me.
You can block the instance, but the individual users can still be seen from that instance. You would still have to block each individual user, and that’s ridiculous.
edit: fyi, i’m discussing lemmy and how defederation here works. not sure how it works on mastodon.
If that’s true, that’s definitely something that needs to be addressed. I am all in favor of users having the choice to block instances and their users, and will likely even block Threads myself. This whole shaming campaign against instances though is childish, ineffective, and against the underlying principles of federation. What’s even the point if people are just going to start name and shaming every instance owner making a decision they don’t like?
And for fuck’s sake, I understand the core idea of embrace, extend, extinguish, don’t link me the article (not you, gregorum, just random readers of this comment). I’m just not going to use that as a kneejerk way to shut down any action taken by a company I don’t like.
That doesn’t sound correct. If it were, what would be the point of the block instance feature?
It’s to block all posts from that instance, which I think is not enough.
So it blocks all posts from that instance but not all users? What is the difference as I still see none of their users posts, which is the point isn’t it? I’m genuinely not understanding.
You can still see their comments, unlike when your instance defederates from their instance. For some people, the ability to completely block all interaction with an instance is important.
We’re talking Lemmy or Mastodon? Because I’m talking Mastodon.
exactly. it’s pointless.
if you were to focus this on just Lemmy itself as opposed to the wider fedi (“Especially given that there was just an update allowing for individuals to block instances they don’t like” implies that’s the case) you already have nothing to worry about as you encountering a threads user here will be even slimmer than encountering a mastodon user.
threads is primarily targeting the microblog/personal side of fedi. the incentives and privacy expectations are quite different compared to this side of fedi
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about why Threads is adding ActivityPub support. It’s not to destroy the fediverse. The fediverse is not in competition with Threads.
I keep on forgetting that “threads” (in lowercase) is frequently being used to refer to “Threads” the Facebook thing, and not separate sub-communities within the Fediverse.
Was getting all confused as to why Fediverse instances were internally blocking each other.
Y’all all need to learn capitalization, yo. Helps reduce confusion by turning certain things into the proper nouns that they actually are.
Maybe a hot take, but if you want this big libertarian anarchist federated system you get all the pros and cons along with it. Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone from coming in and taking it. It’s inevitable by design.
I’d argue the system is working quite well, every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
That’s what federation is all about, no central power taking decisions in behalf of everyone else.
every individual and/or community has the liberty to choose what to do about Meta.
Untrue. Users cannot decide which instances they see.
of course they can. if they don’t like their instance’s policies, they just have to move to another. or host their own.
there has been people in pro-threads instances that have moved to one that blocks threads and the other way around.
if they don’t like their instance’s policies, they just have to move to another.
So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don’t actually have the power to choose who they federate with?
host their own.
Hosting their own instance makes them admins.
So they have to sift through instances until they find one that federates exactly how they would? Lol. Or do they have to compromise because they don’t actually have the power to choose who they federate with?
You can see the blocklist of any mastodon instance without joining it. You can and should read their policies before joining.
Hosting their own instance makes them admins.
This makes no sense. You are saying that just because you’re the admin of an instance you can’t be an user?
You can have a single user instance of your own and be done with it. If you don’t like someone else choosing what instances defederate, you have that possibility.
It legitimately feels like you are incapable of understanding what I’m saying, so I’m just gonna make the executive decision and duck out.
Have a nice day. You may have the last reply.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.
No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.
…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!
We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn’t it?
They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…
Call me a pessimist, but people are caring way too much about the idealistic implementation of the technology and missing the fact that the tech doesn’t mean shit compared to the community. If you don’t care about the community growing, then that’s one thing. But if you do, Threads is the competition that you won’t be able to beat if they feel like putting in the effort.
You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?
Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.
You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?
There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.
we need to prepare for the extinguish
And my entire point is you can’t. The system is designed to allow anyone in, you can’t decided to stop someone because they are a corporation. It’s similar to people trying to stop the NSA from committing anything to the Linux kernel because you’re afraid they’re going to put in a backdoor. It can’t be done by design.
My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.
Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?
“No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space.”
But therein lies the problem. The fediverse isn’t one homogenous entity. Although there seems to be an overall leftie tint to much of the fediverse, opinions on what is" valued" and “positive” vary quite a bit. The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join. Trying to control the entire fediverse goes against the point of the fediverse imo.
Is that really a problem? It’s not trying to “control” anything. It’s a voluntary pact meant to conserve the non-corporate fediverse, as it is right now.
The beauty of the fediverse is that you can choose your experience based on the instance you join
This is never going to change. If you just don’t like the intent behind the fedipact, no problem - the majority of the fediverse will be talking with threads. You get the personal choice of which instances you make accounts on. Hell, you can make your own instance.
There is no problem here.
I don’t know exactly what the fedipact is, but I know of a collection of instances with arbitrary mods without accountability who have sworn to collectively create a block list and block instances based on what opinions those instances allow etc. Instances can even be blocked for not blocking another instance. I see that as a problem for the fediverse because it can grow and create an unnecessary rift of the verse.
Also, yes it’s great that you can chose instance and jump wherever you want, but an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks. We can ourselves block instances from our feeds and we should make that the norm (and perhaps make those blocks more powerful and configurable if need be), and have the instances focus more on blocking straight up illegal things.
an even better thing would be to put more emphasis on user controlled blocks.
And force your instance maintainers to deal with the amount of bigoted content they won’t be able to moderate? There’s already a huge amount of stuff any other instance would be blocked with no hesitation.
If you want a place where admins are not allowed to block communities and instead leave moderation of all but the most egregious, illegal content, up to individuals, there are places like that already in X and Threads.
This is the fediverse, where admins are expected to look after their members. If they don’t, the members will leave. I don’t want to block every toxic user or instance on my own - I already spend too much time blocking normies from lemmy.world.
I don’t think trying to control is the best way of looking at it. There’s a hive mind about the fediverse that has a purpose, that wants to protect it as part of the identity of it. So a collective of instances banding together to keep that intact seems right up its alley.
Not having a central authority means you have no real power to stop someone
This is demonstrating the exact opposite. Community organization is valid.
But… the majority are federated? And if counted by affected users I don’t even know how large they federated majority is since the biggest instances are all federated iirc.
Either way I think it’s good that we can at least choose our own experience by selecting which instance to join.
We’ll see. I don’t think you can beat a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion users if they are motivated enough.
I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.
Same difference with the fediverse. I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures. The fedipact means we can easily find those networks of like-minded communities to federate with.
I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.
Mark Zuckerberg smiled to himself. Nobody knew that he was DarkWolf47.
I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures.
IRC did do that on a few cases, where one federated IRC network had irreconciliable differences with another and you had a split, with a new IRC network forming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet
EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users.[1] It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.
In July 1996, disagreement on policy caused EFnet to break in two: the slightly larger European half (including Australia and Japan) formed IRCnet, while the American servers continued as EFnet. This was known as The Great Split.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undernet
Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet.[4] The Undernet IRC daemon became known as “ircu”. Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.
How do you know about DW?
anti-meta activism is not a bad thing at all. The billionaire corps have their marketing teams, individuals and communities have their activism. Everyone can listen to both and take an informed decision.
They are just that, activists, informing everyone about a possible issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are not enforcing anything on anyone.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances. Not a big deal. You’ll still be able to interact with the Fediverse, it’s not like you were in Twitter, you had to leave and now you’ve lost all your contacts there.
The worst that can happen is that if your instance admin decides to ban Threads and you want to federate with Threads, you’ll have to switch instances.
Honestly, the lack of cross-instance account portability is one of the major issues that I think the Fediverse has today.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
between Mastodon instances it’s quite easy and painless. everything else is kind of a mess.
I’d rather have some sort of public-private key system to permit for moving across instances and being able to associate accounts.
that would be very useful and a fairly good solution.
I don’t see moving instances as this simple thing that everyone else does. Until I can bring my comments and subscriptions over instantly it’s a huge waste of time. Regular users aren’t going to do that. I’m on my third instance already and almost didn’t make the third jump due to the annoyance of adding them all again.
I meant on Mastodon, where it is that simple. After all, it makes more sense since they are both microblogging.
In Lemmy it’s a bit of a hassle, but the devs were working on it.
Haven’t really done much with Mastadon, I always liked following topics over people, and when I last tried it was still firmly people based.
Not at all. Instances are free to ask other instances to not federate with Threads. And the other instances can tell the original instance to fuck off or agree with it.
And then instances start fighting and decelerate from each other and it becomes this annoying game of will I be able to see the content I want to tomorrow? We’ll see how it turns out. Needing to keep moving instances isn’t my idea of a good thing like everyone else seems to think it is.
If that is the case, then the Lemmy will start to shrink or straight up die, but that is life.
That’s the risk of the federation. But I much prefer that than a monolithic black box controlled by a mega corpo.
I just want to find the content I like, the content that helps me solve problems, and a way to interact with it without being forced to see ads. I’m not going to use a worse product just because it’s not controlled by a corporation and I don’t think I’m alone in that across most of the population.
Then maybe Lemmy isn’t for you then. The way the fediverse is structured at its core seems to be a problem for you.
Yes.
I think a fully p2p system with a community, a user, and a post being identified by a key and connected via asymmetric cryptography, and then a reputation system yielding a number between, say, -100 and +100, would work better.
That reputation system wouldn’t be like karma, it would possibly also affect whether we store something below -50 score, to then share.
It should be relative - we may attribute an evaluation to a thing, which would affect its children. Or we may attribute an evaluation to a user, and then derive score for a thing from that user’s evaluation of it. Or maybe all of the described.
Maybe something like that is going to be easier to build on Locutus when it becomes operational.
I don’t think that any single score is going to make everyone happy.
Maybe if there are multiple user-scoring systems run by various sources, and I can choose which score I want to use as a metric.
Like, I think that the Marxist-Leninist crowd on some of the left-wing instances is bonkers, but I imagine that they’d say the same thing about me or other people who subscribe to mainstream economics in general. You’re not going to find a Single Source of Truth on that matter.
Eh, that was the whole point. Do not leave moderation to other people or at least make that easy.
It should be relative
Which means that the score of anything would be derived from 1) what you directly set, 2) what another user sets, modified by what you set for that user, 3) what a user sets, modified by what is set for him by another user, which has a value set by you attributed …
One can even make a logic where you see high score for things disliked by people you dislike.
There is some computative difficulty, but nothing big for our times.
You’re touching a sore topic. Hence the downvotes, many that have bought into the fediverse, believe (in a religious cult way) that its architecture won’t be taken advantage of by bad actors. Even though history has proven the opposite.
Reminds me of this comment by one of the Lemmy devs: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6744852
Technology won’t save us if we allow unethical companies to mess with us.
Spot on… but we have very little power to stop them, unless you are comfortable with the size of Lemmy today.
I get that cult feeling for sure. There is a lot less nuance here. I’d be curious of the average demographic because I see a lot of naivety that’s probably linked to age & experience.
That’s such a reductive sweep of a whole userbase. It’s not because you have a negative outlook that everybody has to be like you.
People are thrilled to try and build something new and people like you come and shit on them to try to recreate reddit.
At the very least, people are trying to take back a part of the internet that corporations controlled for more than a decade. So it’s normal that when a megacorp come and try to muddle the water, people are refusing that because they know their M.O.
I disagree that fediverse is inherently libertarian/anarchist. In fact, a big selling point is that you can find an instance the administration agrees with your politics and will implement moderation policy accordingly.
If you consider each instance as the “person” it’s essentially libertarianism.
No, each instance is more like a country with it’s own laws, and trade agreements with other countries to share or block content.
In real life you’re probably not traversing three or more countries in a single day. You’re much closer to small communities at this scale, and having all these differences at that level is terrible for community building. Reddit was complicated enough with subreddit specific rules for regular people. Now you may not be able to find the same content as your friend if they signed up for a different instance, which is suggested as a feature not a bug. It’s exactly the same time of idealism without thoughts of consequence that libertarianism has.
I was going to use communities as my examples due to the relatively small size of each, but decided country was a better metaphor due to each instance’s ability to fully control their own rules or “laws”, where as communities in the real world are usually beholden to the higher laws of their countries.
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
I think the problem with these analogies is that they’re based on physical spaces, you wouldn’t want to travel to another country or whatever daily because it takes time, if you had a portal to every other country then it would make more sense compared to here
Yes. Imagine if every culdasac had its own set of laws that you’d have to consider. Some your friends can’t come i to. Others don’t acknowledge the culdasac next door exists. Sure you could move to the culdasac you fit in with the best, but I wouldn’t want to limit my friends or interests that narrowly, nor would I want those things to be taken away from me and be forced to move all the time. I don’t see it as better.
It really is terrible for building a community here, I’ve been trying to decide the best place to even start and it’s so difficult to know where when most people won’t be able to find it even if they are federated because the discovery system is so weak then there’s the possibility of it not lasting or either defederating or been defederated from…
I think it’s also especially bad for creating insular groupthink communities which are totally closed to other opinions, seriously look at the moderation logs sometime, the mods are really pushing their bias heavily in a lot of places and it’s pushing away anyone that doesn’t conform.
I hope better systems emerge that allow this to be what it was intended but honestly at the moment it just feels like it’s getting more closed.
Some of the issues, like multiple communities of the same subject were true of reddit in the beginning, and perhaps time will solve the issue, but your right in discovery being terrible. I still don’t know what the Apple community is. Half the time using iOS the app fails to load search. Other times there doesn’t appear to be many subscribers on any over any other. Subscribing to multiple just gives me the same topics over and over again. So I end up with a feed that doesn’t refresh much and has many duplicates. Not a ton of discussion or self posts either.
Eh, IRC and Usenet were both federated systems that had a ton of technical issues when they kicked off that got fixed over time via protocol and code changes. I would guess that discoverability is probably one of the things that’ll be improved – right now, using the Lemmy Explorer is kind of an important tool for people using small instances.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
I don’t think that that’s the end-all-be-all of discoverability, but it works well enough for me now.
Nah, the Fediverse is based on freedom of association while most people live in countries they were born in and leaving one is really hard in most cases. Not to mention that ‘self-hosting’ a state just for yourself would be considered an extremism by existing states.
The Fediverse is clearly a libertarian idea.
Sure, to a certain extent. But having an ability to opt out is far healthier than the walled gardens we have now.
In theory. In reality you’re bringing feather dusters to a nuclear bomb fight. A handful of hobbyists hosting instances with how many users? Couple hundred thousand? Against a 100 Billion dollar company with 3 Billion people? Yea good luck with that.
How do you think this works? Yes, Meta will partake in the Fediverse. No one is trying to stop that. That chart won’t get to 100% and no one cares if it does. People are just ensuring that there’s a place where Meta won’t be, and you don’t need billions to do that.
Look at a pie chart of “internet users of x type platform” from pre fediverse. If original internet dies and fedi does take off, it will be the same chart but they will be instances instead of www sites. There are still plenty of those prefacebook, premyspace forums on the www, it’s just only a few people use them.
What are we competing on exactly? Profitability? We’re not a company, we’re just a bunch of people talking among ourselves. This is like saying your casual Friday hangout with your buddies is no match for the likes of Rogers Telecom Combined International Userbase - like, by wtf metric? It’s not even a competition. They’re a company, and we’re a community.
We’ll just keep doing our thing, and if threads gets annoying then I’ll pressure my instance to block them, and if they don’t I’ll just move to a nicer place. 🤷
If it’s no big deal why the immediate talk of defederating? And if they get annoying, every one of the instances I happen to follow something on has to defederate to keep the community at the same engagement level. I can personally block instances which is great, but that’s not helpful if the community starts posting there. It’s already sometimes difficult to keep topics together across who knows how many instances, with random defederation it makes it more difficult to experience lemmy with users on different instances.
It’s just my opinion, but the reddit backend wasn’t the important part that we lost, it’s the content and community. If my instance goes to shit I can move somewhere else, but I’m disconnected from my posts, follows, etc. that’s what I care about. Not the tech. I try not to, but I can’t help but be pessimistic on the idea when I feel like the point is being missed entirely.
Nah you’re just attached to the old idea of the One Big Marketplace of Ideas, where all the saints and sinners of all the world gather 'round and hash it out. I get it. But it didn’t work out, specifically because corpos put profit over community well-being, so that’s why I’m here.
I’m sure there will be bridging or collating tools for people like you who don’t want to give up precious content just because it comes from a problematic source. Personally, I think wanting it all misses the point of real community.
There already is that someone, it’s the owner of the .world instances.
Things like fedipact are the main way of dealing with such abuse in ancap.
Funny, I’ve never gave a thought to this before, but Fediverse works on ancap principles. Even in pushing out ancaps.
Not even generally libertarian, but specifically ancap.
It’s also funny that the system I’m imagining and would prefer (if it weren’t imaginary) is closer to being generally libertarian and further from ancap.
the point of freedom is that authoritarians deserve it too, and when they want to use their freedom to take your freedom away, it’s fair game.
FYI the 41% of instances that block or limit Threads (from the source data which doesn’t have every instance), accounts for 24% of the user base of the fediverse.
Someone should make a post about why blocking Threads is good and why it’s not to be confused with gate keeping. If not properly communicated, this could look very badly for the uninitiated and they’re not to blame.
Some people of course have an educated opinion against blocking, but many presumably don’t know the reasons behind it.
Could somebody explain what “fedipact” means?
ITT:
“Nobody understands fedipact, Jabber, activitypub, Ruby, embrace/extend/extinguish, mastodon, lemmy, Java, federation, Kubernetes, XMPP, Docker, architecture, carburetors, Ikebana, midwifery, Filipino stickfighting, Zoroastrianism, hegelian philosophy, or XML but me, and therefore you’re all morons with nothing to contribute to this conversation”.
Still too few
If you don’t like it, just move to an instance that defederates
Just what I did.
deleted by creator
I left Facebook to get away from the brain rot. Please don’t bring their demographic to spread here.
Allowing threads to federate is like allowing a virus to enter the system.
Ehm… Shouldn’t Fediverse be… Open?
Handy site to check your instances thread-blocking status.
What’s wrong with threads? I’m out of the loop.
What is the share of users that those 41% have?
Weird middle ground here. I kind of wish that 1 communities FROM threads were blocked, and 2 we had an active dev fund for ad blockers. I’m glad to have threads users come here and add to our communities personally.
How do I know if my
insuranceinstance blocked threads
