I would like to know if I can feel safe here, or if I should pack it up and start looking elsewhere sooner rather than later.
If the kbin staff have already made there intentions clear, please let me know.
We (meaning the whole fediverse, all instances) need to be de-federating that crap immediately.
Nothing good will come from having Facebook streaming into here in anyway whatsoever.
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
Also, if Facebook is allowed to “work with” the development of the fediverse at all, they absolutely will eventually destroy it for profit. And “working with” it absolutely includes them federating with it.
When their vast resources are taken into account, and their existing userbase also, they would rapidly become the main instance (or collection of, but probably just one) of the whole fediverse. Once that’s them, they can use that position to dictate terms pretty hard.
Before you know it, everyone that would eventually have come here are there instead, and they’re now the fediverse. They can also fork the software and leverage their Dev teams to make their fediverse vastly more polished… No donations needed on their fediverse, less bugs, everyone you know is already over there… Seem familiar?
How does that effect us who aren’t there, how isn’t it just the same thing as now? Our fediverse dies off because the users leave, instances close down through lack of population/need, before you know it there’s nobody here and the idea just dies.
Literally been done before. The playbook is absolutely common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
The beauty of the fediverse is precisely that it is not monolithic. Each instance can be different, have different policies and decide who it wants to federate with. Some instances will federate with anyone, some with most, some with a few, some with none.
The claim that that the fediverse needs to be a monolithic whole, where all instances walk in lock-step with each other is entirely at odds with the fediverse philosophy.
this argument makes sense only if you’re talking about defederating instances. It doesn’t make sense here. The problem is not whether we want the users of meta’s instances. The problem is whether we want a huge corp be part of the fediverse. And why are we talking about it? Because people are trying not being naive and believing that meta is here because they liked the ideas of a federated network and want to participate. Meta will cause more harm than good as it has already happened in the past in different technologies/projects.
This conversation has been going on Mastodon for a while now. The problem kind of boils down to the following: there are people who think Meta is a bad actor and having the literal entire rest of the fediverse defederating is the best way of dealing with that. And there are people who also agree that Meta is a bad actor, and think that partial defederation is the best way of dealing with it.
Its really hard to come (read: impossible) to come to a consensus on this, because part of the argument about what is a better tactical approach depends on knowing how Threads implements things like account portability, and this is currently unknown. Most people even assumed that Threads would not implement this at all, but Adam Mosseri just announced that this is an important feature, so who even knows.
It’s an unpopular opinion here, but I truly think Meta joining is being a little blown out of proportion.
The fediverse is simply not valuable enough to EEE. We’re a tiny niche of nerds who all have ublock installed. Meta wants a low effort solution to eat Twitters lunch, and saw bluesky do well.
We could even see this as an opportunity to grow. You can join mastodon AND find famous people to follow. Thread users themselves may realize the moderation sucks and go elsewhere.
Defedrating at best makes Threads roll back their activitypub use…and their millions of users are in a walled garden again. We did it fedi!
The only thing naiive is the people in here thinking that defederating from Meta accomplishes anything whatsoever.
Oh boo hoo, meta’s instance is shinier than ours, doesn’t that mean users will leave? Yeah, look around, they already will and are leaving for Meta’s platforms, they have more users on Threads in 24hrs than the Fediverse has had in it’s entire life.
Nothing about defederating changes that.
the defederation has nothing to do with “reducing meta’s number”. The reason to defederate is so you’re not playing their game with their own rules. Fediverse will gain absolutely nothing by playing meta’s game.
Everyone keeps talking in analogies like “playing their game” because if you said “we gain nothing by getting a ton of free content from Threads users” it would sound ridiculous.
I mean, I’ll give you a non-analogy argument. That “ton of free content from Threads users” is not desireable. In fact, if early reports are anything to go by, Threads is already largely populated by brands and thoughtfluencers, all in a race to the bottom to capitalize on mindshare in a new, unexplored space.
IMO, neither that content nor those users would be beneficial for the fediverse in the long run.
i’m not here for the ton of content that meta will produce. If I wanted this content I would had been there in the first place. It looks like somebody else is in the wrong place and is dreaming of a fediverse full of brands trying to promote their products and the influencers pretending they are real life advertisements.
its funny that you measure value by that metric.
No, I’m just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn’t great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.
Flip it around and you got it. “Why would we want to provide free content to threads users?”
Kbin, ~57,000 users in a few months
Threads, ~10,000,000 users in a dayI don’t think you understand the scale of the dynamics at play. Quantity != quality, but even if Kbin were to take all of Reddit’s market share, there would still be orders of magnitude less content than Meta/Twitter.
Oh boo hoo, meta’s instance is shinier than ours
I’m neither in favor nor against defederation, I’m fine letting the community make that decision. But if you think this is the argument being made you haven’t been paying any attention at all.
If this were just some problematic instance (or a group of them, even) I’d entirely agree with you, but this is Facebook, the damage that they’re almost certainly planning and are entirely capable of requires (at least in my opinion), a different solution.
Please note that I’m suggesting this as an entirely unusual solution to a very unusual problem. Not as some sort of standard practice.
You haven’t articulated a problem, let alone described how this particular solution solves it. Meta building a better version of your platform that siphons away users is a problem regardless of whether or not you federate with them / regardless of whether their platform is even built to support activitypub. Federation has no bearing on that one way or another.
I don’t want content stemming from a place that’s controlled by advertisers and other large companies. If we’re federated with Meta then that means your decentralized independent instance would still have advertiser driven, heavily capitalist and consumer manipulative content domineering and running through its veins.
That’s a specific thing that I’ve read many people enjoy getting away from when it comes to joining the Fediverse.
Fully agree. The reason I’m here is to escape corporate shitfuckery. if you expect anything other than more shitfuckery from Meta you’re either a shill or hopelessly naive.
Meta is facebook who engaged Cambridge Analytica to purchase our lives.
Not from us, but from them. Facebook literally sold out the world
Facebook nearly destroyed this country for a buck.
Fuck facebook. I don’t want to avoid federating because I dont want them around; I want to avoid federating because anything I can do to starve them of every resource for growth that I possibly can is the best thing I can do about facebook.
Not only did Facebook allow incitement to genocide to be circulated on it for years while people begged it to stop, but after the genocide Facebook also actively impeded the international investigation into that genocide.
That’s pretty much as low as you can go.
There are over 70 kbin instances. If kbin.social is not to your liking, you can find another. https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
https://kglitch.social has defederated from Meta (well, blocked the domains that meta is expected to use). Registrations are open.
Exactly. Keep this flagship instance general-purpose. If federation with Meta means you can’t “feel safe here”, then “pack it up” as you say and choose a place with a moderation style that fits you.
Don’t try intimidating everywhere else into adopting your beliefs, like many people here are doing.
Meta cannot harm you by federating. If they want your data that you posted on kbin then they already have it. They run curl and they can swallow all your posts and metadata associated. Whatever you post is given for free to everyone with an internet connection.
Also Meta probably will never federate since it involves a huge risk that they will end up hosting illegal data against their will.
edit: also think in legal terms, meta will never publish content on their site if a federated server hasn’t signed a mountain of legal documents beforehand. It’s simply not happening. I’m only speaking on a user level. If our admin adopts a pro-facebook stance then of course it’s a different story.
edit: The more I read about this the more doubt I have about this story. It seems that kbin still hasn’t signed the fedipact? It’s becoming a big deal and it will affect kbin even if we adopt a neutral stance. There is in fact no more neutral stance. We should sign.
Meta can harm us by federating - the server load alone would demolish Kbin and Lemmy. We were overwhelmed with just the recent sign ups from ex Redditors, how do you think Kbin and Lemmy could handle the firehose of Threads’ data?
IG has 1B accounts. If each IG account makes a Threads account and chooses to automatically follow all of their IG follows that also have Threads accounts set up, while we were federated with Threads., Kbin and Lemmy instances would be done. ETA: I understand that it won’t be all 1B users instantly appearing, and that it would require someone from the smaller instance subscribing to someone from Threads, but it would grow pretty rapidly I’d imagine.
We absolutely have to defederate from Threads just to stay up and be functional. It’s not all about privacy.
If the Fediverse can’t scale to 1 billion users then better to find that out now so we can start working on Fediverse 2.0 that can handle it. “I hope we stay small and nobody notices us” is not a sound technical solution.
We absolutely have to defederate from Threads just to stay up and be functional.
Threads won’t federate so they can stay out of touch of illegal content. The lemmy populace is radioactive material to Facebook. Even here we are fighting against the random content being NSFW, so imagine the black suits of facebook… imagine the lawyers of facebook having a quick look at what they are about to federate. They will pull the plug on it after their first visit.
I agree. it’s fun to debate about whether to federate with meta but bottom line is, meta will want to control their content. by opening a gateway somewhere else, they lose that control. meta will maintain their own closed system.
If they federate, we can scrape their data and view it without ads and redistribute it where they cannot track it.
If they federate then we can publish on their site without having to sign any legal agreement to anything! Hello lawyers! \o/
We somehow defederated with the nsfw Lemmy instance over a big nothingburger.
If we stay connected with those hate groups however, then I’m out. That’s where I draw my line for support.I thought we defederated with nsfw because of technical issues with nsfw images not being blurred properly, not the rules issue?
No. They defederated because people misunderstood a rule change and thought they’d allow cp imagery, which was completely false. They just loosened the rules for fictional content where the exact age of the character is hard to determine and some people took that the wrong way and caused a bunch of outrage posts.
What is the deal with defederating from that nsfw instance? I like having a feed that will occasionally have random nudes or whatnot in it, like r/all used to have. Is defederation the reason I don’t see any of the lemmynsfw.com stuff even though I’m subbed to it?
Is there a place where you can see what instances kbin.social is defederated from?
Yes. Their content isn’t synced to kbin anymore due to this. You’d have to visit the actual Lemmy instance directly to see the content or use an instance that didn’t defederate from them. I hope @ernest reconsiders since this was really a nothingburger anyway.
I would like to know if I can feel safe here
If you have privacy concerns, you should probably not post here for time being.
It is prototype software. Doesn’t remove EXIF geotags from photos, for example and posts here are public (and indexed by webcrawlers). Treat this as “open Internet” for your safety/privacy purposes.
It’s not much of privacy I’m concerned about as much as community and visibility.
Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users, meanwhile from what I have seen from kbin and lemmy, there is a lot more nuance and maturity in the communities here (for the most part) that I would hate to see overun by Thread users.
Secondly, it’s one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me. The fact that the fediverse is a prototype with vulnerabilities makes the likelihood of a company like Meta, who intentionally exploits vulnerabilities to harvest data, all the more likely.
Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks, and I have no reason to believe Facebook won’t do this. If I’m going to invest time and effort into making a community grow, I would rather not waste my time on a platform that is doomed to be consumed.
Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users
With this I agree. 1.2bn users is way more noise than I want to experience and I will, personally block the domain. As a kbin user, you’ll have the tools available for that as well.
Secondly, it’s one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me.
To think that the big companies that base their business models solely on datamining users already haven’t been mining the shit out of our data is a bit naive, I think. They don’t have to exploit vulnerabilities, make their presence known or launch huge products for it. All they (or anyone!) need is a $20/month linux VPS and a Mastodon installation. The fediverse does not have data privacy controls for content (beyond masking account e-mails/originator IPs).
Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks
I agree. Threads got 10M signups yesterday and they haven’t even launched officially yet. They’re already larger than the entire fediverse.
Many people will switch to their app. And at some point, they will most likely make interoperability hard (so we have to adapt to their “bugs” instead of it being the other way around).I just want to make clear that I’m in the “Defederate the shit out of them”-camp, but I also don’t think the fediverse is a place that puts privacy first - if privacy is your concern, then my advice is to stay away from fedi. For now.
Blocking the domain will not block the users, so in that regard there is nothing you can do about 1.2bn users coming here.
If 1.2 bn users join Threads, and only get content from Threads, they’re just going to go back to Instagram. Facebook doesn’t have an unlimited budget for this. If Threads doesn’t gain traction, it’ll be killed off as unprofitable.
That’s the ideal scenario for the fediverse. Threads isn’t able to federate with anyone else from the start, users don’t see the point, Threads isn’t profitable, Threads gets abandoned.
Right…
BUT -You aren’t going to see ANY of those 1.2bn users, until someone on THIS server follows someone on THAT server. That’s the point of federation. It isn’t like Twitter - you don’t just see everything that everyone over there posts. It’s no different on Mastodon - there has to be a social connection before posts start showing up here.
Put another way, if hateful stuff starts showing up on the Fediverse from meta users, it is because someone on the Fediverse is following the people posting hateful stuff.
When meta eventually starts federating - you aren’t going to see posts from @asjmcguire until someone here is following my account.
As for if meta makes changes that makes federating hard, that’s not our problem. If they make changes that make federating with THEM hard, that’s their problem. There is no reason the rest of the fediverse needs to follow what changes meta make. It doesn’t hurt us if they break federation with the rest of the fediverse. Meta is in reality no different to mastodon in that regard, it’s just another platform - but for example Pixelfed isn’t going to bend over backward to make life easier for meta.
But if you go to https://kbin.social/d/threads.net (obviously doesn’t work yet), then you can block the whole instance, yourself, for your own account. It has the same effect as the server defederating, but it only affects you.
The only reason why that solution wouldn’t be acceptable is if you believe so strongly against the very concept of Threads that you want to make that choice for everyone else. You want to forcibly hit that button on everyone’s account and push your beliefs and opinions onto others.
If you simply don’t like Meta, that’s fine - I get it. I want to use FOSS stuff to see my friends. I want my friends to appear in my feed, and I want their hashtags to be sorted into my magazines. My wish to see my friends is just as valid as your wish to not see anyone from Threads. While Threads has some questionable people, they aren’t the majority. It’s much better for me to block the individual accounts that cause problems than it is for me to lose the ability to talk to all my friends.
Kbin gives you the power to go to the domain and block it yourself; this isn’t Lemmy. Why do you want to take that choice away from everyone who is okay with people from Threads in their feed?
I don’t want to take away that choice. I personally don’t have a problem with meta joining the fediverse, and in fact today I downloaded the app and created my account. I’m excited by the possibilities of being able to speak to my friends from my Mastodon account.
My point was more for the people who think that suddenly 1.2bn users are going to be showing up in this kbin instance.
That’s fair, reading it again I see I misunderstood you. :)
I apologize if I seemed hostile; I just get frustrated with people wanting to block whole instances here without cause (like the instance being primarily trolls or hate speech). On Lemmy it makes sense since only the admins can block domains (and it applies to everyone), but Kbin allows domain-level blocking on an individual level so it makes a lot less sense here.
what you (and other likeminded people) haven’t understood is that these 2 are 2 different topics. Defederating with meta is not because people don’t want to be near the users of meta. It is because meta is a huge corp and it is not here to promote the idea of a federated network. It is here to make profit and to exploit the network. Allowing them to be part of the same network will just cause harm to the network itself in the end.
I suggest you reading this article https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html which is the story of how google killed XMPP, written by one of the XMPP core developers. I believe you will see the similarities.
I find the other demands going around even scarier to be honest.
“I don’t want to federate with meta, but I also don’t want to federate with anyone else who does federate with meta”It’s so terrifying that there are whole instances that are now attempting to dictate who the rest of the fediverse is allowed to federate with. And frankly I think it’s a downward spiral if that is allowed. Because if they do it once, they will do it again and again.
then you can block the whole instance, yourself, for your own account. It has the same effect as the server defederating, but it only affects you.
Factually untrue, it is not the same at all. It is also a kbin specific feature that someone on lemmy doesn’t have access to, for example.
This thread is specific to Kbin, which is why I mention it.
Lemmy doesn’t integrate well with the rest of the fediverse at all, period. It’s one of the many reasons why I left.
Threads users won’t be able to make articles here on Kbin anyway (IIRC); they’d make microblogs. So blocking them would effectively remove them from your microblogs, and if they reply to anything in here I don’t think you’ll see that either.
Blocking a domain through kbin only blocks threads from appearing on your feed. You still see users from that domain and their comments, and they see you and anything you post since it gets sent to their server.
I think I’ve seen people comment on threads from mastodon, and maybe down the line threads implements… threads… as well, nothing’s stopping them really.
edit: also, as for
This thread is specific to Kbin, which is why I mention it.
We’re all part of the fediverse meaning someone from lemmy might want to participate on kbin magazines too. Not considering them when making decisions like this is a bit selfish.
As for if meta makes changes that makes federating hard, that’s not our problem. If they make changes that make federating with THEM hard, that’s their problem. There is no reason the rest of the fediverse needs to follow what changes meta make.
If they’re 90-99% of the users/content and people are used to most of their communities being on there, then it becomes increasingly difficult to say “we won’t support their standards”. Allowing a monopoly on the fediverse can cause issues.
If they’re 90-99% of the users/content and people are used to most of their communities being on there, then it becomes increasingly difficult to say “we won’t support their standards”. Allowing a monopoly on the fediverse can cause issues.
AND this is a very succinct explanation of exactly what the “Extend” part of “Embrace/Extend/Extinguish” is!
With this I agree. 1.2bn users is way more noise than I want to experience and I will, personally block the domain. As a kbin user, you’ll have the tools available for that as well.
I can’t imagine how a kbin users would be wanting to watch facebook memes.
So. In 1 day, Threads has gotten more users than all of Mastodon combined. My friends are on Threads. They’re not coming to Mastodon. I’ve tried. I couldn’t even convince my fiance to join me on Mastodon for longer than a day, and we live together.
How would you suppose I talk to my friends? By joining Meta? Or by staying with FOSS on the fediverse? Because when you say “everywhere needs to defederate from Meta” you’re also saying “You shouldn’t talk to your friends here, nor should your friends be able to talk to you.”
Quite frankly - I really enjoy that I can both be here and still be in contact with my friends. Meta can’t track me here (as much, I’m aware they can still siphon data but they could do that regardless). I’d much rather stay here if I can. But if given the chance to choose, I’m going to move to somewhere that federates with Threads. Not because I like Meta - I hate Zuck almost as much as I do Elon, which is quite a lot - but because I’d rather see and talk to my friends than be locked in with a bunch of rando control freaks jumping at shadows.
If the fedipact had it their way, anywhere that federated with Threads would in turn become defederated. This will create 2 separate fediverses. People will have to choose which one they spend time on - even if they have accounts on both sides, one will always be the “primary” account.
I posit that for many people, the “primary” account is going to be the one with their friends and interests. It’s going to be the side with the influencers they follow. Simply, it’s going to be the one that federates with Threads. The other side will slowly wither and die, as all the content dries up and people move to where the network effect is strongest.
You can argue that we need to defederate because of “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Tell me: what is the end result of EEE? A diminished fediverse, where most people use the single app that has all the people and all the content. How is that different than the splintered fediverse caused by the fedipact?
It’s really not much different at all. If Meta goes for EEE, there is no stopping them. If the fedipact takes hold and rabidly defederated anywhere that glances at Meta, then the fediverse’s network effect will shatter. The fedipact will simply backfire and shoot themselves in the foot as people choose the side with the larger network effect. It’s ridiculous that the idea has gotten as much traction as it has; the fedipact’s best-case scenario is worse than the worst-case of EEE.
If a bunch of people want to live in small segmented communities, that’s on them. Beehaw is right there if you want it; that’s what Beehaw aspires for. But large, general-purpose instances shouldn’t bow to the whims of a loud minority that don’t even realize the repercussions of their agitations.
The fediverse is at its strongest when we federate. That’s what makes this place special. We’ve agreed that walled gardens are bad, and the one time that we have a chance to get a bunch of “normal” users on the fediverse everyone panics because they’re afraid of EEE.
The fedipact isn’t going to stop EEE. If Meta wants to do EEE, they’re going to do it with or without the fedipact. We don’t even know for sure that EEE will happen - it’s true that Meta is a business, but there are plenty of open protocols you use every day that never got hit by EEE. L
All the fedipact will do is hurt people who want to use free software to see their friends so this loud minority can exercise their control over everyone.
You have the power to block the domain here if that’s what you want to do. Please don’t let your personal fears ruin the experience of others.
I’m okay with a small bubble of randos as my Fediverse, I don’t need – or want – my social media to be “everybody”.
I’m in a discord with my friends and that’s pretty much all I need.
That’s fair, but I personally want my social media to be “everybody”.
That’s actually what brought me here to Kbin - I loved that it had Mastodon integration and connected everybody to everybody else.
I was originally on Beehaw, which is very much trying to capture that “Discord with my friends” feel. And that’s totally fine; I understand that and respect it and think it’s valid.
But the point is that we have options. Kbin especially is great because these options can happen at a user level; you can go in and block entire instances from your user account, and it’ll be just as if that instance was defederated. Admins don’t need to maintain a short allowlist or a large denylist; you can curate it to your comfort level on your own.
But I’ll also recognize that it’s not inherently a small community - you’re taking a big community and slicing off parts of it, which isn’t the same. But there are spots for that cozy feeling across the fediverse if that’s what you want. I just don’t think a broad flagship instance like Kbin.social should be one of those spots.
deleted by creator
@EnglishMobster @0xtero @Roundcat So what you’re saying is “ignore all the horrible shit Facebook as done, they have more people and that allows them to do anything they want” ?
I’m saying 3 things:
-
Facebook is going to do whatever they want regardless. They are a business, and they are in the business of making money. I don’t like Facebook. I don’t appreciate Facebook. I don’t use Facebook (or Instagram, or WhatsApp…). Facebook will always do what is best for Zuck, and if Zuck leans into EEE that is what Facebook will do no matter what.
-
Right now, Facebook is giving me a chance to interact with my friends without using Facebook. That’s huge; my friends don’t share my anti-Facebook beliefs and are all still on there. I’d love to reconnect but want to do it on my terms. Federation allows that.
-
The fedipact is going to do more harm than good. It won’t stop Facebook from doing what they want to do, as per point 1. If Facebook goes down the path of EEE (which we can guess but is technically not guaranteed - see how the Matter protocol is taking off), then Facebook will execute EEE with or without the fedipact. But the fedipact does Facebook’s work for them by inherently splitting the fediverse into a “Facebook side” and a “fedipact side”. This split is not healthy and many people will choose the side with a larger network effect - i.e. Facebook. Thus this accomplishes the same thing as EEE without Facebook doing anything other than Embracing.
Facebook is allowed to do what they want because they are a business with billions of dollars. They’ve done horrible shit but they’re also mainstream, where my friends hang out and where the celebrities are.
If the fedipact didn’t exist, I would be able to freely interact with the people on Facebook without needing to download Zuck’s data vacuum. I’d be able to see my friends and talk to my friends without having to deal with all the… Facebook parts.
The fedipact threatens that because it will cause large communities (like Fosstodon, which has many open-source projects I follow) to defederate themselves from anywhere that federates with Threads. This splits the fediverse badly and in the fedipact’s best-case scenario (for them) the only way I could even talk to my friends is by downloading and installing Zuck’s app. I’d rather not.
@EnglishMobster Yep, might makes right, why bother resisting, gotcha.
I’m not even saying you’re wrong about the damage that this could do, but you’re also ignoring how FB being here and dominating will make the fedi be a place that many just don’t want to be anymore.
And yeah, great that you can talk to your friends, but I see so many people be afraid of libs of tiktok, and other hate groups entering on an instance that, according to you, should never be defederated from because of its size.
@EnglishMobster IOW, yes, I can see this split ripping fedi in two, but I think you’re wrong in thinking that the FB side will be the one that most of the people on here now want to be on.
It will end up just becoming another for-profit hole, exactly like the ones so many of us are trying to get away from.
That isn’t what I’m saying. You can still ban individual users here on Kbin. I don’t like LibsOfTikTok either, but I can ban them from all my magazines if I wish. I can block them personally.
Are you advocating for blocking anywhere that has any kind of extremist accounts of any kind? Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have open sign-ups; if LibsOfTikTok joined either of those would you want Kbin to defederate from all of Lemmy.world?
The vast majority of people on Threads are normal people. Extremists exist, yes - just as they existed on Twitter, and Reddit, and Mastodon.social, and Lemmy.world, and anywhere that has a large number of users with easy sign-ups. Heck, I’m sure Kbin has some too.
I don’t personally think that those relatively small number of accounts is worth the harm that will be caused by bisecting the entire fediverse. And where do you draw the line? If Google got into the fediverse game, would you want to defederate from them, too? What about Amazon? Apple? Disney? Wikipedia?
If you want to get away from that, you’re welcome to frequent another instance that has that moderation style. I already see you’re not here on Kbin; I can’t speak to the rules of your instance but I am completely fine with your instance defederating from Meta if it wants to be a small community. Beehaw is another great example of somewhere that will aggressively defederate to remain small; I am sure they will defederate from Threads as well.
As for your second point, I can give you my perspective. I chose Kbin because I want to spend all day on a site scrolling away. I don’t like seeing stale content. I don’t like being constrained to a small community where nothing happens.
If the fediverse splits, we will go back to 2020-era Mastodon. It will be a bunch of niche communities without much in the way of updates. You’ll read your whole feed in a few minutes, and then you need to find something else to do. That’s probably healthy, but it’s not somewhere that will keep me coming back (there’s a reason why I never use my Mastodon account).
The other half will have constant updates. A new feed every refresh. If I post something, I’ll get a bunch of likes and follows and comments straight away. It’s an incredible dopamine hit, each time.
If given the choice… why would I choose the slow one? The one where I’ll get… maybe 3 likes from some strangers. The one that doesn’t have my friends or family or anyone I actually know.
I realize not everyone agrees, but I’ve been around the block to know that people crave the network effect and will go to where it is strongest. It’s why the Mastodon Migration failed. The only reason why Lemmy/Kbin is taking off is because Reddit’s moderation team is actively ruining Reddit’s network effect. And one of the reasons why Threads is taking off is because Elon just destroyed Twitter’s network effect.
@EnglishMobster As I don’t like writing books, I’m going to keep it short. A badly moderated instance is hell for other instances, and their users. There’s a reason why people should be banned from platforms, and it’s very common practice to defederate from instances with a lot of abusers.
So yeah, having individuals just block individuals doesn’t scale, and having no good moderation makes for a horrible platform.
Sounds like you just want to be on threads then? You prioritize infinite content and scaling up, talking to your friends and centralization over not being beholden to a big corporation so why keep insisting on ruining it for everyone else here then, just go there instead? Fediverse is not going to replace conventional social media in any near future, if ever.
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Asynchronously talking to people? Not really. Or, I should say - not any where I’m able to contact those people.
While I have some of their phone numbers, I don’t have all of them - and they’re not likely to text me pictures of their new baby.
While I know a couple on Discord, that’s far less than the number of people I know.
I don’t think I know any of their email addresses. And this isn’t the early 2000s where email chains are a thing anyway.
It’s nice to be able to see what old friends are doing. I haven’t talked to some of these people for years. A lot of them came from my time working at Disneyland; sometimes we were close friends; other times we just traded a couple shifts. Still others were just times we spent closing together, chatting about nothing and everything. I treasure their interactions and I want to see how they’re doing - but I don’t want to directly use Facebook.
Threads gives me the ability to check in on them from right here on Kbin. I don’t need to leave this site. I don’t need to give my info to Zuck. I just shoot them a follow, maybe send a message if they have to manually accept follow requests. I don’t want Kbin to defederate because it’ll take that from me for no good reason. (As I’ve stated elsewhere, the fedipact is self-defeating and we should fight at the “extend” stage, not the “embrace” one.)
I don’t want to enter Facebook’s walled garden, and right now the power of the fediverse is that I don’t have to. The fedipact wants to change that - in their ideal world, I would have to. They won’t stop Facebook, but they would be a pain in the ass for everyone who disagrees with their approach (again - fight “extend”, not “embrace!”!), and there’s a good chance their short-sightedness will destroy the fediverse.
But today, the fediverse is a collection of open websites. If Facebook wanted data collection they could just set up their own private instance with some innocent name and nobody would be any the wiser. They have nothing to gain from me interacting with someone on the fediverse; even if that someone is using their site, that person will likely be using their site regardless.
It really doesn’t make any sense to enforce this stupid restriction of “defederate anyone who federates with Meta”. There’s nothing for anyone to gain, and a lot to lose. That’s the main thing I have issues with. (I also don’t think Kbin should defederate from Threads to begin with because it’s meant to cast a wide net. You can make your own instance with tighter moderation if that’s what you want - see Beehaw - or you can block the Threads domain. They’re only on the “microblog” tab anyway unless they’re replying to something they follow here.)
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Right now, Facebook is giving me a chance to interact with my friends without using Facebook.
You won’t be able to talk on threads if you don’t first sign a legal agreement with Facebook.
You know who else want to talk to their friends: The islamic state. Do you really think for a second that Threads will federate with an instance of the islamic state? Threads won’t federate. Why would they federate? Tell us. Zuck doesn’t want you, you talk bad about facebook, he is glad that you are out.
No fediverse server can handle the amount of data of threads. I don’t think you realize the size of these project.
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Huh? Where exactly did I say that?
@0xtero @Roundcat @EnglishMobster Your entire post is about how “they’re going to have all the people, so resisting will be useless”. So it’s the classic “might makes right” attitude.
I just want to make clear that I’m in the “Defederate the shit out of them”-camp
I will, personally block the domain.
???
@0xtero @Roundcat @EnglishMobster Oh sorry, the reply was meant for English Mobster, apologies for the confusion.
You’ve summed up pretty much exactly how I feel.
The Fediverse solutions are better because of interoperability. While I feel Meta needs to be watched closely as far as their moves and intentions in the space, I’m worried by shutting out any large company projects utilizing the Fediverse, the concept will never “take off”.
And I’ve seen some argue that they don’t want it to take off. That they’d prefer the Fediverse stay niche, and I wholly disagree. The way this is all designed allows each user to choose the experience they’re going for, and shoehorning the entire Fediverse into some vision of a fringe and niche network that no influencers or corporate interests are on at all, is just begging for it to stay irrelevant forever.
Ideally, we wind up in a situation where Meta content can easily be filtered away by any individual user, should they feel that is necessary. But if Threads takes off, I’d rather be able to interact with that content from right here than have to actually become a user of their entire platform.
I’m not against corporations integrating with the fediverse, but I do think that federating with Meta will be a net negative for the fediverse as a whole, atleast in its current state.
First of all, In a purely practical sense, since we’re still struggling to keep different instances in sync with the amount of content that is here today. We’re going to have a real bad time trying to sync threads content, while they can probably sync the rest of the fediverse without breaking a sweat. I am afraid that we’re going to drastically increase the compute necessary to maintain a cohesive fediverse, and that we’re just going to hand Meta the keys to the castle as they are the only one able to provide this service at that scale. This is probably less of an issue for Mastodon, where you subscribe to users and not communities.
Furthermore, I’ll come out and say that I like that this place is more niche. I’ve found a lot more joy posting here than i did on reddit or twitter, despite the lower user count. I don’t think that access to a large user base is necessarily going to make this a better place for the group that is here now. I think we as a fediverse needs to grow a bit as a community before we can even hope to take in Meta without it warping the entire community to the point that its no longer itself.
People don’t get the technicalities of syncing so much data. And I’m not even talking about the costs.
Imagine the face of your sysadmin when you tell him that you’re gonna run a carbon copy of Threads on his infrastructure. They haven’t seen the size of the archive of reddit.
One day it would be fun to talk about the costs though.
The servers of the fediverse cannot handle the load of facebook. The case is closed before it even begun.
Create your own instance and ask for federation with facebook: Threads won’t federate with you. Because they don’t know who you are and you did not sign any LEGAL AGREEMENT before you publish on their service through federation. You really think that you can push your content on their servers before you abide to a legal agreement?
You cannot make everything about “your friends”. At the end of the day “your friends” use for free an infrastructure worth billions functionning in a legal framework. You didn’t think about the business problem and you didn’t think about the legal problem.
Then why does Threads advertise ActivityPub support during its onboarding if it’s not going to go for ActivityPub?
Can you cite your sources where Meta is forcing people to sign a legal agreement to federate, or are you just going from your gut?
Because activitypub is a buzz word. They will allow access to privileged partners who will sign contracts and legal agreements with them. Certainly not with a bunch of nerds who are here because they hate facebook. he wants us out as much as we want him out.
Can you cite your sources where Meta is forcing people to sign a legal agreement to federate, or are you just going from your gut?
No I cant. I’m going from my gut. GAFAM are all about laws, that’s their only weakness. Did they talk about federating with us anywhere?
If they federate then they will host pedo content day one. Any lawyer of Zuck will warn him about that.
A lot of the FUD regarding #Threads joining the #Fediverse has been put to sleep by #Mastodon on this blog post:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers.”
Also @daringfireball made this blog post that I agree with:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open“the idea that administrators of Mastodon/Fediverse instances should pledge to preemptively block Facebook’s imminent Twitter-like ActivityPub service (purportedly named Threads) strikes me as petty and deliberately insular. I don’t like Facebook, the company, and I’ve never seen the appeal of Facebook, the product (a.k.a. “the blue app”). But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?”
There are a lot of good reasons to not let corporate media join the fediverse: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I understand, and I do remember the XMPP debacle, but I also remember that back then people trusted Google and their do-no-harm motto, and they really wanted them to lead in the real-time voice/video chat arena, and in order to make it Google made some protocol desitions that broke away from XMPP.
This time around we don’t trust Big Tech and will not try to adjust to their ways, if they want to they can embrace ActivityPub or not. The rest of the Fediverse will not try to apply their tactics or monetization to the protocol. Either they adhere to the stardard, or their users will have no compatibilty with the rest of the Fediverse.
I am not suggesting we all embrace them and try to make them feel welcome, but let’s not close our instances alltogether to them, let each person decide for themself if they want to follow people from their instance or not.
Servers decide instances they federate with, not users.
Users decide servers based partly on what the server federates with.
Leaving the what servers to view/block decision up to every user is a very cumbersome solution to a problem that is already elegantly solved.
Meta isn’t federating yet, so we have time to discuss and make a decision.
Meta will never federate for legal reasons alone.
I wonder if Meta’ll just start moving the goalposts on federating with the rest of us…
Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.
However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.
I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.
As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:
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Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.
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Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.
Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.
nah fuck all that. meta has never acted in good faith; to assume they’ll be anything other than anticompetitive is naive
That’s literally the opposite what I’m saying.
Traditional SoMe embraces open standards
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh man that’s a good one
I feel that this has been a bit of an eye opening moment. It’s nice to see that we at least don’t have to worry about the risk of importing a toxic community, because evidently we are fully capable of producing that ourselves.
I had no doubt that that this is a controversial topic, but the fact that we as a community aren’t even capable of having a civil discussion about it actually saddens me a bit (I’m not just referring to the comment I’m replying to).
Haha I chuckled every time I see someone describe the Fediverse as friendlier than traditional social media. The community here is far more toxic.
Every time I saw a post to that nature, I also saw that same post flooded by unfriendliness.
Basic human nature, alas. There are no technical means of changing it, only ways to adapt our tech to working in its context.
Exactly! Doing this means that the traditional fenced garden modcel is dying, and that’s the best thing that can happen!
Not that it was ever going to be any different, but it’s very funny how a userbase that so clearly sees itself as so much smarter and more mature than the average rando is obviously using the downvote as a “I disagree” button on your comment here.
I can see thinking that this is a naïve perspective, and I’d probably agree with that really, but you clearly have a position, have thought about it, and tried to explain it. This isn’t what downvotes are supposed to be for.
It’s almost as if people here are just as emotionally driven as the normies they detest so much.
Frequent assumption: I am smart and logical, so everything I think is driven by logic.
Frequent corollary: If I ever admit to being driven by emotion, I look stupid.
Maybe in some circles, but I think it’s better to be self-aware and to try to fix the holes in your own thinking. If you can’t see when you’re being influenced by emotion when you might not want to be, you can make a lot more illogical decisions and take your life down a path you don’t want. Doesn’t seem very smart to me. But people of all levels of intelligence fall victim to pride, so this happens anyways.
As you enter more online spaces you start getting a feel for what different communities put in their rules and notice it’s usually the same. Don’t be a dick. Don’t spam. Don’t post illegal stuff here. No (or limited) self-promotion, we’ll consider it spam. And you stop reading the rules. Maybe this is why so many people use the downvote to express disagreement?
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Why would KBin be unsafe?
Federation works by instances (e.g. kbin.social) registering an interest (subscribe/follow) in a specific magazine or person on other instances.
That means content is only brought into an instance that members of that instance are interested in (its the same with lemmy instances, we don’t see everything).
Similarly on kbin users can block individuals, magazines or whole domains. So even if kbin.social does federate with meta you don’t have to see/interact with it.
For instance I respect kbin users might want content from lemmy.ml, as the people who run it are tankies I have no interest in anything from that instance and block the domain.
I have no issues with part of the fediverse walling itself off from meta but remaining in contact with other instances. Similar to how beehaw defederated from lemmy.world but kbin could see beehaw and lemmy.world.
I would treat meta like any other instance, if its a source of headache then deferate.
The Embrace, Extend Extinguish argument makes no sense.
Take C#, many years ago Microsoft wanted to build its own Java JDK. As part of that they added Microsoft specific extensions. Sun said that wasn’t acceptable. Microsoft didn’t just stop, the renamed it C# and launched the product.
Everyone agreeing to defederate from meta won’t mean they stop. It won’t prevent EEE.
The best way to prevent EEE is given in our example. Java had a huge userbase who simply weren’t interested in migrating.
So you need to encourage organisations to deploy KBin/Lemmy instances which integrate with the fediverse. That gives them reach and when Meta tries EEE they cut off content their users want. So it forces them to be a good citizen.
What OP did not mention is the fedipact. There are seemingly admins of the fediverse signing an NDA with facebook. The fedipact is about admins swearing that they will never federate with facebook.
So of course if an admin signs an agreement with facebook and changes the conditions, the protocol, benefits from credits to improve the infra then it’s a different threat and different debate.
Federating with Meta without an agreement is a laughable science fiction scenario, but federating with an agreement is dangerous for the users.
I would treat meta like any other instance, if its a source of headache then deferate.
If we federate with meta then our instance will simply stop responding because of the workload alone.
Everyone agreeing to defederate from meta won’t mean they stop. It won’t prevent EEE.
No. If we are talking about the EEE side of things then we must defederate. If facebook federates with the intention of EEE then they will ALSO bribe the admins.
The code for mastodon, lemmy and kbin is open source and has been forked hundreds of times.
Admins can do whatever they like and people can build and deploy their own instance and enforce their own rules.
This is one of the key strengths of open source, people have forked projects took them in their own direction and had success.
Similarly ActivityPub is documented as a W3 standard, having read the standard the biggest weakness is the number of instances, not the size of the instances.
Also @mod I meant to hit reply and hit report and can’t see how to revoke
If ans when it federates, you have a handy-dandy button that lets you block instances.
As far as I know that doesn’t work. I know I’ve blocked feddit.de but still get it on my front page.
I think I read something about how when you block a domain, it only blocks content hosted on that domain. But a text post, for instance, gets copied over to your instance and served from there, so it’s still visible. That’s why there’s so many posts from “kbin.social” that are actually from Lemmy.
If that’s the case here, then better blocking is needed.
This seems like a fundamental flaw. There NEEDS to be a user level privacy control for disallowing your posts from being copied to a place you don’t want it to go.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I’d rather defederation be left to the users. I don’t want to see content from Meta, but I want the ability to make that decision myself.
It’ll ultimately be an instance-level decision. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something analogous to the open source / free software ideological split develop.
This is FUD, slow down take a deep breath and just give it time.
Giving them time is exactly my problem. That’s exactly embrace extend extinguish works.
They start by embracing it. “We created our own fediverse instance isn’t this a cool thing, come on over to our server you can see other servers and leave anytime.”
Then they extend it. “We added a colorful widget, only available on threads!”
Then when they feel they’ve got enough of the core users, they extinguish it. “If you want to see threads content you need a Facebook account, sorry just to meant be features to stay federated.”
Look at what Google did to RCS for a real world example.
If you’re truly worried about federating with Meta, you should probably also avoid all the other products they have their fingers in.
This includes all their web properties:
- Onavo
- Oculus VR
- Beat Games
- Kustomer
- Lofelt
But this also includes many web technologies that are ubiquitous around the web. Meta has either created or contributes code and resources to:
- React.js
- MySql
- Memcached
- HHVM
- Cassandra
- Scribe
- Hadoop
- Hive
- Apache Thrift
- Varnish
I suspect you’ll have a hard time finding any website on earth that doesn’t use at least one of these technologies.
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my point is that the OP is grandstanding and exaggerating by comparing possible enshittification with his very safety being at risk. so if it’s a life and death matter, he should be taking extreme steps to avoid his bogeyman.
Sorry if tbis is dumb of me but why should we avoid ever using any web tech that has been associated with Meta, just because we are worried about E-E-E affecting Activity Pub?
Are you worried about EEE coming for those techs?
It’s the same thing. Why are people treating them differently?
A more likely explanation for Meta’s actions is that the Digital Markets Act is forcing them to adopt the fediverse: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en
Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:
- allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations
- allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform
- provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper
- allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform
The interoperability is the big one. The fediverse gives a way for Meta to be in compliance. EEE that breaks the wider fediverse will cause the EU to come down on them.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I’m not as worried about the ubiquitous technologies because I’m ignorant about whether/how they could shut down the aps and sites I use.
I don’t go anywhere near the list of websites and aps if I can help it. I do have to use WhatsAp sometimes and it really bothers me that Meta has hold of it now. I wish my wider society would adopt something else instead.
- React.js
React is a JavaScript library that was created by Facebook.
It makes webpages pretty, basically. It makes things load really really fast while still looking clean and modern.
Dropbox, Paypal, Discord, Slack, Netflix, AirBnB all use React.
- MySQL
Facebook didn’t create MySQL, but they have contributed to it.
MySQL is a way of efficiently storing large amounts of data. Users, passwords, credit card info, anything that needs to store a lot of things will have at least considered MySQL.
Other places that use MySQL are Twitter, Pinterest, GitHub, YouTube, Spotify, and so on.
- Memcached
Memcached was originally developed for LiveJournal, but Facebook has contributed to it.
It’s a way to quickly store arbitrary data, and reduces how many API calls you need to make. This in turn makes running a large website cheaper, since you can just look up the data in your own memory rather than needing to make an API call.
YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest all use Memcached.
- HHVM
HHVM was created by Facebook.
HHVM is what executes the Hack programming language (also made by Facebook). Hack is based on PHP (the same thing Kbin runs on), but is optimized in a different way and is more flexible than traditional PHP.
Slack and Wikipedia are the biggest users of HHVM.
- Cassandra
Cassandra was created by Facebook.
Cassandra works basically as an alternative to NoSQL (mentioned above). It does much of the same job, but works a bit better making sure there’s no single point of failure.
Uber, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter all use Cassandra.
- Scribe
Scribe was created by Facebook.
Scribe aggregates logs from many many servers and helps engineers find problems in large networks.
The name is a little generic so it’s hard to find examples, but I know that Dropbox uses Scribe internally and other large companies probably do too.
- Hadoop
Facebook did not create Hadoop, but has contributed to it.
Hadoop is meant for solving problems that take a lot of data. Machine learning (ChatGPT etc.) is the classical example, but really it works well any time you need to process a lot of data.
Uber, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Slack all use Hadoop.
- Hive
Facebook created Hive.
Hive lets you query the results of work done by Hadoop (above). It provides an interface that is similar to MySQL but lets you access Hadoop data.
Uber, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Slack all used to use Hive. It’s largely dying out now because it can’t keep up with modern data sets.
- Apache Thrift
Thrift was created by Facebook.
It connects programs that were created using different programming languages. They can all share a data format through Thrift, which lets them talk to each other.
Thrift is used by Netflix, Evernote, Twitter, Uber, and reCAPTCHA.
- Varnish
Facebook did not create Varnish, but has contributed to it.
It dynamically figures out what to load when you’re on a website, so you can have a lot of stuff on one webpage but have it still load quickly.
GitLab, Pinterest, Twitch, and Udemy all use Varnish.
Literally you could not use the modern web without using these technologies. Meta has a loud voice in most of those techs, and outright controls a handful of them. That’s been the case for most of the 2010s into the 2020s.
While I don’t think Facebook necessarily has good intentions - they’re a corpo, corpos are never your friends, Facebook especially has proven to be evil - they have proven to be good stewards of open-source technologies for over a decade now.
I wouldn’t say I trust them with the fediverse. But I’m also not so quick to jump to EEE because they do have a fairly solid track record when it comes to web tech.
Thanks for the detail! The only one of those I notice when I use it is mySQL. The contrarian in me is saying that several of of those would probably be even better without facebook’s sticky fingers in them, but that’s unfair of me as it’s a counterfactual and there’s no way of knowing without a deep dive into the history of development.
I get tired of extension breaking other things, but a lot of that is the nature of tech evolving. I guess this is what bothers me the most about EEE - for many of us it won’t be clear what is happening and how much of it is just attrition. I remember getting annoyed by Firefox for not working with gmail and “discovering” gmail still worked with Chrome. I had no idea that bug was a feature.
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I’m not sure, but I’m running my own instance at https://fedi196.gay and I have already put threads.net into my defederate list
