A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
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Join the pact and not just vow but actually do defederate Threads as soon as it comes online: https://fedipact.online/
i appreciate the message but what is that ui design???
the floating hearts that go over the text. the neon pink background. the fact that this serious pact is in all lowercase (i know im typing in all lowercase, but i think the fedipact is different from an internet forum). the weird text animation for hyperlinks that makes it unreadable for a second. this does not lead to any reasonable credibility
That is what nonconformity looks like. The internet of old looked similar to this. Nowadays, everything has ample whitespace, and is boringly styled, and ads everywhere.
That would be how I look at this page.
Webpages have ample whitespace and “boring” styling for accessibility and readability. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity is really stupid.
I mean with boring that every website looks the same, perhaps a splash of color but thats it. And even that isn’t a guarantee for accessibility or readability. This pink website is perfectly valid and accessible.
Why?
There is literally a link on that page titled “why”…
I don’t agree with it. Lemmy won’t be affected anyhow since the use-case is so so different. We hardly interact with Mastodon. We’ll be fine.
Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.
There’s a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that’s probably because their practices are illegal, and don’t respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.
The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I’m out of here.
Fun fact - GDPR is about European persons, not European servers. If an European citizen has a fediverse account on an American/African/Asian/… server and Meta collects all of their data and processes it, they are still in violation of GDPR. Locking European (Instagram) accounts out of Threads doesn’t make them comply magically with GDPR.
Good luck meta, have fun handling all those GDPR requests and proving that Europeans have consented that you suck up all their data…
But if your company is not localized in EU how they will prosecute the company?
Level fines and collect them.
Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem in general. But in this case we’re talking about Meta. It’s one thing, if $randomCompany from outside the EU does it. As long as they’re not doing business within the EU and not specifically target the EU as a market, then they might try to get the company and fine them and may or may not succeed.
Meta on the other hand provides service explicitly for EU citizens & companies. Not only did they localize Facebook, Instagram,… for European languages, they offer the service to sell ads for European companies. In this case, the EU can and will have a way to get them fined, I they want.
Maybe but idk if they cannot just evade it juridically since technically Threads is another company besides being owned by Meta, also they will just ip block EU users. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see Meta being fined, I just cant see this easily happening.
An EU person living in Chicago is protected by EU privacy laws.
IP blocking would only protect Meta from EU persons living in the EU.
What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don’t need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they’d need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn’t be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.
Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.
Yes you are right. They can. I wasn’t thinking straight.
I second this, the NI/RoI/EU situation with threads is proof to me that they are for sure doing threads for only the most shady/coporately greedy reasons.
The fediverse isnt ready for widespread/user adoption. Not everything has to grow exponentially overnight (this is a big problem with modern culture IMO).
Let the fediverse develop naturally and healthily, it will shine on its own in time.
This is an absolutely awful take. Can you imagine if you had this approach with email? You wouldn’t let your email server connect to a Gmail server or any other email server that connected to a Gmail server. That’s insane and email becomes worthless.
Not quite the same. Emails are for messages and communication between individuals, not an open internet forum with the idea of allowing people to converse and discuss freely. Its an attempt to bring back the internet golden age IMO. Allowing threads to federate opens the door to them benefiting from the content and work of the rest of the fediverse for free. This would be fine for a non scummy company, but meta will use this opportunity in the worst ways to gain power, influence, and money that they don’t deserve. All the best of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon) was made with FOSS principles in mind, bringing people together, letting everyone have a voice, not paywalling or involving money in absolutely everything. The only reason Facebook is here for is to make profit. We should not let them
Email is not just for individuals. There are plenty of newsletters and other mass emails you can sign up for.
The fedeverse also benefits from their creators content for free too. There’s no better way to get people off of Meta than to tell people to come to Lemmy/Mastodon and you can still follow the people you want. Making people choose FOSS or the content creators they want to follow will just force them to stay on Meta.
Again, not an equal comaprison. You see all federated content in from the fediverse, you don’t have to subscribe in order to eventually see it when it is specifically sent to you. Also, I don’t subscribe to a single mailing list for anything, willing to be many others don’t.
And yes it benefits from creators content but not for profit. I would argue creators (often) will get as much out of there content being posted to the fediverse by the attention it garners them. In comparison to whenever creators’ content is posted to facebook with (often) no credit only for facebook to make the lions share of profit on that.
All this along with Facebook’s (yeah sure, say meta if you want but to me that was just PR to try to gloss over there super shit public perception) extremely poor track record on privacy, controlling mis-information (everyone seems to forget Cambridge Analytica scandal) etc. etc. and no Facebook/Meta should not be allowed anywhere near the Fediverse if we want it to be an enjoyable place on the internet.
I know interoperability between email providers is often used to make the concept of federation more aproachable but other than that they are totally different systems.
Your sent emails aren’t published and not everyone with an email server can track your activity. Unlike lemmy if it connects to threads
Sounds like some changes should be made to the Lemmy software then if anyone can just connect and start pulling out private data about me. Mastodon doesn’t have that problem. I connect to my server and my server talks to Meta. Meta doesn’t get to see any of my private info. Just the stuff I make public.
It’s a “flaw” of the fediverse in general not about private data. As soon as two instances are federated and users interact with eachother, information like posts, comments, votes etc are shared
Yeah but that’s all public information that I’m choosing to put out there. Meta doesn’t need to do a complete integration and share posts back to the fedeverse just to grab public information. They can just scrape the sites the way they are now for most of it.
Scraping sites to gain information and spinning a web of interaction and activity are 2 different things. If your fine with Meta having this data easily available that’s on you. No one stops you from signing up with their services but most people here want to distance themselves from huge corporations and their shenanigans
Yes, if all the MTA admins refused to SMTP with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo right from the start email would still work. Right now it doesn’t. We don’t want a repeat of that, so let’s defederate from any big corp or anyone who federates with any such.
If you don’t, you’re dead in the long run.
Email doesn’t work? I think you are being a little hyperbolic.
Have you operated your own MTA and tried to get reliable mail delivery to Google, Microsoft or Yahoo? If not, you should try.
Yeah people keep talking about open source and interoperability as this fragile thing that can be consumed by any sufficiently large player. It’s supposed to be less fragile, it’s supposed to be superior. If there is a bad reaction to adding such a large player, then learn from it and iterate solutions. Making tiny walled gardens has got to be the most boring experiment that I don’t care to be a part of.
Would be nice if instances had a default recommended block list, like how spam filters work. Nasty stuff is “blocked” but still accessible and I can move it out of spam if I so chose. Rather than defederating all the time
Yeah I came to Lemmy and Mastodon so I’m not living in a walled garden anymore…
Reminds me of the Bitcoin/BlackRock debate. They are trying to start an ETF, and all I can think is “Good, the more BTC is integrated into the system, the more it will change it, this is the ultimate goal”.
It’s not to say it’s without it’s risks, but if the system is not adaptive enough to work through any potential problems, it will never survive in the long run. Antifragility is a necessity of such a system.
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Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on
Defederating doesn’t solve this issue I think. It only stops the flow of data from Facebook to you but not the other way around.
That’s a bummer, hope EU will keep a keen eye on them then. Unfortunately USA and UK have a history of not doing shit.
Meh, federated or defederated, threads poses only the first challenge to the fediverse. There will be other players with their own incentives that will join via ActivityPub, add their own custom features incompatible with the broader world, and entice users with slicker interfaces. Fediverse will need to show it can weather it, especially hard with the network effects of the larger corporations’ user bases.
My hope is the pressure will keep open services innovating to better compete and result in a richer experience for everyone.
Best thing that could happen is that reddit would respond with a surprise “we too” will federate with you all, and implement activity pub. Then you have two big actors competing on an open playground. And we grab a drink and enjoy the light show.
Honestly, the reason I left Reddit was the 3rd party api bullshit. If they suddenly federated and I could use Lemmy to subscribe to some of their communities / subs again without needing to be subjected to their bullshit ads and 1st party client bullshit, I’d welcome that.
I mean Tumblr also wants to join the fediverse. They are smaller than Twitter, but still large to have some amount of influence.
That’s an excellent take on the platform.
Competition drives innovation. If something from a walled garden fediverse comes to the broader world as a result, awesome. I mean, if we could federate with Reddit for example, and I could access their subs content but not be subjected to their 1st party app and ads and karma and that’s the stuff on top of their instance, I don’t care what they do on their server.
If anything it may introduce people as a gateway into the fediverse to begin with so when something happens on a corporate instance that pisses them off, they might feel compelled to look into the broader world around them. Not all, but some.
I guess the only big concern most people have here is the Microsoft EEE.
Excellent take.
Ignore it. Defederate. Defederate with any instances that chose to federate with it. Keep the fediverse small and independent. It’s nice here, let’s keep it nice.
Yeap. It doesn’t to go mainstream; it’s already successful.
I keep asking but haven’t gotten an answer, why must instances that block meta also block those that federate with META? Wouldn’t blocking META be enough, as you wouldn’t see their posta, nor users, nor comments in any way after blovking the domain?
Is this punitive or is yhere a reason I’m mising?
In a federated system, users on Alice can see and post into communities hosted on Bob, eg alice/c/funplace@bob. When Meta tries to join, Alice chooses not to federate - avoid giving meta free content, protect its users from ‘bad’ meta communities, preemptively block toxic meta users, whatever - but Bob does federate. Alice users can’t see meta/c/advertising, there’s no way to subscribe to Alice/c/advertising@meta. Both Alice and Meta users can see Bob/c/funplace, and so alice users can see anything that meta users post there and meta ‘gets’ any content that alice users contribute. Bob effectively acts like a tunnel between alice and meta users.
I got the impression that somehow your activity 3rd hand can still be passed on via the intermediary instance to Threads, and then becomes part of their dataset. I could be wrong, I’m not sure how that information gets passed on in the backend.
If you are worried about your data falling into the hands of Meta, don’t worry, they already have it. Lemmy is incredibly easy to scrape by design.
What we should be more worried about is
- Whether we can become a better and more vibrant community
- Whether we can properly advertise that we don’t track users and don’t have ads
- Whether our instances can be equally performant
This is the only way we can have a steady influx of new users.
Agreed, the data concern is a red herring. Might as well do a “I hereby revoke consent for Facebook to take my data…” post for all the good it will do you.
Block Threads because of the potential impact it can have on the quality of experience here. That’s a good enough reason. Nobody joined a lemmy so that they could keep in touch with people who use social media to gossip about brands and influencers.
It’s a clear EEE attack. Do not federate!
Exactly, Threads will use the Fediverse to seed content and then start to drift from the standard when they have sufficient user base that they don’t need the outside content. They will start to shift all communities to be Meta-hosted and stop advertising the others. Eventually they will just disconnect entirely.
I agree. If I want to see “VIPs”, influencers, ads or other crap like that I can still register an account over there. Also Meta’s track record is horrible…
It’s not easy to make an account unless you port over your Instagram account. I attempted to make two separate accounts, and both were suspended instantly and I couldn’t continue unless I uploaded a selfie. But I didn’t really want to use my name ¯\(◉‿◉)/¯
Sorry, but I’m a bit out of the loop, what is an EEE attack? When I look it up all I get is eastern equine encephalitis, which I somehow doubt is related.
Thanks!
I assume its Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Its something Microsoft is know for and this worried me when they started to “Embrace” Linux. However, I don’t believe big tech can do much in terms of polluting open source and the fediverse.
I dont follow this much but I can see that these companies are investing into what they think the future could look like.
Might just be me…
That’s what they want you to think. (not sure if I’m being sarcastic or not)
Even if that’s true, once they become a part of the ecosystem, they will start looking for ways to dominate it. That’s just the nature of for-profit corporations.
I don’t think you need to read too much into it.
If Meta concludes that federated platforms or activitypub may one day start to eat their lunch, then the clear and obvious first step to any strategy is to have some sort of presence in the fediverse.
Honestly that’s as far as you need to go for the moment. Grab some market share and then avail yourself of opportunities as they arise.
Perhaps it will be EEE, perhaps something else.
Check out how XMPP was killed
This makes zero sense. There is no financial incentive for an EEE attack, and these companies don’t do anything without financial incentive.
Your content isn’t original or interesting enough for meta to want it, and even if they did, they already have access to it without federation.
Threads on its own already dwarfs the entirety of the global fediverse by orders of magnitude. Anyone screaming EEE is just fucking stupid.
Some food for thought from Mastodon:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Meta is going to kill the Fediverse and it’s all probably a part of Zuck’s grand plan.
How would they kill it? I’m all for blocking them, but I’m not sure how could they kill Mastodon or other activitypub apps.
They’ll kill it by having the largest userbase, and therefore the most and best content, and then finally defederating and forcing everyone to join Threads. At least that’s what they’ll most likely attempt to do. It remains to be seen whether they’ll be successful. The EEE approach has been used before and is well documented. Read more on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Since when has Facebook had the best content? I mean I could see them getting a large user base and lots of content, but I have never looked at Facebook or Instagram and wished that content was on another platform. So I guess I’m not too worried.
More users means more content, especially for a Twitter-like service which is based on following individual people. And apparently they already have more sign-ups than Mastadon.
Twitter had more users than Mastodon. Probably still has, despite Musk’s best efforts. Yet … I’m on Mastodon, not Twitter. I get a lot more good quality content from Mastodon than I ever got from Twitter. Interesting. It’s almost as “more content” doesn’t mean “more good content”.
Almost.
Same thing with Reddit. Literally every time I peeked in at Reddit it was a cesspool. There was loads of content, sure, but it was a slurry of shit every time I looked into it. Lemmy, despite being orders of magnitude smaller, gave me better content. That’s why I’m on Lemmy and my Reddit account lapsed years ago. Again, it’s almost as if “more content” doesn’t mean “more quality content”.
Almost.
4chan and 8chan have more users than Lemmy too. They probably have more good content as well, right, and aren’t a septic tank of toxicity.
Hopefully that stays true. I’ve definitely been in the same boat, sort of reviewing the Reddit front page every now and then out of habit when I’m bored at work, but immediately getting bored after the first page or two and after the first couple comments. I only go there for the most niche subreddits (some video game communities) or when I’m researching an issue now.
having the largest userbase, and therefore the most and best content
This is a non sequiter argument. It does not necessarily follow that good content comes from a large userbase. In fact, both of those things are rarely true at the same time. points vaguely at social media
I’m not saying Meta isn’t going to try to run the EEE playbook at some point. Its likely they will, but we are all already skeptical about it. More likely, the play now is to capitalize on the discontent and missteps over at Twitter, and capture the folks over there who are leaving¹. Mastodon and ActivityPub are a functional, free and open source implementation they can use to bootstrap a micro blogging and DM service that supports the familiar hashtag semantics. If they even decide to federate with us, it’s probably just an afterthought. We’re small, and already quite hostile.
Now… Is there value in having a gateway to that content? That’s arguable. I find the kind of stuff posted on Insta to be vapid enough or sufficiently commercial that I feel no need to interact with it. I probably still wouldn’t interact with it even if it happens to show up here. Same for the herpaderp-maga dingbats and their chicanery wandering into discussion threads. Down vote, block, move on. For certain, I would never get back into bed with Meta because-- c’mon-- they’re Meta, and they’re a known quantity. Same as if Google, Amazon, Apple, Reddit (and other failed social media giants) signed on. If their content is available here and of high enough quality to interact with then I’ll interact with it from here or I won’t interface at all. But no, I won’t go into your walled garden to play with your toys. “My terms take em or leave em,” and I think a lot of us feel the same way, deep down.
I do, however, think corporate engagement here IS valuable. In the same way that social media teams at your favorite retail brands engage on the Big Socials, I would also welcome their engagement here as well because its another avenue to interact with the brand as a potential, current or disgruntled customer. There’s no reason the media teams at Nabisco or Target couldn’t set up their own instance and interact with users on other instances. If they play along with us in flgood faith, it works. If they start being evil corporations they get defedersted and lose engagement.
ActivityPub isn’t going anywhere. It’s a standard and a suite of software implementations that nobody can take away. The early adopters are here the community is vibrant llterally in spite of Big Social and now the entrepreneurs are following.
Anyway, I think you’re right to be wary of this move, and about the prospects of the EEE playbook being deployed here as well. I also think we can afford to be a little more sanguine about it for the moment because Meta’s enemy is making a mistake, and we happen to be the arms dealer this week.
Make popcorn and watch the theater. I just read Twitter is suing Meta already, so you know this is gonna be fun!
–
¹ Conspiracy theory (I just can’t help myself!): On today’s episode of Billionare Behaving Badly, Zuck underwrites a portion of Musk’s Twitterbuyout. Musk trashes the brand and liquidates the stock. Tesla buys the infrastructure and Meta buys the user base and their analytics
This is a non sequiter argument. It does not necessarily follow that good content comes from a large userbase. In fact, both of those things are rarely true at the same time. points vaguely at social media
I was coming at it from the perspective of an ex-Reddit user. The main appeal of that site to me was (is?) the size of the userbase and the fact it meant you had access to literally any type of person at your fingertips. Every niche interest was represented, there were people of all ages and walks of life and you could find help or others in the same boat no matter what tech issue you faced or rare ailment you contracted. This type of “content” if you can call it that is only available once the population reaches a certain critical mass. Smaller communities are of course more conducive to civil discussion, high-effort posting and actual conversations, but looking at the popularity of that social media you’re gesturing towards I’m not sure that’s what the majority of people are even after.
It’s not that I want to attract Facebook users to Lemmy, it’s more that Threads as an alternative could well siphon other users who might have otherwise come over here, ending up preventing this site from reaching critical mass. Then again, maybe this particular fear is overexaggerated right now since - as you say - Threads is competing with Twitter and not Reddit/Lemmy.
I find the kind of stuff posted on Insta to be vapid enough or sufficiently commercial that I feel no need to interact with it. I probably still wouldn’t interact with it even if it happens to show up here.
I think the problem is twofold here really. First is the All feed, which by function of how the engagement algorithm works would instantly get flooded with content from Threads if they end up federated, drowning out the content from here. It would not be a matter of deciding not to engage with the post from Threads and keeping scrolling. You wouldn’t browse Lemmy anymore, it would just be Threads and Meta all the way down.
Second is the comment sections to any discussion even on communities here would likely get flooded with Facebook comments. By sheer volume of users they have already too many of them would find their way here. And it is again not exactly the type of - let’s call it “discourse” - I’m chomping at the bit to partake in.
More likely, the play now is to capitalize on the discontent and missteps over at Twitter, and capture the folks over there who are leaving¹.
I think you’re absolutely right and I think if Zuckerberg even knows what “Lemmy” is then it’s because somebody mentioned it in passing when briefing him about ActivityPub. It’s clear trying to usurp Twitter has been planned for a long time and you can understand why. If Lemmy was involved in the thought process at all, it would only be as inspiration for how Threads could in the future be connected to yet another new platform which in that case would outcompete Reddit, which is a site I’m sure Zuckerberg would very much like to usurp as well.
I do, however, think corporate engagement here IS valuable. In the same way that social media teams at your favorite retail brands engage on the Big Socials, I would also welcome their engagement here as well because its another avenue to interact with the brand as a potential, current or disgruntled customer.
But social media teams at your favorite brands don’t connect on social media in order to contact disgruntled customers or discuss consumer concerns, they do it because it’s great, cheap advertising. RyanAir doesn’t use twitter to ask customers if the uncomfortable seats injured their backs, they make funny tweets because they believe it will sell more cheap plane tickets.
Hell, even if the social media admin appears to be discussing actual issues with consumers I doubt those issues would go anywhere afterwards. The big brands aren’t interested in consumer concerns but they probably wouldn’t mind looking like they are since that would make people more sympathetic towards them and more likely to chose their product.
Make popcorn and watch the theater. I just read Twitter is suing Meta already, so you know this is gonna be fun!
Can we arrange for a cage to be built in the courtroom and schedule it so Zuck and Elon give their testimonies in between the rounds of beating the shit out of each other?
Well stated! I agree wirh you on most of it The only point I want to make is:
the size of the userbase and the fact it meant you had access to literally any type of person at your fingertips
The niche communities themselves tended to be small and focused, which is what I say improved the quality of the content. Contrast with the large, default sub’s when I think we both agree failed to add value. I say that communities happened to accrete there was because it was low effort and low friction. Now, not so much. It was a naked grab for cash by usurping the uncompensated efforts of a few dedicated people. The true believers moved on.
As a market place of ideas, reddit was a good mega mall. The anchors sucked but the boutiques were cool. Now it’s just a great big building full of disregarded storefronts after the holiday sales have ended.
I understand, but if they defederate the Fediverse will be what used to be, right? I’m pretty happy with how are Mastodon and Lemmy so far. I joined both during the Blackout and I don’t mind less content but higher quality.
They don’t even have discussion forums like Lemmy. They might have the most twitter like crap but they won’t have the best content.
They could offer the slickest interface and keep people locked to their friends. That interface can use protocols that make it difficult/impossible for non-Threads instances to play ball (ooh this cool new feature is only available through the Threads app; Oh, my basement.world.ml.xyz can’t read that content). There are many ways to EEE, and I’m sure we haven’t even thought of some ways Threads could use.
I think defederation is our only option to protect what we have.
Yes, I totally agree with you.
My fear is that some people is advocating for defederating the instances that doesn’t defederate Meta. In my opinion that would be awful for the health of the Fediverse, as it’ll be even more scattered.
I’m not sure how you know that?
They’re not going to kill it because we’re not going to let them… what’s with the nihilism? If you’re gonna resign that easily just go ahead and download tiktok and instagram and give away all your data today.
One of the worst parts from the “article” which is wildly misdirecting:
According to the App Store listing for the Threads app, it collects a variety of data, which stands out in comparison to the Mastodon app, which collects none. However, this affects only those who download and use the Threads app,
This is most probably decidedly false. Meta has always and will probably continue to collects whatever data they can, they build databases of relations, and collect not only on their users, but also the people their users have contact with.
If you write a message to a Threads user, you can be pretty sure as much as possible from that message is collected. Not just the message, but also any metadata that can be used to identify you and any context you are in.
Meta gets all the data as well, even if all people defederate.
ActivityPub has it in the name. All your activities in the fediverse are public.
The article talks about private data saved on your phone like health data, contacts etc. Threads takes those, Mastodon app does not.
Yes you are right, it was a brainfart on my part.
Eugen’s naïveté is going to destroy this whole platform.
Yeah, I’d like to see an actual explanation of why the Fediverse is insulated from EEE aside from ‘Mastodon brand recognition’.
I think by brand recognition they don’t necessary mean “mastodon is a known brand so it’ll be fine”, rather that mastodon is a big enough brand for their voice to be heard… I imagine that it’ll end up being like mozilla and google with the w3c, where even if one is far more open and collects less data than the other while also having fewer users, they still agree to and collaborate to create the same standards, and users can disable these
In the grand scheme, though, no one uses either mastodon or lemmy. I’m sure, to the devs and people who joined before 2021, that a couple million users seems like an enormous victory (and it is), but relative to a half billion twitters, the 1.5 billion instagrammers, or even the 5+M that signed up for Threads on the first day, it’s nothing.
Those Threads users aren’t part of Lemmy or Mastodon, they’re part of Threads. They don’t have to know what Lemmy or Mastodon are, even as they benefit from content created there. Once Threads is big enough, they either DOS non-corporate instances with mountains of data, disable those instances with protocol-breaking customizations, or just ignore them because all the biggest communities and content are hosted at Threads.
When mozilla & google started working together, Firefox was the majority browser and chrome a ridiculous upstart trying to squeeze into a domain dominated by IE and FF. The fediverse does not have mozilla’s power in that analogy. I mean, fediverse may survive after that, but the commercial players will absolutely siphon off anyone who cares more about the user experience and content than about privacy on a public forum, which probably means the user base of July 2022, not July 2023.
Half a billion Twitter users? At its peak Twitter had 300 million monthly users. Or are you talking total number of Twitter accounts, even the ones that have been lying dormant since 2016?
Twitter has always been an also-ran as a social media site. Despite being a “major” and “international” site, its peak user count was smaller than a lot of strictly-regional social media sites. Sina Weibo, for example, was until recently regarded as a failure because it had “only” 600 million active users, and that’s a single-nation site for all practical purposes, against Twitter’s “international” membership. (With a major cash and marketing push from new owners Ali, Weibo has grown quite a bit since those failure days, mind. It still has only about 600 million active users, but it’s become quite an influential social hub at the expense of Tencent’s QZone.)
For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access.
Yes, isolate me from those scary non-Threads instances daddy
How so many people seem to brush this off is beyond me. As far as I’m concerned the purpose of federated, decentralized services is being in charge of who to trust and huge corporations not controlling or monitoring every part of your online activity.
Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers. They will be more userfriendly and responsive. In effect they will also hold the overwhelming majority of content and data. Just a matter of time till most of the other instances will become obsolete, due to bandwith regulations or smth similar,
The fediverse will be rebranded as the “Threadiverse”
Basically “embrace, extend, extinguish” in a nutshell.
Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers.
Very few people here will go there. They would gets lots of new people, with or without being part of Fedverse. And they would likely only do the Mastodon like part of Fedverse.
Just: We absolutely must wall off Meta.
I think we should defederate any corp version of any federated app. Not due to privacy or anything, but because it silos anyone using those services from everyone else. Bluntly, I don’t want people’s B.S. propeganda on the fediverse, and the stupid crap conspiracy farm that Facebook and other places have become.
I’m sure it won’t stop the stupid from reaching us, but it should limit the amount and impact that those users have. Additionally, it will remove a lot of high quality content from those services making them less viable for corps to run and maintain. They will happily farm the fediverse for content to attract users they can monitize… I’m not a fan of handing them more content to steal while they share zero of the profits of that content with either the creators or the communities that handle that data.
I’m not doing their job for them in promoting entertaining and informative posts just so they can make money on it. They want it, they can put forth the effort themselves.
Put another way, given the size of Meta and its userbase, it’s completely infeasible for a typical instance to moderate on their behalf, so defederating due to insufficient moderation makes sense. Just like with Beehaw and sh.itjust.works or whatever. (I take for granted that moderation will suck ass because gestures vaguely at Facebook.)
That’s a good enough reason for me. I also think federating with Meta is a bad idea on principle and out of self-interest, since they will extinguish the fediverse at the first possible opportunity and federating with them gives them the chance to draw in users and later wall them off.
Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E’s, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It’s good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it’ll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
I’m doing my part here by promoting “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
This is my instance now.
“I’m a Barbie girl, and this is MY Barbie world.”
Could we get John Oliver on board with the fediverse?
As the fediverse grows, there will inevitably be more centralized instances. Every big tech corp may want to start their own instance, similar to how most tech corps provide their own mail services.
There are millions of email service providers, but Gmail and Outlook are synonymous to email for a large amount of people.
Defederating with Meta and Tumblr is like Protonmail blocking every mail from Gmail. You just cripple yourself and make your instance useless.
Every user on threads has something in common. They were stupid enough to join threads.
I’m depriving myself of nothing by defederating that mess.
Threads is a Twitter competitor. Same applies to Mastodon.
Twitter is only useful because companies, celebrities amd politicians embrace it. Nobody cares about ordinary Twitter users. Twitter is a platform for networking with people in the industry and announcing stuff to customers.
Mastodon right now is not an alternative to Twitter, because there is practically nobody important there.
Threads has better chances to overcome this and has already in a few hours pulled more VIPs onto their platform, than Mastodon in multiple years.
This seems right. So what do you propose doing?
I am pro-fediverse, so I guess making Mastodon atleast as easy to use as Threads is a must.
If you look at statistics, Mastodon always gains a massive amount of users, when Twitter does something stupid. Most of these also return back to Twitter, the moment they realize, that Mastodon has no VIPs.
If Threads integrates well with ActivityPub, then people on Mastodon will be more likely to stay, because Threads gives fediverse users access to the VIPs, that they used Twitter for in the first place. This stops people from leaving Mastodon in the short term.
In the long term Mastodon needs to advertise itself to younger people, because nowadays this is the only way for new social media platforms to establish themselves.
That’s how TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram became popular. This would make Mastodon fresh, while Twitter would transform into a graveyard like facebook.
Also having more tech companies, media orgs, cultural orgs, universities and maybe even governments host their instances, would make the federated aspect stronger and the whole fediverse more scalable.
Interesting. In this debate I keep going back and forth, mainly because of the XMPP precedent, but I basically agree with your pragmatic priors.
Your last point is so true. Actually I can’t help feeling a bit of schadenfreude about all those well-meaning organizations and VIPs and whole governments that went all-in on proprietary platforms and now find themselves on super uncool sinking ships or controversy-laden fiascos. I mean, what was some regional government or university doing on Twitter in the first place?! Same thing for Whatsapp literally replacing phone numbers in many countries. I mean, this is a single private company FFS, you have no control over anything, yet apparently most people and organizations still cannot see the problem - incredible. This is why we always need protocols and standards. It was obvious all along. Anyway, forgive the rant, I agree with your take.
What XMPP precident? XMPP is great and I use it everyday. Is that what you’re talking about?
Well, either you must use it to talk to yourself or your contacts must all be in a tech bubble. Unless I am terribly mistaken, an arbitrary XMPP client cannot be used to talk to people on the proprietary networks where most of them are these days.
I think one of the biggest things we can do is identify ways to fight bots. One thing has become clear to me, and that’s that Reddit and Twitter are stuffed to the gills with bots and professional trolls. I haven’t seen a small fraction of the rage engagement here that I did on Reddit, and I’m guessing that the reason alt-right and other extremist messages echo so hard on these platforms is that they really drive rage engagement. These platforms eat it up, because any engagement is good engagement. I worry that Threads will represent an absolute Tsunami of bot-driven garbage and ragebait being broadcast to federated servers.
FSVO VIP.
Come on what is this elitism, almost everyone has an Instagram, it’s not that huge of a leap to just press the button that says threats, it’s not a sign of stupidity.
Seriously there is some heavy gatekeeping and elitism going around whenever there is a conversation around META
for real, the people “stupid enough to join Threads” are my friends and family and they’ve already grown up in a world where they had to sell their soul to capitalism. so what’s one more shitty TOS if it means they can continue following their friends? they don’t have any idea that there’s any community-maintained alternatives cause they aren’t computer science scholars. that doesn’t make them stupid :/ (not that they would see Mastodon as an alternative anyway since they just want a way to keep in touch with friends and mainstream news and, for them, those things just aren’t on Mastodon yet)
You make it sound like listening to the type of person who uses Threads is useful. Weird.
In my opinion, the people that use Instagram and will potentially use Threads aren’t the ones who will get into the Fediverse.
They will probably not even know that this exists in the app as it just puts you directly in threads.net.
Also, there’s the option that this is just a ‘trend thing’ that will die in a week or two, probably because people won’t get used to or due to legal problems (as it’s already happening).
Edit: typo.
I dropped Instagram for Pixelfed a week or two ago. It’s a small community, but friendly and nobody is trying to sell me anything lol.
Same could be said about fediverse in general. I thought there would be more action against reddit but seems the majority of people don’t care.
I use instagram on the daily (mostly lurking). It’s very good for inspiration and updates in my hobby, which is a small community basically only on instagram. Due to how it all works and is set up its fairly impossible to move it elsewhere (for the time being).
I do like it here though, this is nice. Not gonna mess with threads at all, that’s for sure.
I’m going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.
There’s no persuasive argument I’ve heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.
I’m brand new to Lemmy (guess why, lol) and federated systems in general. How do I block all things Meta? And what does that even mean for Lemmy, where it’s an entirely different site from Facebook?
As of now, there’s no built-in means to block entire instances as a user. The only way to keep them out are to use an instance that is 2 levels separated from them, that is an instance that doesn’t federate with another instance that federates with them.
Alright, that kind of answers the “how do I block Meta bullshit?” question, but what does that mean for Lemmy? Lemmy is an entirely different site from Facebook or Threads or whatever. Or is Lemmy more like a browser to view anyone’s federated community? Then I’d get the EEE thing everyone’s talking about. You usually see your communities on Site A, but Site B offers what Site A has, but also free beer! People migrate to Site B, Site B slowly introduces ads, poisons the beer, kills your cat, and steals your wife, but Site A is a shell of it’s former self and dies out, so…you can’t unfuck what’s been fucked.
ActivityPub is the protocol that Lemmy/kbin/Mastodon use, and is the basis behind the fediverse. It’s also the same protocol that Threads uses. They’re all different site/services, but they can all interact with each other through the ActivityPub protocol, assuming they are federated to each other.
At the moment, Threads is entirely separate, as they haven’t federated with anyone, but eventually they will want to join the fediverse, and the question is whether or not to federate with them. They will always be able to view our content as it’s public, but if we federate with them we will see their content and they will be able to post content here. Keep in mind that Lemmy currently has about 70k active users, and that Threads just got 30 million+ sign-ups. We don’t know how many of those are active users, but it’s certainly more than all of Lemmy put together. If they come here, that’s going to be basically impossible to moderate.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another. The worry then is basically seeing and dealing with Meta’s bullshit here, and them more or less taking over through EEE tactics. That makes sense now.
Lemmy communities aren’t federated with Meta threads by default, right? It’s opt in. So just…don’t federate with .meta or whatever they’ll use? Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
Ahh, so if I’m on Site A, I can view and comment on things from Site B, so long as A and B are federated with one another.
There’s a bit more to it, but essentially yes. For example, beehaw.org has defederated from lemmy.world, but we can still view their content. We can interact with their content and reply to their posts, and other instances that they are federated with can see what we do there, but beehaw users can’t see any of it. Basically federation is a one-way street. You can federate with an instance, but they don’t have to federate back.
Apart from “don’t affiliate with The Zuckerbot”, I’m still not sure what the worry is all about.
That’s kind of the motto of the fediverse in general. It’s supposed to be de-centralized and de-corporatized. There are no built-in features for advertising, for example. It’s meant to be a place that is safe from the things that we’re afraid Facebook is trying to do. Overall, it mostly is. They can attract people out of the fediverse and into their garden which they plan to wall off, but they can’t quite shut down the independant instances.
Ahhh, now it makes sense, thank you! So…do we panic because Zillaberg is making a federated Twitter sequel, or…?
There’s really no imminent threat with Meta and ActivityPub, as a standard.
As for Threads and Mastodon, the “threat” is mild. If Meta wants your data, they can get it without spinning up an entire social network. If the concern is that it’s going to lower the quality of the content, well, there’s probably some truth to that, but that would happen with popularity, regardless of which service became popular, and it’s a problem solved by the block function.
data is not a problem, you should accept what you post publicly to be well… public
what most people are worried about is embrace extend and extinguish policy, if you haven’t read it already here it is
Everyone on the fediverse knows about EEE at this point; it’s mentioned in every other post haha
The dev behind Mastodon doesn’t seem concerned. Why are you?
i don’t like meta and everything they seem to touch with their greedy little fingers turns into a hollow husk of what it once was, if you want an example look at whatsapp
i like the fediverse and i think it has potential, i just don’t want to see it ruined slowly but surely
WhatsApp is owned and fully controlled by Meta. The Fediverse is federated and that’s the beauty of it. They can’t control it
you are right but they can dictate standards because of their massive user base, i mean they have had 10 million sign ups in 7 hours. that is more than the entirety of mastodon.
perhaps a more suitable example would be google’s adblock hostile attitude and how they can only do that because of their massive user base.
meta only cares about profit and i don’t think any profit driven entity entering fediverse is a good thing.
Yeah, but if they do try to dictate standards, then react, defederate, that’s all I’m saying. I just don’t think we need to be proactive here, our tools to react are fast acting and simple.
If they do go for the dreaded Embrace, Extend, Extinguish method, then let’s ride the benefits of “Embrace” and lose them when they move on to the next steps.
Look up the history of the dread Triple-E and count the number of people who said exactly what you just said here shortly before they got consigned to oblivion by it.
The Mastodon Dev says it’s not a concern because of brand recognition.
That’s not a defense mechanism lol.
That’s not an accurate summary.
Please could you provide a better summary then? I must have missed the point, because I’m genuinely not understanding how the fediverse is EEE-resistant.
Lots of devs are foolish/naive, Eugen is just one of many to fit this bill.
Being smart at coding doesn’t automatically make you smart at anything except, possibly, coding1. Eugen is young and is being more than just a little naive here. He hasn’t seen well-intentioned people get played for suckers enough times to make the pattern match on “bad actors do bad things, no matter what their pretty words”.
1 Why “possibly” here? Because “coding” is a far larger field than people understand—including coders.
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During the short time Google also acquired users, who moved from other XMPP software because…well, the software was more integrated with other stuff. So when you then defederate, the rest is left with less users and a terrible experience.
Google did the same with Chrome and the web standards too. Look at the browser competition nowadays…
I think defederating is the only way forward, Facebook will take over otherwise even if they do it slowly.
No offense but I think the website becomes useless if it’s defederated.
Only with Threads
